The Electric

1. Apple IIc So many conflicting memories about this one. I don’t think I would have graduated high school without it. Yet the guilt I felt from having it made me wish I had never saw it. Plus it turned me from an Apple kid who worshiped tales from Fire in the Valley to the Apple Hater that I am today.

Let me set the stage. It’s fall 1984. We just moved into an apartment after my Grandpa had died that spring. I had been begging my folks for an Apple after we sold our TI. I mean the Apple II+ was the machine for kids in those days and I loved every time we would play Oregon Trail as part of social studies class. I also loved the idea of owning an Apple because the snobby kids would flaunt the fact they had one even if they couldn’t figure out how to put the disk in it.

When we went shopping for it, my Grandma was in the hospital. She had gone in with pneumonia and on the day she was to come home had a grand maul seizure. Three months had passed and things were not good. My Dad was busted up a the idea of having to put her in a nursing home. My grades were dropping from C’s to F’s. I was bugging my parents for an Apple and when the IIc came out, they said yes. Yet the week we got the IIc was the week my Grandma died. I had the boxes in my room but was told I couldn’t open them since we might have to take them back. I puked the night before we left for Tennessee for the funeral. Once home I whined to open the boxes. My parents said yes in spite of the fact we couldn’t afford it.

I wrote with Bank Street Writer then moved to AppleWorks with the Beagle Brothers Spell Checker.

I printed all my homework assignments on it with the Scribe printer. I could remember going to Persacom and getting raked for Scribe ribbons (good for only 50 pages) and feeling grateful since they were always out of stock.

I played Microleague Baseball, Hardball and yes, John Madden Football (which I still have in my basement)

I tried programming or rather tried to read a game program written in BASIC from a book that had about 25 programs in it (could you even thing about doing that now?) to my Dad while he typed it in. I could never say the characters list { [ ; or > correctly so he gave up in a huff.

I still get flashbacks to the Apple wall vs the IBM section when I would go to Perscom. Even with the Mac’s coolness, I will never forgot how Apple just dumped the Scribe and then the IIc. I know better now that I’ve been in the IT business but it still pisses me off the free ride Apple gets for shafting its bottom tier owners.

Whereabouts: Was still running as of 1994 when it was sold along with my Dad’s golf shop

1. Texas Instruments TI-99 A So many firsts with this guy.
2. First time disk drive
3. First voice synth
4. First time making a voice synth cuss
5. First time I bought a game and loaded it via a cassette tape
6. First code I ever wrote And while I wasn’t to play games on it, I do remember my Dad in my room while I was asleep playing Munch Man at 3 in the morning. To this day I can remember one of the football coaches in my youth league working as a TI salesman at K-mart when they had a booth for the 99-A in their store. He’d let me mess around with it to show how kids take to computers like ducks to water. Later when TI pulled the salesmen, I would throw down a three line print screen command with a loop to see how long it would run before someone would notice and reset it.

To honor all those systems that have gone before the new XPS 600 that is on it’s way, I give a listing of those riggs that have brought me to this point in my geekdom.

1. Tandy TSR-80 Model III 5th grade. Mrs. Novak’s class. Sure we knew nothing about it which was more than Mrs. Novak but did we have fun trying to make it do something…anything Whereabouts: Unknown