I was notorious for a few things in high school, like being one of those kids who knew everything but got shit marks and hanging out with all the other long-haired loser kids and getting up to the kind of mischief and mayhem that every social outcast nineties kid got up to.

(Fun story: One day I decided to get a haircut and asked for a “number 2 all over”. I came to school the next day and got asked by the principal if anything was wrong because I’d shaved my head and that was of concern. My principal was actually pretty cool.)

Among teachers, I was notorious for my terrible handwriting. It wasn’t that I couldn’t write (a kid in my year had to bring a small typewriter to class because he was severely dyslexic and couldn’t write at all. He also happened to be the son of a local businessman), it was just that my handwriting was incredibly tightly joined lettering, like what I’d learned in primary school. I often had to tell teachers what I’d written and a lot of my assignments came back with “couldn’t read; please re-write”.

By about year nine, my teachers had kind of got sick of it. One of them forced me to start printing (i.e. not joining my letters when writing) but even this wasn’t enough. Printed, my handwriting was somewhat legible but it turned out I had some pretty idiosyncratic letterforms.

Then one day, my computers teacher told me the school was selling all the old Mac Plusses the school had used up to that point for $50 each. So I asked my mum if I could have $50 for a “good” computer (my Commodore 64 was not a good computer in my estimation) and she gave me the money and the next day I brought home one complete Mac Plus with keyboard and mouse.

My best friend at the time (hi Roger!) mentioned that he might be able to help “upgrade” the computer. Mac Plusses have replaceable RAM on their motherboards, and he happened to have the right kind of RAM to upgrade from the default 1 megabyte (that’s 0.001 gigabytes for you kids out there) to a colossal 4MB of RAM. On a Mac Plus, that’s the equivalent of loading your gaming PC up with 64GB of RAM. It’s a lot, is the point. I even got an external 20MB SCSI (“scuzzy”) hard drive thanks to my Dad finding one for sale at a local school car boot sale. I finally had a “real” computer.

For a printer, I ended up with some old Epson dot matrix printer that I don’t remember the origin of. Just that it was weird to have a dot matrix printer in the mid-1990s. Roger offered me use of an “ICE cable” that his Dad (who worked in desktop publishing and was all about the Macs) that would connect a PC printer to a Mac. I plugged it in and got it set up and soon had my little Plus convinced it was talking to an Apple ImageWriter II printer.

That setup would last me most of the rest of high school, but it was getting on a bit by the time I got to year 12. I needed colour graphics and I needed them now.

So when Roger asked if I wanted to pay for his Dad’s old Centris for $1500 I was like cool but where would I get the money. Enter my grandma, who gave me a $1500 loan (which I had to, and did, pay back) to buy the computer, along with a monitor, mouse and keyboard.

Going from a Mac Plus to a Centris 660av is like going from a Toyota Corolla to a Porsche Carrera. When it came out in 1993, the Centris was the second-top tier of Apple’s line up. It offered up a Motorola 68040 CPU at 25Mhz, up to 68MB of RAM (the number is weird because it has 4MB soldered to the motherboard) and an option for a 2-speed CD-ROM drive, which mine had.

It also had a really neat party trick. The “av” in the name was a reference to the fact it had built-in video capture. Apple included a DSP chip (a 55Mhz AT&T 3210) that enabled it to take in external video and display it, in real time, on the monitor. Absolutely wild for a computer from 1993, and even when I got the thing in about 1997, it was still kind of a crazy feature. Even cooler was that it could be set to appear semi-transparently, so you could see the video through your windows as you worked. Later AV Macs, like the 6100/60av, could not do that.

The Centris got me through the end of VCE (I wrote all my CATs on it) and all three years of TAFE. I augmented it with an external Zip drive and an Epson inkjet printer (one that was designed for Macs this time). The Zip drive was brilliant for TAFE because 100MB was big enough to fit all the work I was doing in Macromedia Director on it, as well as desktop publishing files and a bunch of other stuff I needed for that era.

It ran Mac OS 8.1 beautifully, and I really miss that “Platinum” user interface. It was so nice and clean and usable, and I kind of miss the little touches of personality it had. Modern Mac OS (sorry, “macOS”) is fine enough, but it lacks the friendliness of Platinum. Maybe that’s just my nostalgia talking.

In 2001, I ended up getting what would the first in a long line of Apple laptops, and my first “new” Mac. It was a white “Icebook” model iBook, with a 500Mhz PowerPC G3 CPU and 256MB of RAM. If going from the Plus to the Centris was like going from a Corolla to a Carrera, then going from the Centris to this was like going from a Carrera to a Bugatti Chiron. It was just improbably fast (well, when running Mac OS 9. OS X was, at this point, a slow, painful experience most of the time) and good to use.

The impetus for the upgrade was, sadly, the death of the Centris. I’d bought a new hard drive to upgrade it too, a 1GB IBM model. Unfortunately the drive seems to have permanently killed the machine’s internal SCSI bus, as it never booted off the new drive or the original drive ever again. I ended up gutting the insides and installing the drive and CD-ROM drive into a Quadra 840av (the Centris’ bigger brother) but even that computer saw little use. I still have both of them today, and I do want to get them up and running again, but the work involved may be more than I can handle.

I have a couple of other old Macs as well, including an LC475 and a beige Power Mac G3 that I paid $100 for sometime in the early 2000s. I would love to get all of them up and running, but time and my ability to solder (all these machines will likely need new capacitors installed) limit what I can do for now. It would be very cool to start a project of bringing them back to life. I’ll likely talk about the other machines in more detail in future posts, but for now, just know that the Centris was my most important computer, as it was the first “real” computer I owned (“real” in this case meaning it had an internal HDD that it booted from I guess) and the one that got me through a lot of my formative years. I would love to see it working again, and hopefully one day, it will.

(Author’s note: the Centris 660av is also known as the Quadra 660av, as Apple changed the name just a couple of months after releasing it. My model has the Centris badging which is why I refer to it as such in this piece.)