A nice little Apple II story

[sark314@hotmail.com (Charles Forbin)]

So one night, I'm really bored, and I get it into my head to haul my
Apple ][ out of the closet.  I hook it up to the living room's 27-inch
Toshiba TV and, lacking any disk drives, dance through BASIC for
awhile.  (There's something wonderfully wrong about an Apple ][
connected to a huge brand-new TV.)  Some time later, my friend Lauren
comes back from work and sees me goofing around with the odd-looking
device on the floor.  "What are you doing?" she asks.  "Making dots on
the screen," I reply.  This sounds just weird enough for her to look,
and soon enough, she's captivated.  She spends the next fifteen
minutes enthusiastically learning lo-res and hi-res plotting,
arithmetic from the prompt, and even a FOR-NEXT loop.  This is a
person who takes no interest in her HP Pavilion except for instant
messaging, e-mail, web browsing, and word processing, and has little
care for how it works--yet a GUI-less, user-unfriendly relic from the
late '70s managed to capture her attention.  I particularly remember
her delight as she produced her own lo-res dots.  :)  There are
probably deeper meanings to this story, about how the masses don't
have to be computer-illiterate, how programming could have a wider
audience than it traditionally has had, etc., but I just thought this
was a nice story to share.