My second computer was an Apple II

1978

From the first time I set eyes on the great science fiction movie computers of the 1960s and ‘70s, I loved computers. Even the killer ones seemed cool. I wanted to spend time learning about computers and playing with them. In high school, I was incredibly lucky to be part of maybe the greatest school computer lab in the country. That was a lot of fun and gave me a jump start on my dream.

Me in the amazing computer lab at George Washington High School in Denver, circa 1976. I’m typing on an ASR-33 Teletype. Those are IBM keypunch machines in the background. I’m wearing a Robert Crumb “Keep on Truckin’” t-shirt. That is hair on my head.

In high school, I had a friend who somehow got access to a computer with a voice synthesizer and a vocabulary of 100 words. You could call this computer on a touch-tone phone, assuming you could find one of those rare fancy things. Then you could enter two-digit numeric codes to get the computer to talk back to you in a creepy monotone voice. You entered some codes and then pressed the * key to hear the words spoken. So, for example code 01 was “a”, 02 was “the”, 03 was “go”, and so on. Codes 94 through 99 were “daisy”, “give”, “me”, “your”, “answer”, and “do”. And if you don’t understand why those last 6 words were included, I sentence you to watch my favorite and greatest movie ever made.

I loved to write computer programs at school. I was not good at drawing, painting, or other creative endeavors. But I could make a computer do cool stuff. Seeing software come to life was like magic to me. And then, because I was alive at the right time, I found out I could own my own computer! And that computer was…a Radio Shack TRS-80. For only $399, I could hook it up to my TV, write programs in BASIC, and have a great time. I went to the neighborhood Radio Shack, where they convinced me that I also wanted a monitor, plus a cassette recorder for loading and saving programs and data. I spent $599, pretty much every penny I had. But now I owned a computer! I was 17 years old.

I spent every spare hour with my new computer. You can’t imagine my level of excitement and exploration. The computer was the best toy ever. I wrote programs in BASIC, and I typed in programs from magazines and books. I learned that there were mysterious commands named PEEK and POKE that caused amazing things to happen. What the heck were those commands doing? And there was something called assembly language? No idea. But BASIC, I could figure out.

I wanted to be a programmer, and right now! And maybe I could be! A family friend who owned an insurance agency contacted me. Like every other agent of the day, he looked up rate quotes on a plastic rating card. The card had tables with rates based on a person’s age, car model and year, and so on. But he was forward-thinking. Would it be possible, he wondered, if he could get rates on a computer instead? Sure, I said! I could write a program to do that on the TRS-80. I tried to replicate the tables from the rating card in my program. But there wasn’t enough memory in the 4K RAM TRS-80 to hold the tables. So to save space, I had to encode the rates as formulas, which I knew existed somewhere and were used to create the tables. To make this work, I had to reverse-engineer the rate formulas from the rating card. I was pretty proud of that.¹

I had these business cards printed up so I could look cool and professional. I didn’t actually know what systems design was.

While I was writing the insurance program, I dropped by the local ComputerLand store often to get the latest magazines: Byte, Creative Computing, Kilobaud, and so on. Every time I did, I saw the Apple II over in the corner behind the magazine rack. Usually it was doing something very cool. Running a demo of Breakout in color. Showing hi-res graphics. Playing music. My TRS-80 couldn’t do these things. I developed a case of buyer’s remorse.

So when I finished the software, I offered to sell the insurance guy the TRS-80 along with the software. He agreed. I went straight to ComputerLand to buy an Apple II. Because I didn’t have much money, I wanted to buy an Apple II with 4K of RAM, which was $970. They had never heard of a 4K Apple II and said I would regret having so little memory. They talked me into a standard 16K RAM model for $1195. I guess I was an easy mark for computer dealers.

ComputerLand was serious about selling computers to serious buyers. They were attempting to move beyond the hobby computer shops of the day. ComputerLand sold a lot of Apples. I worked there eventually and had the hilarious title “Software Technician.”

This time I really couldn’t afford a monitor or cassette recorder. So I used my lousy blurry TV, which sat on a rollaway stand next to my desk because it was too big to fit on top of the Apple II. I had a super cheap tape recorder which worked fine with the Apple II. I was happy. I had my Apple II: color, hi-res graphics, great music. I was rescued from Radio Shack and joined the wonderful world of Apple. And I even figured out assembly language eventually.

A few years later I sold the Apple II and used the money to buy an Apple III. But that’s another story.

1. Clever thing I could have done but did not think to do: contact the insurance company to ask them for the formulas instead of puzzling them out, and then offer to sell the rating program to them so more agents could use it and I could make more money. Oh well.