Re: Results of "For the fun of it"

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

golfrock wrote:
> Well, I'm one of those squarely in the middle.  In fact, I will turn 41
> next week.
>
> I may not have bought my Apple II+ in 1982, but then as a senior in
> high school, I hardly had the $3K to buy it.  Graduation present....

I was 39 when I bought my first Apple (][+), a 16K, cassette-only
model, because $1195 was a lot of money.  That same day I bought a
$179 10" color TV for a monitor and a $30 GE cassette deck for storage.

Two weeks later, I spent $59 on another 32KB of DRAM, and I probably
never spent more than $25/month (for software and publications) for
almost three years.

Then I had an opportunity to participate in a group buy of SA400
disk drives and privately manufactured cases for them (together
with the 7-page instructions on how to convert the drives to
Apple-compatibility)!  I think two drives, two cases, and a controller
set me back about $260, which was a "big league" addition to my
Apple system.  Within a month, I found myself using the cassette
drive only to load programs to move them to disk.  The good news
is that diskettes had come down from about $5 each to about $1 each
between 1980 and 1983.  ;-)

I've always tried to be frugal in my home computing whenever
I could.  But in 1980, after studying the hardware and the market
for several months, it was clear that the Apple II was the only
"real" computer, and its expense would have to be borne (I didn't
know about "clones" until several years later).

> I have invested some money in a IIGS collection.  I hope to teach my
> two boys about the early years and give them some appreciation of the
> machine and what even an old machine can do.

The most important of which is to engage the imagination and
train the mind!

> In 15 years or so, maybe I can sell these and pay for a semester of
> college.  Yeah right, not the way it keeps going up.

True, we don't know what will happen to Apple II "value", but
one can safely predict that college will keep going up.  ;-)

-michael

New, faster SUDOKU v2.0 solver for Apple II's!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

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