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I was fortunate to go to a high school that acquired a single Apple ][+ kept on a rolling cart that was locked in the chemistry lab closet for safekeeping. Eve
by jbgreer 5mo ago
I was fortunate to go to a high school that acquired a single Apple ][+ kept on a rolling cart that was locked in the chemistry lab closet for safekeeping. Every school day at 2:15PM there was a race to see which student could claim it until they finally kicked everyone out of the building. Thankfully I had pretty fast legs and a nearby last classroom. Our first “instructor” had the good sense to know he was never going to keep up with a bunch of rabid students; I don’t recall any of the lessons, but I recall the experiments we devised.
In 1983 I purchased my first personal computer, an Apple //e. By then we had an entire lab of Apples and Franklins, but I no longer needed to stay. The setup at home was more convenient, but the limitations imposed by the previous setup had a powerful focusing effect: hand-written programs, carefully reviewed and mentally simulated.
Fun times. Thank you, Steve, Woz, et al.
- dhosek 5mo agoI had a similar situation, first computer access was a single Apple (Packard-Bell) ][+ on a rolling cart that normally lived in the closet of the 6–8 grade science teacher at my elementary school. I would stay after school every day to write programs on that, first in BASIC and later in 6502 Assembly. Floppy disks were a luxury to me, let alone actually owning a computer, and all my programs were handwritten in spiral-bound graph-paper notebooks. Even though I wouldn’t own my first Apple computer until 15 years later, I was still a life-long Apple fan, even when I was stuck on other operating systems over the decades.
- dhosek 5mo agoTo this day, my mental model of a computer is still a 64K Apple ][+ and my imaginings of how I would extend it given the capability to do so. My idea of a graphics system that didn’t rely on main memory to represent the bit map turned out to be predictive of how graphics cards now work, albeit constrained by the imagination of a high school student in the 80s.
- moosedev 5mo ago> a single Apple (Packard-Bell) ][+ I'm curious what were you referring to here. Did Packard Bell make Apple 2 clones? I didn't find anything in a quick search.
- UncleSlacky 5mo agoThey might be thinking of the Bell+Howell clone: https://www.oldcomputers.net/bellandhowell.html https://www.oldcomputers.net/bellandhowell.html https://dfarq.homeip.net/the-bell-and-howell-apple-ii/ https://dfarq.homeip.net/the-bell-and-howell-apple-ii/