Life with my APPLE II Plus

RIVER BENDER - February 2012

The APPLE II Plus 'microprocessor' was my first real computer. They weren't called PCs back then because IBM didn't yet make a 'personal computer.' They considered them toys. It was early 1981 when I paid $2557 for my APPLE with 64K bytes of memory, 2 disk drives, 8" monitor and Epson 80cps printer. It also had VisiCalc spread sheet software which is why I chose APPLE over Radio Shack and Commodore. VisiCalc enabled me to answer numerous 'what if' engineering questions that came up at work. I also used BASIC programming language to develop application programs. My efforts promoting APPLE paid off because our department decided to start using microprocessors in addition to time-shared computers we used in-house and at General Electric. For this I received a "Commitment to Excellence" award of $500 plus a weekend trip for Marilee and me to the lavish Homestead resort in the mountains of Virginia. The disappointment, however, was that IBM had just announced their first personal computer and the company decided to go with them instead of APPLE, probably because the company was entrenched with IBM main frame computers. This irked me because I had to rewrite many of my programs in IBM's BASIC or FORTRAN language but in the long run it turned out good because IBM or IBM-compatible personal computers ended up dominating the market.

I continued using my APPLE mostly for swapping and copying software. Everybody was a 'hacker' during those days which was defined as cracking encrypted software. Numerous cracking programs existed which one could get by swapping software. In '84 when I retired I was given a 2400bps modem which enabled me to access hundreds of amateur bulletin boards that had popped up in the Washington DC area that had tons of free software. This was before Internet existed.

After owning my APPLE for 10 years I finally decided to upgrade to a IBM compatible computer. I purchased a custom built Intel 80386 computer made by a company called Accel in Virginia. Compared to my little 65K APPLE, the new computer had 4 Megabytes of RAM and instead of 2 APPLE 110K disk drives I now had a 1.4M and 1.2M disk drive plus a 130 Megabyte hard drive. Speed wise, my APPLE clocked at 1 MHz while my new computer clocked at 25 MHz. My APPLE monitor had an 8" green screen compared to my new monitor with a 12" screen with super VGA color which was the highest resolution available. My new printer was also faster and had more features than the old Epson. The amazing thing was my complete new system with printer cost only $2399, compared to $2557 for the APPLE. This demonstrated that more power at less cost had occurred and was to continue for years, confirming Intel cofounder Gordon Moore's prediction called 'Moore's Law' that the number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years.

This article completes my 14th year writing a computer column for the River Bender. When I submitted my first article in '98, editor Marelen Allen asked if I would continue writing a monthly computer column and I told her there was no way. All 168 articles are online at http://pages.suddenlink.net/davew/dwindex.htm