“How to pay homage to Steve Jobs and Apple as the company turns 30? I certainly can’t add onto the plaudits being handed out by the millions. These days everyone loves Steve. Steve’s even bigger than Bill, who is plenty big in his own right,” Eric Lundquist writes for eWeek. “Then I remembered that my thanks to Steve was sitting down somewhere in my cellar. Or the agent of my potential homage, I should say. For down there amid the old boxes of decaying magazines (remember print?), exercise equipment still in like-new condition, and the flotsam of any New England cellar, was my first computer.”
“I found it in the far corner over by the backup sump pump. This would be a real test of a real machine. A delicate system preserved in museum quality conditions? Forget that. This was a box sitting open to the elements. Dust, humidity, freezing temperatures when the furnace conked out, all the pieces were there to mess up the strongest power supply, the beefiest microprocessor. I’ll describe my scientific testing: I carried all the pieces up to the kitchen counter, plugged everything in and hit the on button… the screen lit up and the disk drive whirled before settling on the A: drive waiting for something. That something was software, of course, and I had none,” Lundquist writes. “But the computer worked. Why Steve Jobs turned his back on computers that you could open up yourself and stuff add-in boards into is another story.”
MacDailyNews Take: What’s the Apple Power Mac line, chopped liver? No, it’s a Mac you can “open up yourself and stuff add-in boards into.”
Lundquist continues, “Why he has cultivated the art of distance from his loyal supporters and broader audience is also another story. Why he was sent to the desert away from Apple, only to return a wiser man, is also another story. But Steve and company (and you really shouldn’t forget the rest of the company, especially in the case of the IIe) came up with a nice-looking box that was built in 1982 and started up after sitting winter after winter in a New England cellar, and for that I thank them and offer my congratulations on thirty years in the business.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Richie” for the heads up.]
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Next stop: http://www.XPonIIe.com
Meh.
Next stop: http://www.XPonIIe.com
Meh.
Next stop: http://www.XPonIIe.com
Meh.
Next stop: http://www.XPonIIe.com
Meh.
the link to xponlle doesn’t work.
Jim,
That was a sarcastic remark. Duh!
My 2nd computer was a IIe and i loved it. I worked a summertime job at 14 to buy it from a friend of the family that was an Apple employee at the time.
– My monitor was my 13in TV.
– Single Floppy drive.
– and a GIANT Qume daisywheel printer.
Spent hours listening to Metallica while playing Ultima 2, 3 & 4.
It got donated to a charity back in 1991 when you could still donate that stuff.
Side note-
My 1st computer was a TRS80 Color Computer (chicklet keyboard). I leaned how to program basic on it. It had 2k when my folks bought it used. We bumped it to 16k. Storage was a cassette tape.
Why Lundquist couldn’t grow up to be a better writer? I guess that’s another story.
but i never learned to spell!
Why doesn’t Apple call its computers Apple anymore? Everything is Macintosh. I want an APPLE computer!
MDN word: Late. As in, I was too late to own an Apple computer
We have an SE that still boots up. We just like keeping the frendly little guy around for the heck of it.
AP,
I think there are some people at Apple, or who were previously at Apple, who worked very hard so that one day someone would say: Everything is macintosh. They aren’t sorry.
MacRaven – I also have a stilll-working SE30 that I can fire up and play Strategic Conquest in their honor. It has the old Pyro screensaver, too, when screensavers actually did something to prevent screenburn.
It had the most interesting barrel-type fan to keep the processor cool, and that’s the only think that has broken – I found one of those handy external fans that sits on top of the unit and blows air through the handle while providing an extra power outlet, too.
Fun memories!
Here is my homage to Apple:
This message was typed and sent from my first computer – a Quadra 650 purchased in 1993. I’ve been telling people for years that it still worked. I realized recently that it had been packed in a box 4 years ago. It had been moved from Florida to Ohio and put in a non-climate controlled storage facility. Later it moved from Ohio back to Florida where it has been in what equates to a barn for the last 2 years or so. Again no climate control and this time in the Florida humidity. So a few weeks ago, I dug it out. It has yellowed significantly since I last saw it. As I hoped, once I plugged it in and hit the button on the keyboard…BONG…It booted. This baby had ethernet on the motherboard back in 93 so I plugged it into the network, set it for DHCP and voila, I was on the net. Currently running OS 8.0, and equiped with a whopping 40MB of memory and 240MB HD, the 33MHz Motorolla 68040 hums right along. All this on the original battery!
Happy Birthday Apple!
I still have a TRS80 in my room, along with a C64, and a Ti-99 computer!
Several years ago, at my dot-com job, I set up my Apple IIc and in DazzleDraw or whatever drawing program I used, I made a green-and-black representation of a Netscape browser of the period– as if we were still doing browser testing for those. (Ah, geek humor…) We did enjoy playing Lode Runner on it, though.
I have to say, every once in a while I run across a piece of my original IIc’s manual package, you know, the blonde girl in the sweatshirt with the hat over her eyes holding the IIc (because it’s portable!) on the red background– nothing has ever summed up the limitless promise of computing like that packaging and imagery for me. The next 10 or 15 years of Macintoshes were more frustrating than fun much of the time– it took OS X and video editing to make me love them again– but that girl, and the computer under her arm (no sign of the cast iron armature for the monitor), were the future.
Magic word: piece. No, I’m not going to profane my memories of her by saying it.
Having worked at Shreve Systems for 9 years, I am definitely in touch wih the old hardware. We did board level repair on the Apple II all the way up to PowerMac 9600.
I agree with the MacDailyNews Take. What I don’t understand about the article, however, is that he named it “Booting up circa 1982 Apple IIe as homage to Apple’s 30th anniversary”, when he didn’t actually boot it up! ROM BASIC doesn’t qualify.
My first computer was an Apple IIgs (1986). It is also the single personal computer that that I used as my main home machine for the longest period of time. During that time, when the WWW was just starting to get interesting, processing power was not so important. More important was the “fun” of using a high-quality reliable computer, and the user community that supported its own members. So you could use a so-called “obsolete” computer for a long long time without getting tired of it or wanting something newer.
It is Apple’s 30th birthday, but it’s also the 30th birthday for the Apple user community. So happy birthday to us… Without an enthusiastic, loyal, and helpful community of users, using a Mac would not that much better than using a “PC.”
As some of you may have noted, I booted up my Apple ][+ at the stroke of midnight on the first to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Apple. That ][+, along with a //e, were my family’s first computers, handed down to us by a relative when they were already quite obsolete (circa 1992). Despite this, they still managed to serve us quite well until we got better computers. I used the //e to practice for my grade school computer classes, which still used //es. Bank Street Writer served me quite well as a word processor for a number of years, faithfully outputting to the vintage Apple Dot Matrix Printer connected to the //e. I also did plenty of BASIC programming on it. I still have several Apple // series computers in with my vintage computer collection, but the ][+ and //e hold a special place in my collection.
-Adam
http://www.electronixandmore.com/adam/index.html
My first computer was a brand new //e. I had to sign a contract with my parents stating that I would do my homework and chores WITHOUT complaint. And some other stuff that doesn’t really stick in my mind right now, I think it had to do with going to camp or something. I was 14, the year was 1986. It was the best gift my parents ever gave me. I loved that computer – I used to fall asleep at the keyboard. I’d go to bed and then sneak back up to play games. AppleWorks was my word processor. I had no use for the spreadsheet at the time. Karateka, Sky Fox, Conan and Lode Runner were my favorite games. I used my //e all the way through high school. Then came a used IIgs. What a machine. Those were great days for computing. Every new piece of software was anticipated with great hope for whatever advancements it held. It seemed like software companies made leaps and bounds back then. Maybe it was because I was watching with young eyes. Maybe it really was unfolding right in front of us. Who knows. It was just a really great time.
Happy Birthday Apple.
i had a commodore 64 when i was growing up, so my memories of the apple ii and macs are pretty limited – it’s only when i actually started messing with macs (about five years ago) that i got interested in the vintage apple computers. i have a iigs and i HAD a mac plus, but it died after six months of uptime as a full-screen clock. =)
all-in-all, hooray for apple, here’s hoping for thirty more years (as long as they aren’t anything like the early-to-mid-nineties were!)
I learned BASIC on a IIe in Highschool. My friends had II+’s and IIc’s. Now that I think about it: I wonder if nostalgia led me back to Apple. We need Sigmund to figure this out.