30 "Birthday" of the Apple II!

[gunug]

I can remember really wanting an Apple II with one of those nice "hi-res" square composite monitors; ended up "settling" for a Commodore 64 hooked to an old B&W television.  First Apple machine I ever touched was a MAC Plus but I've handled 100's of Apple IIe's over the years I've been with the school district (we still have a Apple IIc in our museum).  This is a great little article and a trip down memory lane:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/04/16/HNappleii30_1.html


This was in the slide show; I guess Orville Redenbacher's nephew Gary (on left of picture) was an early adopter of the Apple II!    Doesn't WOZ look young?

[daryl66]

I have one looks just like that sett about 20 feet from here. You may/or may not recall I started a thread here attempting to find some assistance on how to use it and aquire the necessary software. I was attempting to decipher some disks my neighbor (the newspaper editors daughter) found. Long story short, while to took the better part of a year, I finally accomplished the task. You would be amazed at the size of the Apple ll comunity that is still active and lives out there. I sure was. Mostly gamers.  It was an interesting project.

Daryl

[Parker]

woah its been 30 years already??
not that i've been around for 30 years.


so those computers were 20 years old when i first used them in school...
boy does the government live by "if it ain't broke, don't fix it (even if it's obsolete)."

and 30 years later
the computer's still usable for tasks.

[gunug]

Parker - There was practically nothing to fix on an Apple IIe.  I can remember changing out countless power supplies (5 minute job), an occasional keyboard (5 minute job), and maybe 2 logic boards.  Sometimes we had to swap out floppy controller cards, graphics card, or printer card but that was about it!  All of that educational software worked quite well and in terms of what graphics and sound were available it was attractive to the students they had in the grade schools!  The floppy drives were pretty hard to break as well; I hooked a dual floppy to an Apple IIe card in a MAC LC about two years ago and "rescued" some data someone thought they needed; that drive worked like a charm!

[gunug]

I noticed the 20th Anniversary MAC in that other thread

(  http://www.techsurvivors.net/forums/index....showtopic=15811 )

and I wondered which Apple product should be considered the 30th Anniversary product?  Probably the darned phone; and probably it will reach "greatness" only after being hacked like the AppleTV!  Although I think there are already cellphones with a very hackable Linux on them and I don't think they have sold all that well!