I was reading Wikipedia tonight and, as often happens, ended up bouncing from article to related article for awhile. I started reading, somewhat randomly, about the Apple ][ and from there went through pretty much the entire line of pre-Mac computers — Apple ][e, ][c, //gs, etc.
Seeing a picture of the original Apple floppy drives really took me back. We had those in elementary school, and I remember the “clunk-click” sound those drives would make when you closed them. They were big and had metal cases and it seemed like a big deal to fit 144k (or whatever it actually was) on a five and a quarter inch floppy disk. Ironically, I didn’t have a whole lot of interest in computers when I first laid eyes on an Apple ][e sometime around the third grade. My best friend Oliver walked up one day, held out a floppy disk and said something to the effect of, “these are going to change everything.” I can only assume that Oliver went on to attend MIT or to work in particle physics or invent time travel. Smart kid.
When I was in perhaps sixth grade my Dad bought a used Commodore 64 from one of his buddies. Like the Apple ][s, it had a five and a quarter inch floppy drive; Dad’s buddy gave us his entire collection of games and programs that filled two giant disk boxes. I pored through all of those programs, played some of the games and tried to figure out if I could do anything “useful.” I managed to find an address label program to automate my paper-route receipts, and eventually got GEOS running.
Needless to say my Wikipedia roamings led from the Apples to the Commodores to GEOS. I also stopped to read about some of the significant related machines like the VTech Laser128 (Apple ][ clone), the Commodore PET, the C128 and the VIC-20.
In junior high we had Apple ][e computers with color displays. I had what must have been my first “computer class” and in that class all of the kids were playing Oregon Trail nonstop. I wasn’t all that interested in the games (never have been) but I do remember trying to program the screens to display my own “art” creations. The school also had some Kaypro 2’s, which we used for word processing for the school newspaper.
High school had some IBM-compatible PCs and one Apple //gs, the last “old school” Apple I remember seeing in use. We published our school newspaper on IBM PS/2 machines running this newish thing called “Windows,” connected to a very primitive network to share a laser printer. I used the money I had saved from the junior high paper route to buy my first 386 PC. I discovered Bulletin Boards and the Internet; my first Internet roamings were via telnet through an open modem pool at the local university.
It occurs to me that my ongoing dislike of proprietary systems may go back to my Commodore 64. At some point my Dad and I found a deal on a C. Itoh dot matrix printer that was much more capable than the simple Commodore printer we had been using. I wanted a printer with a standard parallel port, but this one plugged in to the Commodore’s proprietary data port (a big DIN connector) and daisy chained to the floppy drive. I was able to get graphics to print at twice the resolution as the old printer, but it was not as high-res as the more standard parallel dot matrix printers.
Still, it was hot stuff at the time.
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