Re: How I got interested in the Apple ][...

[Jeremiah Stoddard <jeremiah@jeremiahstoddard.com>]

noemail@noemail.net (catalog//e) wrote:
 
> Hey all, just thought I would start a thread about how I got interested in
> the A2 platform, but would also like to hear your stories as well in this
> same thread. Just for fun, just for anybody interested in reading about
> such stuff. Sometimes it good to look back and see what was, what is, and
> what came to be!
> :)
> 

Okay, it turns out I'm fairly long-winded, so read on if you dare:

I got started in the early 90's -- a little late, but that's because I'm 
relatively young. As a child I had wanted to learn how to make my own video 
games. I wasn't necessarily going to make a career out of it; I just wanted 
the capability. However, I had no way of accomplishing that goal. I didn't 
have any concept of programming languages, and my only exposure to games was 
what I had seen on an Atari or Nintendo console. Somehow information from the 
cartridge and the paddle were processed in the machine and converted into the 
image on my TV, but beyond that I had hit a brick wall.

Then I struck gold. I found a book stored away in a box called "Tim 
Hartnell's Giant Book of Computer Games." It didn't teach programming, but it 
had listings of dozens of games in BASIC, and from the code I was able to 
teach myself. I could come up with simple games on paper, but now I needed a 
computer to apply this knowledge.

While visiting some relatives, I became familiar with their Franklin Ace 
1000. Even without a manual, it wasn't hard to quickly become familiar with 
the machine and begin writing programs on it. I convinced my relatives to 
"upgrade" to one of the early Macintoshes so I could have the Franklin -- the 
Macintosh didn't interest me because it didn't have BASIC built in.

Eventually the power supply in the Franklin stopped working, but it was now 
the mid-90's and some of the more well-off schools were dumping the Apple IIs 
in favor of Macintoshes and PCs. I had a friend who acquired several IIe's 
from a local middle school, but he found the Franklin fascinating enough that 
he traded me a working IIe with monitor and joystick for my broken clone.

Later on I acquired an 8088 from a local middle school, which was fine with 
me because it came with a BASIC disk. BASIC didn't find much use on the PC, 
though, because it also came with QuickC, Turbo C, and a C tutorial program 
called Learn C. I was finally into "real" programming.

The PC got replaced by newer ones, but the Apple II remained until about five 
years ago when the Disk II cable became damaged. Then it got stored away for 
a later date when I would hopefully be able to acquire a new cable.

My interest was reawakened a few weeks ago when I decided that I was bored 
with the music on my iPod and started looking for some podcasts to subscribe 
to. I found 1 MHz, and it became the first podcast I ever subscribed to 
(unfortunately it appears to be on hiatus as well). A2Unplugged was the 
second. It didn't take but a few minutes of podcast to convince me that I 
needed a working Apple II again. So I first purchased Virtual ][ for my Mac 
(which was where the PC upgrades eventually led me), while poking around 
eBay. I found a IIc, a IIe, and between the podcasts and Virtual ][ a vibrant online Apple II community. So here I am today!

-Jeremiah