i just finished reading steve wozniak’s biography, iwoz. while reading, i started remembering one of my first “apple is a really cool company” moments.
my family very early on realized that i had a bit of a talent with computers. my tandy trs-80 (their later color version) just wasn’t cutting it anymore, so my family bought me my first apple.. the apple IIgs, the g and s representing the enhanced graphics and sound capabilities. unlike the previous apple II’s, the gs had a mouse and a gui.
anyway, my family managed to find an entire IIgs outfit with a color imagewriter printer, monitor, floppies, everything. it was used, but in mint condition. all of the manuals were included, which i read for some reason.
i was surprised to find that the previous owner had never sent in the registration cards. i filled them out and sent them in, along with a letter stating that even though i was the computer’s second owner, i hoped the registration information proved useful to them.
several weeks later, i received a personal letter from an apple employee thanking me for the registration even as a second owner. they also sent me an apple t-shirt and an apple hat. i was impressed that someone had taken the time to write a personal letter thanking me.
nowadays i’m lucky if i get an apple sticker in my frequent apple product purchases. ah well, i still love ’em.
i also started my first bbs on the iigs, although i eventually replaced it with a pc. there was a very limited supply of apple bbs software. ah, and i ran up hundreds of dollars of phone bills. compuserve didn’t have a local number.
i’m itching for some oregon trail now.
If you can scare up a Windows box:
http://www.virtualapple.org/oregontraildisk.html
The IIgs was my second computer too! Don’t get me wrong, I *adored* my commodore 64, but it was the IIgs upon which I spent countless hours entering the basic code from the back of 3-2-1 contact magazines, just to make a dot go across the screen. WOOH!
Fond memories of technologies past. Tell me y’all played Winter / Summer Games too. Those were *awesome*
I feel deprived, my first was an //e…I never had a IIgs. Then I built my first XT and that was my last Apple.
i loved summer/winter games. i remember the generic graphics for throwing the shot put made your character look like they had atrophied arms. I owned a franklin ace apple clone with duel disk drives for more convenient pirating. i gotta give a shout out to my first computer, the commodore vic-20 and that fateful day i accidently learned that pressing “commodore-shift” would prompt you to press play on the tape. playing alien panic was well worth the 7-8 minute load time.
wow – i completely forgot about winter games! i liked me some word/number muchers too.
oh, and risk. can’t forget risk.
there’s a complete //gs setup like i used to have (imagewriter and all) that was at $250 last i checked. i bet it goes up towards $400. damn…
I still have my //C in storage…remember the //C anybody?
ahh yes, the //c. semi-portable and all.
ok so om sure im opening a can of your mom jokes…but my mom has probbly at least 10 old school apples in her classroom from the early macs to the IIGS they all work and she has drawers of 5.25 floppies of old games and shit on. She has them all setup for her students to play games on….(my mom teaches special ed at port clinton middle school for those of you questioning the rational)