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Comment by protomyth | Hacker News Reader

I will say the form factor of the classic Mac (in my case a Mac SE/30) was amazing for writing. The height was perfect without the ability of the text to go to just above the keyboard like a conventional monitor on a stand. I end up duplicating it by using half a window or finding a text editor that holds the current line at a certain height. It was also a very portable design. I have an old Color Classic II case that I sometime think I might mod into something a bit more modern (since it is DOA anyway).

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I remember in college in the late 80s (when laptops were mostly exotic and expensive) seeing someone walking across campus, carrying his Mac by the handle on the top and thinking that it was so cool to be able to transport a computer like that.

I taped a tote bag to my imac and traveled with it as a carry on once. https://twitter.com/alana31415/status/1578492366201098240

The original Mac mini fit perfectly in a camera case I had. That thing probably had more miles on it than some of the portables I've owned.

At our Mac user group meetings, it was routine for most folks to bring their machines. We all had these similar Mac tote bags.

It was an interesting ambassadorial event when we’d invade a pizza parlor with a dozen Mac, especially after Phone Net showed up and we started wiring them up with technological equivalent of cans and string.

I was practically a poster child zipping around with my Mac bungeed to the back of my scooter.

At first I thought the original Macintosh screen was too small to use for meaningful work, until I fired up MS Word 5 and started writing. The display fits half a page at nearly 100% scale which made it perfect to just write, and the printed page would look pretty much exactly as it did on the screen.

I did wish Apple had released a Mac in the original form factor with an 15" screen (9" width by 12" height). It would have been fun to have a machine that could show a whole page.

They did just that in 1989, with the Macintosh Portrait Display [1]. It was designed to fit snugly on the Mac II. Like other CRTs with fixed resolution and refresh rate, the phosphor persistence was perfectly tuned for comfortable, fatigue-free document viewing.

Curiously, tho, I don't think it was a perfect 72dpi like the 9" CRT in compact Macs, so it's not precisely scaled with printed output.

[1] https://lowendmac.com/1989/macintosh-portrait-display/

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