I’ve been reading the Apple: The First 50 Years book by David Pogue (Pogue's Posts) and its early chapters obviously spend a lot of time on the Apple II. I actually never knew anyone that had an Apple II of any kind. In my neck of the woods, people had the
We had garden variety Apple ][e models at my high school and that's what computer classes were taught on. Had we gotten a ][gs - with that fantastic Ensoniq ES550 audio chip, it might have convinced me the Amiga 500 that I got for high school graduation in 1987 wasn't the correct choice.
But comparing the ][e to Commodore 64 and/or Atari 800 - it offered a ton of expandibility with the chassis but was an inferior experience across the board.
Also never knew anyone with an Apple ][ in their home. We all had Commodore, Atari, Timex-Sinclair or even IBM systems. Our yearbook staff did have a Macintosh, and I got to do some light desktop publishing on it, but had a friend get an ST in 1986 and the Amiga 1000 was out and so it too seemed the inferior choice as well.
A roommate in college had a IIGS. I never got to use it (I had my Atari 130XE). He had two 3-1/2" floppy drives, and a hard drive on it. He hardly ever used the GUI. He was usually in 80-column text mode. That's where I saw him running Kyan Pascal for his CS assignments. He used to use it to play games, as well. A marquee title on it was a side-scrolling platformer that had a muscle man wielding a sword against baddies. The music on it really stood out, but I can't remember the name of the game.
I went through primary school never seeing a computer in school. I don't know when this started. I didn't notice until 1981, when I was in 5th grade, that my local library had a few computers where patrons could sign up for time: an Atari 400 and 800, and an Apple II+. They added a 128K Mac with a single floppy drive, and an Imagewriter printer in about 1984. This was eventually upgraded to a 512K Fat Mac.
I didn't see the first computer students could use in school until I got into Jr. high. They had an Apple II+ in the school library. My 7th grade year, one of my math teachers offered an after-school computer club that I signed up for. He had an Apple IIe in his office. A group of about four of us gathered around while he showed us stuff on it. I think we got a little time on it, as well. Next year, the school devoted one of its rooms as a computer lab, filled with Apple IIe's, and offered computer-user (learning to use Bank Street Writer, Apple Writer, VisiCalc, and a simple database), and programming classes (in Basic and Logo).
Even though I liked the Atari more than the Apple II, for its system capabilities, I spent most of my creative programming time on the Apple II, I think mainly because Applesoft Basic had strings, and Atari Basic didn't. It had a buffer construct that Atari called "strings," or what I would later learn used to be called "packed arrays." The main deficit with this was Atari Basic had no concept of string arrays. You had to emulate them using some indexing arithmetic. I didn't learn how to do this conceptually until I was in college.
When I got into high school, they already had a couple computer labs with Apple IIe's. I didn't take any of their computer classes, as they were too rudimentary for me, but the teacher had an after-school computer club that I joined, where we participated in the American Computer Science League (ACSL). My junior or senior year, the school replaced one of the labs with Mac Pluses, which were to be mainly used by the English department for word processing.
Most of this time I programmed in Basic, both on the Atari and Apple II.
I learned Pascal in high school using Apple/UCSD Pascal. Many years later, I learned some exciting history re. UCSD Pascal, since it was an operating system written in Pascal. In UCSD, Pascal was compiled to p-code, and run on a VM. This helped explain why we needed to use a separate floppy disk with it. It had its own standard format that was supposed to be readable on other UCSD Pascal platforms. It was supposed to be "write once run anywhere" (well before Java). It didn't turn out that way.
We had garden variety Apple ][e models at my high school and that's what computer classes were taught on. Had we gotten a ][gs - with that fantastic Ensoniq ES550 audio chip, it might have convinced me the Amiga 500 that I got for high school graduation in 1987 wasn't the correct choice.
But comparing the ][e to Commodore 64 and/or Atari 800 - it offered a ton of expandibility with the chassis but was an inferior experience across the board.
Also never knew anyone with an Apple ][ in their home. We all had Commodore, Atari, Timex-Sinclair or even IBM systems. Our yearbook staff did have a Macintosh, and I got to do some light desktop publishing on it, but had a friend get an ST in 1986 and the Amiga 1000 was out and so it too seemed the inferior choice as well.
A roommate in college had a IIGS. I never got to use it (I had my Atari 130XE). He had two 3-1/2" floppy drives, and a hard drive on it. He hardly ever used the GUI. He was usually in 80-column text mode. That's where I saw him running Kyan Pascal for his CS assignments. He used to use it to play games, as well. A marquee title on it was a side-scrolling platformer that had a muscle man wielding a sword against baddies. The music on it really stood out, but I can't remember the name of the game.
I went through primary school never seeing a computer in school. I don't know when this started. I didn't notice until 1981, when I was in 5th grade, that my local library had a few computers where patrons could sign up for time: an Atari 400 and 800, and an Apple II+. They added a 128K Mac with a single floppy drive, and an Imagewriter printer in about 1984. This was eventually upgraded to a 512K Fat Mac.
I didn't see the first computer students could use in school until I got into Jr. high. They had an Apple II+ in the school library. My 7th grade year, one of my math teachers offered an after-school computer club that I signed up for. He had an Apple IIe in his office. A group of about four of us gathered around while he showed us stuff on it. I think we got a little time on it, as well. Next year, the school devoted one of its rooms as a computer lab, filled with Apple IIe's, and offered computer-user (learning to use Bank Street Writer, Apple Writer, VisiCalc, and a simple database), and programming classes (in Basic and Logo).
Even though I liked the Atari more than the Apple II, for its system capabilities, I spent most of my creative programming time on the Apple II, I think mainly because Applesoft Basic had strings, and Atari Basic didn't. It had a buffer construct that Atari called "strings," or what I would later learn used to be called "packed arrays." The main deficit with this was Atari Basic had no concept of string arrays. You had to emulate them using some indexing arithmetic. I didn't learn how to do this conceptually until I was in college.
When I got into high school, they already had a couple computer labs with Apple IIe's. I didn't take any of their computer classes, as they were too rudimentary for me, but the teacher had an after-school computer club that I joined, where we participated in the American Computer Science League (ACSL). My junior or senior year, the school replaced one of the labs with Mac Pluses, which were to be mainly used by the English department for word processing.
Most of this time I programmed in Basic, both on the Atari and Apple II.
I learned Pascal in high school using Apple/UCSD Pascal. Many years later, I learned some exciting history re. UCSD Pascal, since it was an operating system written in Pascal. In UCSD, Pascal was compiled to p-code, and run on a VM. This helped explain why we needed to use a separate floppy disk with it. It had its own standard format that was supposed to be readable on other UCSD Pascal platforms. It was supposed to be "write once run anywhere" (well before Java). It didn't turn out that way.
One correction though, the 65C816 CPU was not built by Western Digital, but by Western Design Center. They still seem to be around :)