winter's computers
found, loved, and nurtured for spring
my ugly geek secret

Sunday 10 June 2007

a2brute

Model

  • Apple IIe Platinum
Introduced
  • 1987
CPU
  • WDC 65C02, 1MHz
RAM
  • 128 KB
Video
  • 560 x 192, 16 colour
Disk
  • 5¼" floppy
Network
  • none
Operating Systems
  • ProDOS 1.1
  • Apple DOS 3.3
  • CP/M
Features
  • CP/M card
I was fascinated by computers at a young age, being a sci-fi fanatic, but I never thought I'd ever see one in the little town of Revelstoke. Then one afternoon in Grade 9 (1982), after classes, I walked past a small room that I'd never seen inside before. The door was open and through it I saw some students working on about a half dozen Apple II+ computers. Grade 9's were not allowed to use the computers except as part of a class, and we did get a brief introduction to them as part of Math class. I was hooked then.

When I got into Grade 10 there were no computer classes available, but I was allowed to use any computer that hadn't been reserved by the Grade 11's and 12's. So I learned to program in BASIC a few minutes at a time, and by Grade 11 I was passing on all my bad programming habits to other Computer Science students. In Grade 12 I was teaching myself 6502 assembly language while being forced through a paradigm shift to structured Pascal programming in class.

So, while I never became a professional programmer (that's another story) my current career did start with this particular computer (or, actually, its immediate predecessor).

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