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).