3 ms·
As a math grad student in 1980, I took out a student loan for $3,000 (equal to my annual stipend) to buy an Apple II computer. (Eventually, computation establis
by Syzygies 6y ago
As a math grad student in 1980, I took out a student loan for $3,000 (equal to my annual stipend) to buy an Apple II computer. (Eventually, computation established my career, just not on this machine.)
I recall making a "shift key mod" within days, that no doubt voided my warranty. It wasn't the mod described in this article. I recall some card that gave me 80 columns, Pascal, and increased my memory from 48K to 64K. I believe that my shift key mod involved cutting a single trace? In any case it worked. Various out-of-school friends learned computers on this machine, and changed careers. I learned the low memory locations like the back of my hand, and wrote crude Pascal programs, while my "real" code was in the relatively young C language on a Unix timesharing machine. That all changed when I bought one of the first Mac 128K's. Manx Aztec C!