This was written on an Apple Classic II, one of the very very first home computers to reach the mass market.
It cost more than a thousand dollars, quite a bit at the time, and was indeed a magical instrument.
I was constantly astonished by what it could do. As far as I, and many others, were concerned, they changed the world.
The Apple Macintosh Classic II (also known as the Performa 200) replaced the Macintosh SE/30 in the compact Macintosh line in 1991. Like the SE/30, the Classic II was powered by a 16 MHz Motorola 68030 CPU and 40 or 80 MB hard disk, but in contrast to its predecessor, it was limited by a 16-bit data bus (the SE/30 had a 32-bit data bus) and a 10 MB memory ceiling.
At the time word processing was in its infancy, and for writers was a completely miraculous technology.
I was working at The Sydney Morning Herald and home a lot in the evenings with my then one and two-year-old.
Here there are repeated pages and rough drafts of the book, which with a busy life and young children and other chaotic elements, was never completed.
Much of the original draft of the book was eaten by mice.
This chapter, centred around my very first front page, was to be called: Here For The Very First Time.
