In our endless wandering on the Internets, the Doodler stumbled across something Wordpress bloggers might find a bit interesting: a retro MacOS theme (which incidentally enough, is also its formal name) that uses 1-bit System 1.0 graphics. You can’t get more retro than this clunky monochromatic look. Who’da thought that in the future, pixellation would be cool?

Try the Retro MacOS Theme if you’ve a mind to, although for this Doodler, it’s a bit too hardcore. System 7, maybe. Even if I cut my teeth on Macs staring at screens like this for hours on end back in the day, it’s something I wouldn’t exactly want to revisit. Too retro for me, man.

See it here.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5oGaZIKYvo]

Jeez. As Bugs Bunny once said: What a maroon.

My love affair with Macs began with a dalliance in the early 80s with an Apple ][ Plus that look exactly like this. Well, kinda; only I had just one drive, not two. The other chunky metal floppy drive came much later. Actually, come to think of it, even the first drive came late too; I started with a little cassette recorder to load up apps and games, and to save files. On cassettes, I kid you not. I used to listen to the stored programs, and they sounded exactly like modems do when they try to connect to some slow-ass provider. I remember my favorite program was a game called Space Invaders, a 20k app which took fifteen minutes to load up and start.

The Apple ][ Plus wasn’t a Mac, no. The Mac came later in my life. But this is the computer that started me on Apple, and onto the Mac. This is how it all began.

Later I’d get a Z80 card and a 64k memory expansion card so I could run CP/M, which is a command-line operating system that wasn’t made by Apple (strictly speaking, I wasn’t using Apple software, just the hardware - later I’d live and breathe Appleworks, but in the early days it was Wordstar and dBase and VisiCalc). CP/M was the ancestor of MS-DOS, and CP/M itself grew up to become DR-DOS, if I’m not mistaken. I’d later graduate into a Apple //e, and then an Apple //e-Enhanced, (which was silly when you come to think about it - the e in //e stood for “enhanced” already) - and a color composite monitor and more colorful games like Centipede and Karateka, and then, finally, a Macintosh.

My //e still lives and breathes, by the way, a 25-year-old geezer. I love that thing.

Seemed appropriate to talk about my roots, at this juncture. Great to put things in perspective; there are so many proud, chest-thumping newbie Mac fanboys whose earliest memories start with the Aluminum Powerbooks. Man, you don’t even know the half of it, you young whippersnappers. *grumble* Let’s just say, if you’ve never wrestled with system extensions to get your Mac running, be careful in flaunting your Mac pedigree.

More reminiscing as my memory comes slowly crawling back.