Re: A nice little Apple II story

["Tim Haynes" <trhaynes@NOSPAM.yahoo.com>]

What a fantastic story, Charles!  Thanks for sharing it... it brings back my
own memories of the first time I programmed lo-res graphics.  :) :)  What
fun that was!!

Cheers
Tim

"Charles Forbin" <sark314@hotmail.com> wrote in message
2ab25086.0201271311.4ab22782@posting.google.com">news:2ab25086.0201271311.4ab22782@posting.google.com...
> 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.