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

[heuser.marcus@freenet.de]

On Dec 15, 9:30 pm, noem...@noemail.net (catalog//e) wrote:
>
> Let's hear your stories....

I always wanted to write a bit about my personal history to
read myself when I'm too old to remember so I chime in:

I actually began with a ZX 81 as it was the cheapest computer
around at the time. I destroyed it after less than six months.
With a hardware expansion - a custom character generator card
because the shitty thing could neither do high-res graphics(*)
nor custom fonts itself. It wasn't a big loss as system was
also very unstable with its heavy 16K RAM expansion.
(* Actually some people coaxed high-res graphics out of this
tiny machine but still monochrome and very slow).

Around that time our school (a Gymnasium for my fellow
Germans out there) got a computer room equipped with seven
Apple II Euro Plus - one with a brilliant Taxan color monitor
(don't know if it was RGB), all others with very bright green
monitors. "Bright" as in "eye destroying brightness".
Never saw anything like that after that and I never liked
monochrome monitors that much again. "Bolo" was incredible on
these displays! The "friendlier" amber ones were for weaklings
anyway. And I still can "feel" the personality of the keyboards
in my fingers ;-)

However, the darned things were much too expensive for me
as much as I loved the color screens of "Mask of the Sun"
or screen shots of Apple RPGs in game magazines at the time.

So I settled with an Atari 400 - the sturdy little thing with
a membrane keyboard that permanently flattened the inner sides
of my thumbs. Over the years I added a 48K RAM card and a
floppy drive. Which made it bearable.
I only had a handful of commercial games like the standard
Star Raiders (still the best game ever!), Defender etc. so
I had my most creative time back then (a good basis for
8-bit nostalgia, it seems).

The great thing of that time was that in our loose group of
four "computer nerds" all had different machines: One had a
C64, one a TI99/4a at first then a C64, one had a IIe because
his father was a college professor and I had the Atari 400
and later a 130XE with 128K RAM.
But we all had some flavour of 6502 and most of us learned
assembly and played role-playing-games (Ultima IV nearly
cost me my school education...).

Then came the Amiga 1000 with its Boing! demo and of course
none of us had the money to upgrade. So we all programmed
Boing! demos for our little machines and the best looking one
was from the guy with the IIe - he was much ahead of us in
assembly at that time, wrote a ramdisk and even published
an article in the German Apple magazine Peeker. He even
could type quickly - which I couldn't because of the shitty
membrane keyboard. I was *so* envious! ;-)

The affordable Amiga 500 came and we all bought one - and
though we had the same machine school was over and personal
choices drove most of us apart. Everything got professional
and the speed race between hardware and software producers
really began.

I generally enjoyed my two years stint with it (some dabbling
in 68000 assembly, a custom case, home-built harddisk interface,
lots of illegal software and a bought Ultima V which I still
have) but I wasn't as creative and productive as I used to be
and the time of the Amiga was quickly over for me as Origin
chose the PC as the next native Ultima platform. You see, I was
so into Ultima at that time - if I had a kid I would have
sacrificed it to Lord British to play the next installment!

My programming genius friend dumped his Amiga even earlier
because he wanted to have a Mac and a Mac LC he got -
the slow first one - with a monochrome monitor (he didn't care
what the "C" stood for, apparently). The limited possibilities
of the machine didn't hinder him to write great programs like
an Amiga-like soundtracker, though. This didn't stop this
diehard Apple-fan to work for the Evil Empire(tm) now, though ;)

In 1991, however, I went PC after Origin published Ultima VI
for VGA-equipped machines and what a beautiful game it was!
I sold my Amiga for a ridiculously high price to get a decent
PC at the time (386SX20 with 2 MB RAM, 120MB harddisk, ET4000).
Then I earned my first "real" money and I supported the PC
upgrades industry from then on.

Though I'm very happy with my setups (as I'm building them
myself I should so ;) none has as much personality as an old
8-bit from whatever company and so I occasionally fired up my
old Ataris to relive some of the glory days.

Then came Ebay.

And with it hordes of people who cleared out their cellars.

While I was unemployed I had way too much free time on my
hands and researched old games and CPUs and eventually
got to the 65816. That's when I remembered an old BYTE article
about the IIgs which was even more expensive than a well
equipped Amiga at the time. I actually never saw one
personally back then!

Talk about curiosity...

Well, some Ebay auctions later I'm still infected with a "retro
virus", have some Apples that won't ever be sold and try to
"recover" some of my youth that I couldn't live at the time.
Especially sitting before the Apple (or an emulator) while
an early 80ies US-movie like Wargames runs on television...


Project: Writing an RPG of the classic fantasy type but with
some style of its own. Laziness, exhaustion from work and
never ceasing fan missions for the Dark Project games being
my worst enemies I have at least prototyped a "new" graphics
routine (think a mixture of Moebius and Ant Attack). So, after
twenty years of dreaming to cook up a great CRPG it may take
another twenty years to actually finish it - but it will then run
on a IIe compatible platform.

Apple II forever! ;-)

bye
Marcus