Apple iie

My father bought our first computer from what was probably the only computer store in Tewksbury, MA. It was on Main street sort of near the intersection with Chandler street. I’m not sure what is there now. It had a monitor, a keyboard, and two floppy drives. I believe it was 1983. 

It looked like this:

I don’t recall the specs beyond that. Maybe before I click publish I’ll ask the stupid AI Assistant if it knows. I do remember we had a joystick but it didn’t work very well. We also had a modem wired into our telephone. We could plug a phone line into the computer, connect it to the phone, and dial out direct. We used it to call some old bulletin board services. It was completely epic, like the movie War Games but without the treason or the nukes. Unfortunately the modem was so slow it made the whole experience useless. We did have a text chat with some random person once. That was ground breaking, indeed.

I used it for school to write papers and essays. We had a word processor program that worked pretty well. I also played a lot of games, but that experience wasn’t quite as good as what we had over at Mike the (future) Bass Player’s house as he had a Commodore 64 which was a better gaming platform. We had a great baseball game and an olympic decathlon game that was really fun but difficult. We had a text based game that I think was a Zork knock off that I seem to remember was called Mobius.

It was a great computer. Eventually, at some point in the 90’s, my father had a friend who built IBM clones and we moved on to Windows 3.1. I messed with Macs for the first time when I was at Northeast Broadcasting School in ’93 (I think?), and then when I went to Middlesex Community College I took a class called Intro to Computers that covered an office suite called Claris Works that also used a Mac. Later, while at UMass Lowell (for my second time around) I got a job at a computer lab where I was tasked with putting a tech focused talk show onto the radio station. My desk had a Mac Quadra that I used for editing audio. I also used a program called Nifty Telnet that let me connect to the university’s Unix system so I could do my programming homework. That machine was epic. I didn’t become a Mac owner until years later, after I moved in with Jen. I got a MacBook Pro and have literally never looked back. I am 100% invested in the Apple echo system now. MacBook Pro, iPhone, iPad, AppleWatch, HomePods all over the house. How long until they pull me into the new Vision Pro? Someday.

There you have it, my first computer was an Apple iie and it made me the computer nerd I am today. Thanks for listening to my Ted Talk.

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Hey, AI Assistant, what were the specs for an apple iie?

The Apple IIe, released in 1983, featured a 1.023 MHz 65C02 processor, 64 KB RAM, and used 5.25-inch floppy disks for storage. It also supported a lowercase character set, which was an improvement over its predecessors. The computer sported a sleek design and was compatible with a wide range of peripherals, making it a popular choice for educational and personal use.

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* I was going to send the owner of the Flickr account a request to use the image on my page but it hasn’t been active for 12 years. Fortunately, it did have a license listed on the page which allows for use of the image for non-commercial purposes so long as I credit the owner. The link in the caption should suffice as a credit. Click it, please. That means I can never monetize this post. That’s fine as I have no plans to monetize this site ever. Thanks, mysterious Flickr account!