In 1979 I bought an Apple II+ with 64K RAM and the language card (which I never used). I think it set me back about $3,000, which was a LOT of money in those days, but I wanted to run VisiCalc, as I was the controller of a company with six or seven sales offices scattered around the country. I think VisiCalc sold a lot of Apple computers for Jobs. Once I had it, I found a CPA in Texas who had built a verrrrrry slick double-entry bookkeeping program for the Apple. Nearly all computer accounting in those days was done with batch mode processing, which pretty much sucked. This guy had his program doing real-time posting, which meant that when you posted each entry, its impact on the books would immediately flow all the way up to the Balance Sheet and/or P&L. No batches! This was very pioneering. Much more useful than VisiCalc. Now it's the way QuickBooks does it. I have often wondered whether he sold his technology to Intuit.

This all came back to me when I began to wonder, would it be worth buying a Mac in order to be able to run a 1999.io blog from my own Mac? I appreciate being able to write here, using Dave's servers, but my eventual goal is to be independent and on the open web. So far I have not succeeded in getting any of Dave's tools installed on my own rented server in the cloud.

I had an iMac, but I think I donated it to charity when I moved last July. It seems like all Macs being sold these days are laptops. Is that right?? Would I dare to buy a used Mac on eBay?