Evendays

In honor of the iPhone’s recent release and to wrap up my Mac History posts:
(All stock prices are split adjusted.)

In March of 1990, Apple stock was at 8.56. My Mac SE sans printer cost us $2900.00. Could’ve bought 338 shares. Running total: 338 shares.

In March of 1995, Apple was at $10.00. My Powerbook 520 cost us $1000.00. Could’ve bought 100 shares. Running total: 438 shares.

In July of 1999, Apple was at 11.84. My Blue and White PowerPC G3 cost $1440.00. Could’ve bought 122 shares. Running total: 560 shares.

In December of 2004, Apple was at $32.63. My iMac G5 cost $1994.00. Could’ve bought 61 shares. Running total: 621 shares.

In July of 2006, Apple was at $57.27. The family MacBook was $1050.00. Could’ve bought 18 shares. Running total: 639 shares.

Apple’s closing price on Friday, June 29, 2007? $122.04.

Had I stuck to pencil and paper, an exhaustive concordance and Randy’s old sermon notes, and had we bought and held, we’d have $77,983.56 in AAPL stock.

BTW, I bought the program Microsoft Word for $292.00 in March, 1990. MSFT was at $0.69. Could’ve bought 423 shares. I’d have $12,471.36 in the account if I’d held.

Now I know MS Word is not worth THAT much.

One day I spied Father-In-Law (FIL) checking out my monitor, all 17 inches of it. “You can sure read the text easily on that thing”, said he. “Not only that, but you can get more that one page of a document on there,” I replied, sensing an opportunity. “I have a lot of trouble reading the little print on new G3 Powerbook,” said he.

“Hummm,” said I. “Want to switch?”

A month later he bit and I had an absolutely great portable machine $1000.00 over my budget and FIL was able to read his documents.

The Powerbook is now 9 years old, can run OS 10.4 (slowly) and the latest version of Microsoft Office. I’ve been able to do most of the repairs myself, though one time I took it to replace the power source and the Wizard changed the screen too. Go figure. But, the whole family will miss PB when he’s gone.

BTW, a few months after the exchange, FIL made a trip to the USA and bought himself… the same portable with a faster processor. “But you can’t read the screen!” said I.

“Nah… It’s just that you were drooling over the other one,” said he.

In March of 1999 I was in the computer market again. That’s always a problem when you’ve got friends that own Mac stores, but it was 4 years after my last purchase and a new battery for my PB 520 was going to cost more than the machine was worth and… Well, you know how it is when you’ve already convinced yourself…

I had the funds for a Mac G3 Blue & White, code named Yosemite. It was a desktop… Ran at 300 MHz, had 64 Mb of RAM and plugged right into my 17 inch screen. It had NO floppy, NO SCSI, and cost about $1900.00. It was bold.

I bought it while Wife’s Dad (FIL) was in the USA. And not that it mattered, but I finally had a faster machine than he did! But, of course, FIL was up to the challenge, and came home to Switzerland with a very slick black PowerBook G3 (the Lombard with a “bronze” keyboard). It had a 14” screen in beautiful color, no ADB port, no floppy… But I was speechless. It was my dream machine. Out of our budget, but my dream machine.

After 5 years with my Mac SE, a good friend (and supporter) from Austin started looking for a new portable for me. At a Sunday evening church service, he ran across someone who could get an Mac PowerBook 520 for only $1000.00 in March of ‘95. It was a great mobile machine and had a connection for a 17” monitor for use on my desk. It had a track pad and a 160 Mb hard drive, and it ran at 25 MHz, waaaaay faster than my old SE.

I took th PB 520 everywhere, especially when I was teaching English is businesses. I’ll never forget the manager of a French bank walking in on me before class and saying, “That is certainly not a PC.” “How did you know?” “It’s got style,” he replied. I just smiled. Not only were my sermons getting better, but I could work on them anywhere, able to digitalize a thought faster than you could say QUERTZ. And my MacBible program still worked on it.

The PB 520 sold me on mobile computing and I promised myself I’d never go back to desktop computers.

Well, never say never…

Continued from February 20… (see way below…)

Wife’s Dad (F-I-L) finally told me that if I got a Mac, I could make a printer network and use his LaserWriter. So I bought my first Mac, an SE FDHD, in March of 1990 (8 MHz). It had a 9 inch monochrome screen and cost about $2,900.00. It came with a 1.44 Mb floppy drive, 4 Mb of RAM, a 40 Mb hard drive, used System 4 and Finder 5.x (and updating to newer systems was FREE!). Man, few sermons had ever looked so good. I also got an ImageWriter ($450.00) for those times I couldn’t use the LaserWriter.

I’ve still got the SE (Son 2 would not let me throw it out and now it’s part of his inheritance). I used FileMaker to make databases and to keep track of expenses. An early version of Microsoft Word set me back $225.00. I loved the French spell-check. When the kids were old enough to manage a mouse, they enjoyed playing freeware games. I bought a golf game and Hunt for the Red October (never figured it out). Wife hand-made a cover for the SE. The screen saver displayed Romans 8.1. It was a great machine.

More this weekend…

Wife’s dad (F-I-L) loved technology. In 1984, Mother-in-law already had one of those daisy wheel typewriters that could remember a one-page letter. It would even pause so you could type in a name for a personalized letter. We used that machine to write our first mission newsletters. Amazing. Plus, F-I-L had two IBM Selectrics, one with a Cyrillic “golf ball”.

In 1987 I bought a used IBM XT and a dot matrix printer for about $2000.00. My sermons got better right away. The printer was terrible and would print an “@” for an accented “à” and “&” for the “é”. But I used them (and sold them 3 years later for $500.00).

Wife’s dad bought a MacPlus (circa 1986) and a LaserWriter printer. He wouldn’t let me touch his tools (toys) at first, but when I showed him how MacPaint worked and actually printed something out for him, we both stood amazed at our creation: A checkered, striped, gray-scaled EPI (his first name) with a happy-face background. And we did it all with three key strokes and a thing called a mouse.

He could write his radio scripts in Ukrainian with a QWERTZ keyboard (I think that’s how you spell it…) and run off printable Ukrainian text in PageMaker, type-set and ready for eager readers. Now that really was amazing.

To be continued…

Last night I dreamed someone ran into the car. Good thing it was only a dream.

But we could certainly use your prayers. Several things seemed to fall on us all at once last night: Some folks trying to lead members away from the church here; a young illegal who has gotten herself into some very serious trouble; kids and school; my two-year-old Mac broke.

So this morning I wrote notes to members and called the girl in trouble. The kids headed off to school with their worries and responsibilities. And I dropped my Mac off at the official Mac pay-me-before-I’ll-even-look-at-it repair shop. What a great business. You hire two geeks who love computers. (They used to do it for free till they left home at age 27.) Tell the client you’ll look at their machine if they give you 80 bucks, which you also tell them they won’t get back, ‘cause no matter what, it’s gonna cost more. Then give the client a contract that says you are not liable for any damage done to the machine, including if you accidentally erase the hard drive.

Too bad it wasn’t a dream.

Thanks for dropping by to see our new "home". We’ve changed some of the furniture and repainted some of the walls, but we’re still the same old folks at heart and are happy to have you at our new site.

You may need to sign up to comment on the different posts (and we bloggers just love comments, especially when they’re witty, drole, and provide debate), but everything else should be just like the old home we loved so much.

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It was 0-0 when in the last minute of Germany/Italy overtime when the storm knocked out the power. With no electricity, it was impossible to know the final score. An hour later, Randy called brother-in-law in Malibu and told us that Italy had scored two goals. We thought that one of them had to be pulling our leg, but brother-in-law in Malibu confirmed it, and we missed the most exciting part of the match.

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We’ve got Randy all set up to run on Macs now. He’s taken to the transition like a fish in water. It’s wonderful when you find what you were always looking for…

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Thanks for the visit.

Brady