How The Apple Ii Plus Was An Eye Opening Experience In My Life

Before I returned to school, I had no knowledge of computers. My only exposure to them were in the movies, where they tended to be big, cumbersome and evil.

Then one day, a friend was reading a book about DOS. I thought it was about STDs and asked him about it. He said it was a simple computer language. Luckily, he offered to show me how it worked.

I was hooked. It was cool, and easy to learn. But where to go next? My friend suggested going to school to learn about computers. It sounded like a good idea. So I went.

Going to school to learn computers was not as easy in 1982 as it is now. I finally decided to get the Apple II Plus because the IBM seemed to stuffy and elite for me. How wrong I was, but that’s another story.

I got a loan from my uncle for $4000 for the computer, monitor, joy stick, game paddle and 2 disk drives. Yes, it cost me $4000 to get a computer that came with 48k of ram memory. That was the equivalent of a single page of text for each single file.

I was the first geek in my little sphere of influence to have a computer. Everyone came to see it and play with it. I began to type my book into it, one page at a time. Soon I had 250 files on about 40 floppy disks. But my book was done!

That computer opened up the en tire world of computers for me, many years before the rest of the world found them to be indispensable for their world. I had an insight as to what was coming from the inside, as it were.

Today, my Apple is long gone. I spent six months transferring all of my files, one at a time, across my small neighborhood to my friend Mike’s IBM computer. At the time it was an enormous, painstaking and time consuming project. But it was worth the experience.