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Come on, you know what I'm talking about. Yagottahavits. You read computer magazines? You do more with the Voice than look at the pictures? I guarantee you, if you've got a Macintosh, and you are just mildly literate, and vaguely curious, you know all about yagottahavits. You're and expert, even if you don't know you is one.
Disinfectant is a yagottahavit. Ya get it? Ya gotta have it. A yagottahavit is cheap (Disinfectant is free, which is cheap, I guess) and it does something you just can't live without. Viruses do kill, after all. Now cheap doesn't always mean free. Yagottahavits range from free clear up to a hundred fifty dollars (which is still cheap, I guess). I've got a little list of yagottahavits here. Don't think this is a full list. I couldn't afford to download a full list, even at 9600 baud, and all the baud I've got add up only to 1200 (I told you some of these articles were a little/lot dated). You've seen the last scene in "Raiders of the Lost Arc"? The yagottahavits warehouse is bigger than that one, about two times.
Screen Savers: After Dark $22, Pyro $22, Blackout $5
Font and DA Handlers: MasterJuggler $63, Suitcase II $42
Virus Protection: SAM $67, Disinfectant $free, Virex $100
Disk Utilities: MacTools Deluxe $75, SUM $98, Norton Utilities $83,
DiskExpress II $64
Memory Enhancement: Virtual 2.0 $200 ($275 with PMMU)
Font Enhancement: Adobe Type Manager $55
Finder Enhancement: Boomerang $30, DiskTools Plus $30,
DiskTop 4.0 $63, Findswell $60
Print Utilities: SuperLaserSpool $150, SuperGlue II $120
Time Management: Smart Alarms $100, Remember? $10
Macro and Keyboard Enhancement: QuicKeys $63
Miscellaneous: Image Grabber $90, INITPicker $50
Hypercard: HyperDA $45
Finance: Quicken $60
I've got a confession to make. I don't have all the yagottahavits, not even one from each category. Before you break my mouse and drum me out of MacValley let me explain. I plead that a thousand dollars is a lot of money. Not as much as it was when two thousand would get you a Volkswagon and eight hundred gallons of gas, but, despite those memeries of better days, it's still a lot. My computer has been sucking up money since the day I got it. Right out of my wallet and into the floppy disk slot. Like something from a Spielburg movie. And yagottahavits aren't the only things that suck it up. I need four more megs of RAM. I don't even run MultiFinder because Fullwrite, and Finale, and MacDraw II are all applications that like their elbow room. I've got a Roland D-10 synthesizer for which I would dearly love to get an editor/librarian. You get the idea. There are major things you do with your computer and then there are the chores. Yagottahavits mostly help out with the chores. You can back up and optimize the hell out of your hard disk but why worry about it if you don't keep something truly important there? Even more difficult and shameful to say, sometimes I need to spend money on things entirely unrelated to my Mac. Food comes to mind. Rent. Kitty litter. And now that you've got me going, I have a bone to pick (that's all I can afford) if you gotta have it, why doesn't it come with it?
Stop and think. You are sitting in front of a computer --- your beloved Macintosh. Without software that computer is just a box, no better than a DOS machine without DOS. The most basic part of that software is the mystical and much protected ROMS. Then comes the System, then the INITS, the CDEVS, the DAs --- the YAGOTTAHAVITS!!! The Mac comes with backup software, but it's not good enough, so ya gotta get something better. It comes with the Finder, but it's not good enough, so ya gotta get something better. It can handle more kinds of fonts than a DOS machine ever dreamed of, but that's not good enough, so ya gotta get something better. Hold on! Just a minute! I truly wish to be enlightened, and pray never to stray from the Macintosh Way --- but --- forgive me, I do real work on this machine. It's my pencil, my paintbrush, my music machine. These yagottahavits, they should take care of themselves. To all the hoopla over operating systems, GUIs, the Mac OS, DOS, Windows, UNIX, Looking Glass, OS/2, Presentation Manager, System 7, I would like to contribute this thought. The computer of the future, the one that we all hope the Macintosh will become, won't have any such things as yagottahavits, because they'll be so well integrated into the entire computing environment that we won't ever have to think of them.
Gregg Writes
MacValley Voice Articles
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