From Donna’s supervisor came something from the past: a Macintosh PowerBook 160, fresh from 1992. I have been trying to restore the thing, which from what I can tell has not had its hard drive defragged in nine years; I thought perhaps I would upgrade the operating system, too. But it is old, and the battery doesn’t work for more than a few seconds. It has a modem, but I have no dial up Internet account anymore, unless you count Rogers’ ¢20 a minute thing. I don’t seem to have a System 7 on floppy, if I ever did, just several CD-ROMs from various Macs I have had to maintain over the years. The thing has less memory than my Palm.

Yet there is an attraction to it, and a real beauty to the black and white icons and in the flickering of the grey screen. And it has that 80s Mac feeling of a closed world, with the edges of the things seeping in. A PowerBook 100 was my first “Internet machine” in a time when the closest thing to hypertext was Gopher. I still like the effect of rapidly scrolling text on that old LCD screen, going so fast it leaves a ghostly trail of grey and purple.

So what will I do with it? My obsessive side likes being able to take an 800K Mac floppy from 1992 - filled with my strained love poetry or the usual polemics- and inserting it into the PowerBook, and then being instantly transported to that miserable, cramped Guelph apartment and those wonderful days of online exploration, right on the edge of this new time. My more practical side is not so sure.