A grey weekend to begin June, and today was ridiculously cool for June 2 — not over about 60 degrees F. Temps should be warmer later in the week, but not what I call summer.

I’m not sure why I bothered to write the following down in 1997, but I did. These weren’t the first Power Macs that I’d ever used — that was in 1995, when everyone was certain Apple was a doomed enterprise that would never again live up to its glory days, much less become a sinister behemoth on the order of Microsoft. I was glad, maybe, just to have a polychromatic screen.

June 9, 1997

I came back from the fire show in Lake Kiamesha, New York, and our new Power Macs were waiting for us at the office. Fast! It’s a little scary. No sooner is a button pushed than something happens. It didn’t work like that on the old machines (a IIci). This is a 8600/200 with a 7.5.5 operating system.

If I understand correctly, there’s 32 megs of RAM and a whole lot more disc space, and I just discovered that the thing plays audio CDs. Now if it would only play tapes. I have many more of them. No question about who owns the machine, though. A blue label marks it, Property of Intertec Publishing Corp. I may get to buy the IIci for a low price, however. That would be nice to have at home.

I didn’t buy the IIci. It wouldn’t be until 2000 that I had a computer at home, a spiffy purple iMac. Intertec merged into something, and that into something else, and I don’t know what, but some of the magazine titles it published are still around, such as Fire Chief, where I worked at the time.

As for Lake Kiamesha, I’ve posted about that before, though I refer to the trip as White Lake. I happened to visit the Concord Resort Hotel the year before it closed, and it wasn’t hard to see in ’97 that the place was on its last legs.