Adobe fonts were unbelievably expensive in the 1980s. A lot like buying lox.

Hey. Hi, everybody. It’s 4 a.m. and I’m totally jazzed and wide awake in the middle of the night, probably because Sam and I both conked out in the family room after dinner and slept for about four hours. When I woke up at 1 a.m. I decided to migrate into the study to horse around with my brand new iMac ... and I’m still horsing around.

In case you’re new to the Howdygram or don’t know me very well, my love affair with Macintosh computers is the world’s worst-kept secret and will go on forever. It started with my first Mac 512K back in 1985, which included a nine-inch monitor with a grayscale display for $1,700. Since there was no such thing then as a hard drive, the Mac OS, my desktop publishing software (Ready-Set-Go by Letraset) and my entire library of four fonts — Times Roman, Helvetica, Symbol and Courier — fit on one 400K floppy disk. Seriously! 

And so it continued! In 1987 I spent $2,000 for the new Mac Plus (which looked exactly like its predecessor) and another $700 for a 20mb enternal hard drive with the same “footprint” as the computer, and one year later I dished out $1,200 for a Hewlett Packard DeskWriter, the first inkjet printer for the Mac. It only printed in black ink but with the right high-quality paper (Classic Crest’s Solar White) the DeskWriter’s output rivaled a high-resolution laser printer, which was so damn exciting I ALMOST HAD A STROKE. I also splurged for Adobe Illustrator 88 and paid real money for a few Adobe fonts. (Adobe fonts were unbelievably expensive in the 1980s. A lot like buying lox.)

Incidentally, discovering the right paper for the HP DeskWriter was a huge fucking hoo-hah because nobody had invented inkjet paper yet and your printer output usually looked like somebody ran it through a dishwasher.

Thank you.

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I’ve got a cute swarm of FREE FONTS for you this afternoon. My favorites are “Keyline,” “Jumbuck” and “Belmont,” but all of them are really excellent and I think you should consider sharing a few with your friends and relatives. EVERYBODY LOVES FREE FONTS! I’ll include download links below the graphic, okay?

Keyline • Kiwami • Belmont • Breathtaker • Jumbuck • Misguided • Yellow Shoes

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And, of course, there were also more free high-resolution background images today ... a set of 16 vector patterns with an island theme (vector patterns can be edited in Adobe Illustrator) and a collection of semi-useful (or semi-useless?) “premium quality” badges and logo designs. I have no idea why I download and keep so many of these stupid things. I never use them.

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Joanie Cunningham died today, people. JOANIE CUNNINGHAM! Actress Erin Moran, 56, who starred in CBS’s “Happy Days” from 1974 to 1984 — and its spinoff series “Joanie Loves Chachi” — was found dead in Corydon, Indiana.

As a child Moran began her career in commercials and occasional feature films but shot to the spotlight when she was cast in CBS-TV’s “Happy Days” as Joanie, the younger sister of Ron Howard’s character. She continued the role alongside Scott Baio in the “Joanie Loves Chachi” spinoff, but the show only survived one season because nobody really gave a shit about either of these characters.

After her “Happy Days” stardom ended, Erin hit the skids through a combination of drinking and whacked-out behavior that eventually landed her in a trailer park in Indiana. Her husband, the cheerful and attractive Steve Fleischmann (pictured below), evicted her when she ran out of dough from a lawsuit settlement against CBS in 2012. Oy, Joanie.

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A few final thoughts tonight as I get ready to shlep back into the family room for a juicy William Powell movie and another good night’s sleep!

I LOVE MY NEW MACINTOSH COMPUTER. This is the most amazing iMac ever. It’s very fast, very sleek, very wonderful and very easy to use. I had all these ridiculous fears about technology passing me by ... and all of them were pointless. On Thursday night Oliver from Half Price Geeks installed our computers, spent 15 minutes showing us some new features, and from there I managed to figure out the latest and greatest versions of Adobe Creative Cloud’s InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. All by myself.

However I decided to take a pass on the “magic keyboard” that came with my iMac. It’s a tiny wireless thing that’s sized like the keyboard on a laptop and far too small for an old war horse like yours truly who learned to type on a manual typewriter in my cousin Bobby’s basement when I was eight years old. I firmly believe that bigger is better where keyboards are concerned, so I ordered myself a new Apple extended keyboard (see below) from Amazon that will be here tomorrow.

SAM MADE US AN AMAZING DINNER TONIGHT. Our menu included gigantic baked potatoes with great toppings*, a few Costco meatballs and sugar-free Eskimo Pies for dessert. Hoo-boy!
*Margarine, sour cream, chives and bacon bits.

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It’s time to do my nightly drugs and get some sleep. Thank you for stopping by, thank you for reading this, thank you for trying to remember the Alamo and thank you for telling your friends about the Howdygram!