I used an Apple //e in the classroom today

[dog_cow@macgui.com (D Finnigan)]

Here's a neat little (true) story which took place earlier today:

I and another classmate had been designated in our Industrial Technology
class to give a presentation on Space technology. Others in the class
gave/will give presentations on other technologies. The criteria: we must
have a roughly 10 minute presentation where we do the talking, a discussion
where the whole class gets talking, an evaluation where we see if the class
was sleeping or paying attention during our lecture, and finally, an
"activity." This "activity" is where the Apple comes in. :-)

Since there's so much space technology out there that we could have covered,
we decided to do something familiar, and that would be the American moon
landings in the late 60's and early 70's. After we finished the
presentation, we handed out 9-question quizzes to the class. They had 90
seconds to complete the quiz.

What they didn't know is that the person who got the highest score, along
with the person who got the 2nd highest score would get to play Lunar Lander
on the Apple for a monetary prize.

So, the quiz was distributed, taken, collected, and graded. The top scores
were an 8 and a 7. Now remember, the class did not know what the quiz was
for. Now, I said something along the lines of "Ok, you space cadets, the top
scorers in this class are now going to have a chance at landing a moon
mission for a prize of $10"

I then walked over to the boxes which contained the Apple //e and Disk ][
drives. I placed them on the desk at the front of the class room, and took
out  the Apple //e. Immediately, there was a buzz of interest (literally,
some people were "Ooohing" over it) as I placed the 26 year-old machine on
the table; they could recognize that it was quite an old computer! I got out
the Disk ]['s, took off the cover, and plugged them in. I then had my
presentation classmate plug in the cord, while I connected the Apple to the
overhead digital projector. All of this took about 1 minute.

Before I pressed the power switch, I gave a little intro/explanation of the
Apple to the class:

"This is an Apple //e computer which was made, believe it or not, by the
exact same company that makes your iPods, iPhones, and Macs today. It came
out in 1983 and it operates at 1 MHz. In comparison, today's computers
operate at 1 Ghz. It has 128 kilobytes of RAM, which is less than one of
these floppy disks stores [I held up a 5.25" disk]. However, this computer
is the closest thing I have to the computers that got us to the moon 40
years ago, and it is even more powerful than those space computers."

I flipped on the power switch and the Apple made its usual beep as the disk
drive whirred. I took out the disk which had the Lunar lander game on it,
and placed it in the drive. Just for fun, I ran the CATALOG and there were
some more response from the class at the simplicity of it all. In less than
30 seconds, I had booted the machine and was ready to play Lunar lander
(something that would take much longer on a modern Mac or PC, I'd imagine).

I called up the first lucky player, and we all looked over the introduction
screen of the lunar lander. The player simply sat at his desk and called out
how much fuel he wanted to burn. I stood in front of the Apple and typed in
the amount and pressed Return. We all got to see the results on the big
projector screen. Suffice it to say, even though the Applesoft game had no
graphics or anything impressive about it, everyone in the class paid their
full attention to it, and many others kindly offered their "best advice" as
to how much fuel should be burnt. We had many a laugh about "stopping on a
dime," and being about 2 miles from the moon's surface, traveling at 3,000+
miles per hour.

In the end, neither of the two players were able to successfully land on the
moon and win the prize which I had offered (I was a bit disappointed). The
first player crashed and created a new crater 143' deep; the second player
crashed with a resulting crater-depth of over 800'. In the end, though, I
think that the game impressed upon the class the difficulty of the math
involved in successfully landing on the moon, (even though it was a
simplified simulation) and I had no reason to believe that the Apple game's
lack of realistic color graphics or sound effects diminished the classes'
attention and interest toward the game. There were many "backseat"
astronauts. ;-)

The professor was impressed because he said afterward that he remembered
using Apple //e's in his school when he was a youth. So, the Apple gets
packed up again to return home this evening, having served its purpose. :-)