Though I have a PowerBook 170 in front of me today, on which I plan to complete a writing project later, the computer I am doing battle with is not a Mac but a Tandy. A Model 600 in fact - a machine which dates from 1985, and not highly thought of then, let alone now.
This is largely due to the fact it isn't DOS compatible, but is, instead, fairly useless.
It's built like a tank, has an 80-character, 16-line non-backlit screen, a stunningly good keyboard, a mere 32k RAM, and an operating system designed by people for whom computers and their users were seemingly entirely unfamiliar. They went on to write the manual, which is not one the best you could hope for either.
The computer works, if it could be called that, but the struggle on this occasion is attempting to get files off it. It has a single-sided 3.5-inch floppy drive, which should make it easy, but the 600 produces files in some kind of 'Works 1.2' format, which nothing can read or seemingly convert, including Works or Word versions in DOS, or even LibreOffice which manages many curious file types, but not this. All I get is a header, then garbage characters, sometimes including the command menu. There's a method described in the manual to copy the file out in ASCII, but each time I try I get a whole different collection of some parts of my text, and lots more garbage.
The definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over, expecting different results.... but it actually does.
