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The Apple II At 30
turnitover sends us to eWEEK for an appreciation of the Apple II on the 30th anniversary of its shipping. An overview of the history of the Apple II puts it in context. A nice tidbit: how important the floppy drive was to sales. The article quotes Sellam Ismail, the proprietor of VintageTech, which maintains archives of computers, documents, and software: "You could think of the Apple II's importance on two levels — the Woz level and the Steve Jobs level." The former refers to its allure to hackers, and the latter to its appliance-like polish, a first for its time, There is also an interview with Woz, who says, "[A]t the start there were no computers in the home — we had to make the word computer compatible with homes."
I got an Apple ][+ with 48k back in 1981. I had a chance to use a couple of computers before then, but this was the first one I spent any real time with. I taught myself to program on it and it sparked my life long interest in computer graphics and game development (which I attempt to do professionally today). I have the awesome manuals that came with it to thank. That's the way to do a computer right. And now it makes me feel very, very old. I wish I still had that particular computer, I should have never given it away. I still have an Apple IIe, two Apple //c's, and a Laser 128. What Woz did with Apple is the most inspiring and amazing thing. What an engineer!
+0 Meh
What's the big thing that seems to have changed at Apple over 30 years?
In 1977, Apple Computer included the schematics for all of the motherboard and CPU design for the Apple ][.
In 2006, Apple Ceased & Desisted a site for merely linking to a service manual.
Please come back Woz, we miss you.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
The BEST thing about starting with the Apple ][ was the manuals. They explained clearly and with examples how to use the computer and write BASIC programs. Nothing since has been as comprehensive, or easy to use.
There are so many layers and problems which todays desktop make difficult, and were easy back then. A much better introduction to computers couldn't be had.
Zork, not Zonk. I'm assuming that's a braino, since the 'N' key is nowhere near the 'R' key.
... the graphics in your head.
All those text-only Infocom games had the best graphics
SLM
main() {1;}
Like any geek 30+, I had an AppleII too (in fact, the computer's name was TK2000, a brazilian clone). And I must say that the world of computers were sooo funnier then... Obviously I'm takking from a romantic point of view, where typing 500 lines of BASIC code to save it in a K7 tape (after 3 hours debugging your mistypings) is real fun! I remember a book called "the black book of TK2000" that contained several hard-to-find informations that allowed me to really explore my machine, and the assembly programs that made it read even bugged tapes without errors. :-) And, last but not least, Karateka! :-)))
:-) IRQs, DMAs, conflicts, fun, fun, fun! :-) But since then, everything went downhill (or uphill). From 64Kb to 4Gb of RAM in 10 years...
After that, I had a MSX (I don't know if this japanese computer was famous in other countries, but here in brazil it was) with a single-sided drive, and some years later my first 386SX.
Today, you buy a computer, connect it to your 8Mb internet connection, download a 2Gb game in half an hour and play games that are almost real... You don't need to worry about tapes, typing, basic, anything. It's obviously better... But it's sad too. There's no fun anymore...
Yes, I know I'm getting old... But I really think that I was happy and I didn't knew...
--- Illogical Spock