Apple Of My Eye

I was just reading this article on people reminiscing about their first computers. My first computer was a Texas Instruments 99-4A, complete with cassette tape drive that made these god-awful screeching sounds whenever you transferred data to or from it. It was hooked up to an old color television and I probably had it from 1981-82. That was followed by the Apple IIe with the green monochrome monitor and dual floppy drive. It was really bitchin’ because it had the graphics adapter that could display 80 columns of text. I wasted hours on that thing playing Infocom games (Planetfall rules!) and Donkey Kong. Then came the promising but ill-fated Apple IIGS, circa 1987. That was followed by a Macintosh Plus (the first computer I operated with a HeadMaster) and then I entered the world of PCs. I remember my dad bringing home this XT from work that had a whopping 10 mb hard drive. When that one started to smoke, we replaced it with a 386. Then a 486. And so on… Looking at my current system, it’s light-years ahead of those clunky boxes, but I still have fond memories of sitting in the basement, in that muted green glow of the monitor, exploring a maze of twisty passages, all alike.