Can I sell you some old 4 track tapes that I have?

I knew I was getting older when I'd see a mother and daughter walking down the sidewalk, and I was looking at the mother.

I remember the Apple I...
The Byte Shop in Palo Alto had an Apple I on display, once upon a time. It had a keyboard and monitor hooked up... and an audio-cassette interface.
If memory serves, it had just a monitor in ROM; to get BASIC, one had to load the interpreter from casette. Slowly.
I have a vague notion that the BASIC-on-cassette was a Microsoft product.
Once the BASIC interpreter had been loaded from cassette, once could proceed to write programs. There was a gotcha, though: about half the alphabet was, undocumentedly and apparently randomly, not available for variable names. Use "X" (or maybe it was "I", or maybe it was either) as a variable, and the interpreter would get corrupted, and it was load-off-cassette time again....

At high school, we had a row of Model 33s wired to an HP3000 time-share system (which also had intriguingly buggy software). No official instruction; none of the teachers had a clue how the computer worked, so we had to learn programming on the street corner.

Ah, those were the days!

Oh, you're gettiing me all nostalgic. My first computer was a //c with 128k and a 1MHz 65C02 processor. Like you, I starved and saved and didn't quite get the first Mac, but rather the "fat" Mac (512k... no one will ever need that much RAM). I've been with Apple ever since... also through the dark years.
Yes, I also had an 8-track. Even had one in my '64 Pontiac Tempest (aftermarket, of course).

...and I remember sitting in the "T.V. Room" at a motel in Santa Maria, California one Saturday night, watching the Art Linkletter Show. They had an honest-to-God Univac doing singles matching or something like that (this was about 1960). It was, upon reflection, probably just a card sorter.

A book from one of my favorite educational book clubs made the point that a really useful computer would have to be the size of the Empire State building, and need as much water as went over Niagra Falls to cool it. (Tubes give off heat, ya know.)

And, Kerry, I'm starting to notice that Grandma doesn't look too bad....

My dad worked for IBM and in 1967 or so he came home one Friday driving the "Showmobile', a GM motorhome tricked out to be an IBM showroom on wheels that they could drive up to a building and bring everyone down to sell them shit.Rather that leave it in downtown Milwaukee for the weekend,he was enlisted to park it in our driveway in the burbs.There was a rear projection screen in it that had looped movie cassettes of commercials they produced,the "cassettes" were like 12" square and you would pop them in and sit on a couch and see the pitch.Bit the most amazing thing to us was the phone on the dashboard,and actual rotary phone that had a radio hook up of some sort to call HQ and such.It was so cool.learned how to run a Selectric that weekend,something I think Dan Rather wishes he did.

So, do you have any predictions about the changes we'll see over the next 25 years or so?

Frank,

I think you can get kids to give you that man-from-Mars look today with just ONE observation:

When I was a kid, televisions didn't have remotes.

It's a sobering thought -- how many people today cannot imagine GETTING UP to change channels.

(Oh, and my second computer was a used Apple ][ Plus, upgraded by hand from an original Apple ][. 280x192 resolution, except on color monitors. I had 64K of RAM, too... on four rows of 2K memory chips. I still have fond memories of massive machine-language programs I wrote, which I struggled to keep under 4K in size. Them were the days...)

respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline

Eric, the original BASIC (*caps*, you Philistines!) was "Integer BASIC", and it was not produced by M$. Later on, there was a floating-point basic which was a melding of Integer BASIC with the then-fairly standardized M$ BASIC called "Applesoft BASIC". I am pretty sure that did not exist until the floppy days, although it would not amaze me to find out that there were computers which were back-modified.

The BASICs in question ran out of the monitor ROMs which were up in the top quarter of the 6502 address space.

The Integer BASIC's life was substantially extended, however, for its utility as a hacking tool -- the RESET key on the Applesoft BASIC jumped to an alterable point down in low RAM, whereas in IntBASIC, it jumped up into the internal debugging monitor in ROM.

One of the many, many cracking tools for the Apple ][ was an add-in card which allowed you to flip-select a switch which changed (on the fly) the A$ and Integer BASICs, allowing you to boot a program with the A$ BASIC in place (some software would NOT boot with Integer in place) flip a switch, hit the reset button, and, "Voila!" you were in the Integer debugging monitor with full access to memory (one of the tools of the DM was a fully functioning disassembler)

Many a copy-protected program was cracked using this technique or a variation thereof.

> (512k... no one will ever need that much RAM)

LOL. I remember in the 286 days when there was a speech from ol' Bozo Bill hisself that claimed that no computer would ever need more than 16 megs of RAM.

Considering that his loverly widdle OS now requires more than 16x that to just run more than one program, you sort of question his perception of computers.

P.S., those of you interested in how Apple *really* screwed the pooch, WIRED did an excellent article some years back:
They Coulda Been a Contender
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.11/es_apple.html?topic=&topic_set=

We can, indeed, chalk it all up to Gallic Arrogance as to why we're not all using Macs by now. Just one more reason to hate the French. They stuck us with Jean-Louis-Gassee.