WorkForce645/BX635

My Dad just scanned these old photos from the 70’s, back when floppy discs were actually floppy and televisions were embedded in wood like furniture. I was such an Apple fanboy… I clearly couldn’t get enough of those stickers.

This powerful tool was something my father never had growing up. But during the 70’s, he manufactured memories, and I remember plugging in banks of his chips to boost the programming capacity of my precious Apple ][ from 16K to 48K (which I used up with my Adventure game written in BASIC).

Seeing this time capsule brings back many fond memories and reminds me that each generation provides more compute resources to the next.

While the generations are bound to the metronome of biology, the power of our cognitive prostheses grows exponentially.

31 responses to “my first computer — the Apple ][”

  1. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    My programming buddy Bradley "shteak" Miller also recently uncovered the shape tables that he used to improve graphics performance in our games, resorting to bitmaps in machine code (hence the black book on the shelf above):Apple ][ Shape Tabels Bradley MillerHe writes: "I also remember one of us holding the graph paper and calling out "up…left…up…right…" while the other pressed the corresponding arrow keys. Tedious! Then figuring out what memory range to stick the shape tables into, so they wouldn’t conflict with anything else."

    "Peek but don’t Poke"… CALL -151…. PR#6…. all etched in my mind (glossary)

    And, well, my Dad also found these 70’s geek chic photos… oh my!Scan 60Scan 61I wonder where my interest in rockets came from? =)

    I spent some time at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Texas, camping there one summer where I met the programmer behind Ultima, the cool cat who called himself Lord British. Here are some reunion memoriesIMG_1833The Apple ][ carried me to college and ultimately a pilgrimage to work with Jobs at NeXT.

    Reply
  2. Ramones Karaoke Avatar
    Ramones Karaoke

    I had one of these when I was at CERN. 1980, and they were already Higgs-hunting in the LEP. I bet none of the would have guessed at 32 more years …

    Reply
  3. Coffee and Computers Avatar
    Coffee and Computers

    I wore pants like those on my first day of school.

    Reply
  4. linux-works Avatar
    linux-works

    boy, I sure bought a lot of those verbatim’s when I was into the trs-80 stuff, late 70’s.

    "hey, are these 35 or 40 tracks? are they double sided or just ‘flippy’? hard or soft sectored? ok, I’ll take a box of those." 😉

    Reply
  5. bike-R Avatar
    bike-R

    ROCKET MAN!!!!!! Hey, no TIMEX SINCLAIR or Commodore 64? Must have been Apple to the core….

    Reply
  6. solerena Avatar
    solerena

    Cute, love the links:)…and memories…

    Reply
  7. linux-works Avatar
    linux-works

    it was either the trash-80, the apple or the PET, that people had. the sinclair was not quite part of the trio (was it?) but it does get honorable mention 😉

    Reply
  8. Chris Maytag Avatar
    Chris Maytag

    This machine — there werre others, of course, parallel histories, but this is the ONE — was what started everything, from my perspective. It was my first machine, after first learning BASIC on a Commodore PET stuck in a broom closet at my elementary school. My first was one of the first II+ machines, and was the beginning of everything that followed. Good times!

    Reply
  9. Spaceaholic.com Avatar
    Spaceaholic.com

    First exposure to Apollo? (Thats an H-1 engine your resting on from the Saturn IB first stage).

    Reply
  10. scleroplex Avatar
    scleroplex

    most excellent!
    my 1st apple was a IIe with duodisk.
    it was gorgeous 🙂

    Reply
  11. AGrinberg Avatar
    AGrinberg

    Ha!
    I’m surprised you didn’t start with an Altair 8800 !

    Reply
  12. heet_myser Avatar
    heet_myser

    *Awesome* stuff, Steve! But where was your windbreaker?

    crop09

    Reply
  13. seatonsnet Avatar
    seatonsnet

    I just finished the Walter Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs and I came away with very mixed feelings… Is Steve Jobs really more important than Alan Turing or the team at Bell Labs that wrote UNIX or the team that created the Xerox Star or more important than Tim Berners-Lee for that matter?

    Maybe he is, just like Walt Disney is more important than Hans Christian Anderson, Washington Irving and the Brothers Grimm… He the one that turned it all into dollars.

    Reply
  14. solerena Avatar
    solerena

    Personally, I can relate to Steve Jobs well with his emphasis on intuition, focus, elegance, beauty..Charisma…he was also half-German… I feel at home in this part of SV…did not feel this way in any other place…it is subjective…hard to tell who is more important:)

    Reply
  15. scleroplex Avatar
    scleroplex

    agreed.
    comparisons are without merit here.
    all of them played an important role in shaping the world.
    for example, everyone ridiculed al gore when he said he was the father of the internet.
    those people did not understand the vital role of government policy in allowing and encouraging an open internet to flourish.
    when you look at other countries like saudi or china, it is easily apparent what gore meant.
    the people ridiculing gore probably have never heard of saudi or china……

    Reply
  16. Kaets Ebut Avatar
    Kaets Ebut

    Ah, I remember that particular Apple ][ well. (Those glasses, too!) I can still feel the springy action of those keys under my fingertips. And hear the resonant, midrangy scraping sound of that floppy drive. (It was much richer than the tinny sandpaper-on-metal sound of the TRS-80 floppy.) And you had the very fancy, advanced color monitor.

    "Machine code"? You flatter us! We used a rudimentary shape table editor (acquired via sneakernet), which output the finished shape data as a file. All the programming was done in good old Applesoft FP Basic. Then we tried to speed up the program using a very buggy machine-language compiler, without much luck. (I last saw that computer in Walnut Creek. Do you still have it? I still have one of my old disk boxes–and yes, it has an Apple sticker on the front. I think I got it at CompuWare. Tell your dad that’s a great vintage photo!)

    Nice plaid pants, by the way. I have a photo of me from the same era wearing a red-white-and-blue polyester suit. But your green striped ensemble is way cooler.

    Reply
  17. WF&DT Avatar
    WF&DT

    I recognize a couple of Star Destroyers on the graph paper.

    Reply
  18. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    Yes!

    Kaets / Steak – Was that compiler called Expediter? I have some vague memories about that…. and the various machine code calls we invoked, often in a random walk through memory space. =)

    Alas, I sold my Apple ][ in college. I was amazed that I found a buyer for $600 for a machine that underpowered. Needless to say, I regret that now.

    [http://www.flickr.com/photos/linux-works] and bike-r: I would not deign to use a trash-80. We had our standards after all. (And I remember the annoying Spock-like classmate who showed the TRS-80 calculating Pi faster than the Apple ][. So I just told him his code was shit, and left it at that.)

    My first programming experience was on the TI-58C, which my Dad brought home in 1977 from Texas Instruments:

    (more info from dedicated sites: vintage calculators, data math, TI59) It was mostly an exercise in entering known programs, like Battleship. But I first experienced a fondness for open source code examples as a way for newbies like me to learn how to program… which carried forward to BASIC on the Apple ][ and HTML in 1995 for me.

    Reply
  19. true777 Avatar
    true777

    The glue looks the exact same it does today — not much innovation in glue technology in the last 35 years, I guess.

    Reply
  20. Kaets Ebut Avatar
    Kaets Ebut

    Steve: Yes, I’m pretty sure the compiler was called "Expediter". It crashed constantly, but when it worked, the speed gain was incredible. One approach we didn’t try (but should have) was "page flipping" between HGR and HGR2. It would have made the animation a lot smoother because you wouldn’t have seen the shape tables actually being drawn. With page flipping, the image is drawn on the page you’re not seeing, and then the whole page is made visible at once. Oh well…too late now!

    > Alas, I sold my Apple ][ in college.

    Ah. Then I last saw it at your parents’ house. I recall it was sitting on a small table outside the door to your room. You had just installed an 80-column text card in it. (And the 1988 "Just Say Yo" compliation CD was sitting on it.) After that, it was all Macs.

    > Needless to say, I regret that now.

    Yeah…Castle Wolfenstein just isn’t the same in an emulator!

    > And I remember the annoying Spock-like classmate who showed the
    > TRS-80 calculating Pi fastr than the Apple ][.

    Are you talking about Ralph, or Eric Quintana? Quintana was a programming genius. Do you remember that TRS-80 pinball game he created in high school, and then sold to Radio Shack? I see he’s been designing FP processors for Motorola & Intel since college.

    Ralph’s no slouch, either! (That is, if you can stand people who preferred the TRS-80.)

    Reply
  21. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    But I can’t…. =)

    Eric – that’s a name I have not heard in a while. I think it was him.

    (and I didn’t actually say that about his code. It’s a frequent Steve Jobs utterance. But I did dismiss his little trash-80 stunt with "Whatever. It’s still black and white.")

    Resharing: My programming buddy Bradley "shteak" Miller also recently uncovered the shape tables that he used to improve graphics performance in our games, resorting to bitmaps in machine code (hence the black book on the shelf above):Apple ][ Shape Tabels Bradley MillerHe writes: "I also remember one of us holding the graph paper and calling out "up…left…up…right…" while the other pressed the corresponding arrow keys. Tedious! Then figuring out what memory range to stick the shape tables into, so they wouldn’t conflict with anything else."

    "Peek but don’t Poke"… CALL -151…. PR#6…. all etched in my mind (glossary)

    And, well, my Dad also found these 70’s geek chic photos… oh my!Scan 60Scan 61I wonder where my interest in rockets came from? =)

    I spent some time at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Texas, camping there one summer where I met the programmer behind Ultima, the cool cat who called himself Lord British. Here are some reunion memoriesIMG_1833The Apple ][ carried me to college and ultimately a pilgrimage to work with Jobs at NeXT.

    Reply
  22. Chris Anderson Photos Avatar
    Chris Anderson Photos

    Awesome photo that brings back many good memories, especially the pink Verbatim floppy envelopes and foil write-protect stickers. My high school (class of 1984) even had a hole punch designed to cut the precise notch to make the single-sided disks double-sided.

    Reply
  23. pennman007 Avatar
    pennman007

    Funny to think back now how powerful we thought even things like pocket calculators were back then, compared now to the computing power of our mobile phones today!

    Reply
  24. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    Given how few photos we have from the era of film, I am just delighted that someone took a photo of this. It brings back more memories than any other photo I can think of from from childhood.

    Reply
  25. RalfLippold Avatar
    RalfLippold

    Thanks Steve to stir up our collective memories. Myself I remember fiddling around the Commodore VIC20 in the basement of my exchange family in North Vancouver in 1982 (on a school exchange), at high school we had Apple ][ as well. A gorgeous time not to forget a visit to Seattle’s Science Museum and the Space Needle. 30 years in the past, and memories just stick, I am must have been a tech geek back then already – in the making 🙂 Seems like others have been as well.

    Reply
  26. admont1979 Avatar
    admont1979

    Hi Steve, great photo. I used it (credited) in an article on Infobarrel (on the topic of writing, rather than old computers). Thanks a lot.

    Reply
  27. Rue89 Avatar
    Rue89

    Hi,
    We’re a French news website called Rue89 (http://www.rue89.com) and are about to use this picture (with link and credit) to illustrate a story on our site, observing the Creative Commons conditions mentioned in this page.

    If you do not want us to reproduce your work on our site, just email us webmaster[at]rue89.com.

    Congratulations for this photo.

    Reply
  28. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    My computer is in the news today, on Vice: thump.vice.com/en_us/article/ywgq9j/soundcloud-back-up-yo…

    Reply
  29. viljalex Avatar
    viljalex

    I would use your photo in an e-learning material for students if you do not mind. Thank you.

    Reply
  30. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    And revived as a Startup Story podcast

    Reply
  31. jurvetson Avatar
    jurvetson

    Another reminder in my archives… By college, I moved to the 68000 processor. Wrote an OS multitasker in assembly code. And then this 68000-based computer with some speech synthesis hardware from National. After programming the boot ePROM, the most difficult task was debugging the rat’s nest of wire wrap 😉 Digitalker

    Reply

Leave a Reply to jurvetson Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *