It all started innocently enough. Someone wrote in to MacUser’s Help Folder column (written by yours truly and Bob Levitus truly) with a question regarding “The best way to upgrade a Mac 512.” Seeing an opportunity to make a weak joke and eat up about 8% of my word count besides, I suggested that the only useful upgrade for a Mac 512 would be to turn it into an aquarium.

Had I been paying attention in my 10th grade social studies class, I would now be able to mention the assassination of someone at somewhere, a small event that nonetheless had monumental, grotesque repercussions, namely World Wars I and II and the Cold War, just for starters. In tenth grade, however, I had all of my elder sister’s notes, term papers, and exams.
Our teacher, remarkably, hadn’t changed a single homework assignment or exam question in six years, so I managed to cop an A without bothering to learn so much as the teacher’s name.

But I digress. The point is, an avalanche of mail resulted. All right, eleven letters.
But clearly it was a mandate from the masses, eleven of them at any rate,
and so I set forth to design and build The MacQuarium.

The MacQuarium is actually a custom-made glass fish tank (capacity: two gallons give or take a hectare) made to fit on top of a small platform inside any Macintosh shell with a Classic form factor. The MacQuarium is known to be compatible with the Mac 128, 512, Plus, and SE, and is assumed to work with a Classic or Classic II shell. No amount of begging or pleading could convince Apple to send me one for free, and frankly though I love my job, if I’m going to blow $799 it’s going to be on a Laserdisk player or a subwoofer or a complete set of Sandman comics. I’m sorry, but there it is.

MacQuariam.hqx

(50.79 KiB / 52.01 KB)
/ BinHex'd, use Stuffit Expander

4 / 2023-01-07 / 2023-07-22 / eb1f9bc16264a541f36cdc986dc6df733f3aac8d / /

Instructions for building a MacQuarium in Microsoft Word 4.0 format