Apple II Forever - Apple IIc Apple II-GS 1988 Retro Computer Chronicles Video

I thought I would put this up, because I remember using these things when I was in grade school. It is amazing how much computers have changed since then. The video is basically a review of the Apple IIC, and IIGS, of the 1980's. I had both an Apple IIE and an Apple IIGS.

I still love the retro computers, the build quality of today's computers do not even come close. I would like to know if you had any of these computers and what you liked about them ?

I can not get the video to play for some reason here is the Youtube Link

Let's give this a try...



There we go.

Great video, OP, it's kinda creepy.

reply to post by Bybyots


Thank you dont know what I did wrong here.

reply to post by desertguy


My family used to have a apple iic. Back in the day, it was an amazing computer! We used to have one with the colour display and external floppy drive too.

Used to play games like law of the west and spy hunter etc. Great times. I also used to love the startup sound of the floppy drive engaging. Haha nerd time

reply to post by desertguy


I have a couple old Macs and commodores in my basement most of which were given to me by the original owner along with a mega ton of software, I grew up using apple in grade school back in the 80s-90s and when in high school after the millenium my school still used macs. I have fond memories of them, at home I had an NEC that barely even ran carmeggedon and other games lol the hell with homework on the home pc lol

well...living in the permian basin after the oil crash wasn't quite as technological. The area is still playing "catch up" with basic infrastructure (our internet speeds are under half the average you find on the East Coast).

That said, our schools had the Apple II, Apple IIe, TRS-80 (a couple....i hated trs dos (trash dos), and 1 tandy where we learned our MS-Dos skills.

I didn't like the Apple machines. They were mostly used as reward/game systems, and to teach the LOGO programming language to the younger kids. Kids who were a little older got to use the TRS-80's to learn BASIC and Pascal programming languages (i was on a three man team that won a large grant and first place in a state Pascal programming contest....we bought a new computer lab for the junior high).

At friends houses we messed around with the commodore 64. I had a friend with a custom built PC that we would practice our coding for various contests we entered through our schools. Oh, and we played tons of games like Kings Quest, Police Quest, and D & D.

reply to post by desertguy


Thanks for your input, I found that youtube has a ton of old pc videos I was watching them for a few hours the other day. What great memories.

We had Apple II's back in the 80s at my grade school. I remember playing Oregon Trail and some kind of rocket-building game.

My family owned the Mac Classic, Mac SE, LC II, and Quadra 650 over the years... Basically any time they upgraded computers at my Dad's work, they let him bring one home. By the time I left the house around 2001 they'd moved up the a PowerMac G4 "Sawtooth". I thought it was so awesome because it had an internal firewire port.

MystikMushroom
We had Apple II's back in the 80s at my grade school. I remember playing Oregon Trail and some kind of rocket-building game.

My family owned the Mac Classic, Mac SE, LC II, and Quadra 650 over the years... Basically any time they upgraded computers at my Dad's work, they let him bring one home. By the time I left the house around 2001 they'd moved up the a PowerMac G4 "Sawtooth". I thought it was so awesome because it had an internal firewire port.

edit on 22-11-2013 by MystikMushroom because: (no reason given)

The Oregon trail was my favorite game to play when I was in Grade School. I remember my first real PC was a Syslink System that had an Intel CPU that ran at 33Mhz and had 2MB of ram. It took about 10 minuts to boot up and was slower then crap, I wanted to go back to using Apple II.

bigfatfurrytexan
well...living in the permian basin after the oil crash wasn't quite as technological. The area is still playing "catch up" with basic infrastructure (our internet speeds are under half the average you find on the East Coast).

That said, our schools had the Apple II, Apple IIe, TRS-80 (a couple....i hated trs dos (trash dos), and 1 tandy where we learned our MS-Dos skills.

I didn't like the Apple machines. They were mostly used as reward/game systems, and to teach the LOGO programming language to the younger kids. Kids who were a little older got to use the TRS-80's to learn BASIC and Pascal programming languages (i was on a three man team that won a large grant and first place in a state Pascal programming contest....we bought a new computer lab for the junior high).

At friends houses we messed around with the commodore 64. I had a friend with a custom built PC that we would practice our coding for various contests we entered through our schools. Oh, and we played tons of games like Kings Quest, Police Quest, and D & D.

I remember the good old BASIC programming, I used to write follow your own adventure text based games. I wrote other programs, it was very fun to learn.

reply to post by desertguy


The benefit for me as i have grown older: my background in BASIC has allowed me to be able to understand what is happening in scripting in general. As I learned MS Excel, i discovered I could very easily apply what I knew into Visual Basic macros. Some people think I am a wizard. Its more that I just learned some of this stuff back in the late 80's.

reply to post by bigfatfurrytexan


BASIC always made perfect sense to me. Very logical... gosub here gosub there... if-then-else. However, due to my extreme impatience at the time, I always wrote my pseudo-code after I completed my programs. The prof knew as much, but gave me an "A" anyways because I was one of the few students who showed any interest whatsoever in his class.

bigfatfurrytexan
reply to post by desertguy

 

The benefit for me as i have grown older: my background in BASIC has allowed me to be able to understand what is happening in scripting in general. As I learned MS Excel, i discovered I could very easily apply what I knew into Visual Basic macros. Some people think I am a wizard. Its more that I just learned some of this stuff back in the late 80's.

Thats cool you are still using it today, I kind of gave up on it after I got my first real PC and didnt go much further with it.

My old IIe, c64, vic20 and Atari 800XL are still alive (I think) up in my parents attic. Might dig them out one day......might be an Acorn Archimedes up there to with the Atari ST and Amiga.

Ahh, the great days of computing

10 print "dad smells"
20 goto 10
run

tee-hee

reply to post by desertguy


Hey I remember the days when the only places in the country that owned an Apple machine were schools. Which always baffled me, since everyone else used PCs it would make more sense for schools to use PCs so that they could teach them to the children, but whatever.

I'd take a computer these days over ANY computer from back then and not just because the technology is better. Being able to swap parts easily, not all parts being screwed into the computer and can just pop them out, plug and play and more, and towers are much better than the stupid boxes that we used to rest our monitors on. Not to mention, I'm glad they've done away from the white computer cases that ALWAYS ended up completely stained some slightly brown color over time (and it looked extremely goofy if you replaced something like a cd-rom drive).

woogleuk
My old IIe, c64, vic20 and Atari 800XL are still alive (I think) up in my parents attic. Might dig them out one day......might be an Acorn Archimedes up there to with the Atari ST and Amiga.

Ahh, the great days of computing

10 print "dad smells"
20 goto 10
run

tee-hee

edit on 22/11/13 by woogleuk because: (no reason given)

Cool, would you be interested in selling I would love to own a IIe.

desertguy

bigfatfurrytexan
reply to post by desertguy

 

The benefit for me as i have grown older: my background in BASIC has allowed me to be able to understand what is happening in scripting in general. As I learned MS Excel, i discovered I could very easily apply what I knew into Visual Basic macros. Some people think I am a wizard. Its more that I just learned some of this stuff back in the late 80's.

Thats cool you are still using it today, I kind of gave up on it after I got my first real PC and didnt go much further with it.

Don't let the "BASIC" in "Visual Basic" fool you. It turns a good excel user into a God excel user. It allows you to turn a database into a number crunching, algorithm fueled program with amazing potential.

I had a guy work for me once that used MS Visual Basic to create the program that ran the police microwave radio system in several parts of Denver. When I saw what he could do with VB, i was amazed. It is not going to give you the same robust capabilities of C languages....but if you know BASIC and can do some Google Fu, you can do VB macro scripts and completely differentiate yourself from others who are limited to only in cell formulas.

Zarniwoop
reply to post by bigfatfurrytexan

 

BASIC always made perfect sense to me. Very logical... gosub here gosub there... if-then-else. However, due to my extreme impatience at the time, I always wrote my pseudo-code after I completed my programs. The prof knew as much, but gave me an "A" anyways because I was one of the few students who showed any interest whatsoever in his class.

In my school there were 3 of us that took an interest. The school leveraged that interest to the fullest degree, putting us in all manner of contests. The computer lab purchased with our winnings was "state of the art" at the time, surpassing the quality of the lab at the university I attended.

In college I became so distracted with beer and broads that I don't really recall doing classwork or homework. Other than a Lotus 123 class I took and failed. LOL....if I would have only known what my future held in store for me, I may have paid more attention back then.

reply to post by desertguy


Afraid not, sorry....I'll ratch them all out and take a pic.....hopefully all switched on and working, would be a grand sight to see!

The Apple2C was cheap enough to allow engineers to build dedicated controllers out of the boards. The 6502 micro-processor was relatively easy to program but the problem was memory and data storage. We did some real tricks by overlaying code and interfaced a TI Bubble memory to the bus (1gbit). It had to access data in a serial loop, but was the largest piece of dedicated storage you could get back then.

I build a least cost router from one, interfaced to a Rolm PBX after the Bell divestiture. It was entirely done in 6502 assembler, and was perhaps the greatest job satisfaction I ever had in my career. Long Live Apple.