Since 1979

After a year of visiting Hamburg High School's computer lab, I brought home an Apple II,

First the lab. Not exactly what you would expect today with rows of computers facing front and wired into a network. With a smart board or a projector or large monitors so that the students can follow the instructor as she demonstrates how to write a macro.

None of that, it was maybe six Apples on the edges of what may have once been a large closet or storage room. There were usually two or three geeks to a computer. The great thing is that the teachers were self appointed and interested in this new phenomenon called a personal computer. The IBM or what we now know as a PC (can you say Windows?) was a year or two away. So, since I visited the school in my role as a youth worker, I also stopped in to see the lab where Bob, a teacher and church member hung out with the students after school hours.

Bob beat me to buying one, but I was not far behind. I brought it home so that I could use it for my dissertation, kind of a glorified word processor, at least that was the excuse. Really I was fascinated by this new technology.

Sure, I wrote my dissertation on software called Magic Window. At first it only had 40 columns, something like half a page, then you had to toggle to the other half. But, my Masters thesis had six drafts, all typed on a Smith Corona (I hope that is in Wikipedia for those who have no idea), all typed by my wife. The last time she touched the Smith Corona was probably when she typed the dissertation proposal on it. I took over from there using the Apple. My dissertation had ten drafts. Of course, the spell checker was pretty bad. It did not know how to spell sex. Don't ask me why I used that as the test, but I hired a proof reader after I found that out.

But the Apple II was more than a word processor. I will never forget when my son and I opened the case and put a memory card in. We now had one meg of memory! We thought we had died and gone to heaven. You no longer had to swap disks (that's another post, those big disks) when you were using AppleWorks. That had become our word processor by that time.

We had fun with that computer playing games like Choplifter (that is in Wikipedia). Not exactly graphics as we now know them, kind of dotted lines moving across the screen. I played with BASIC; wrote a grading program that I used for several semesters in my teaching.

My son got into it a bit more. I had to kick my nine year old off the computer around ten at night so I could work on my teaching or on my dissertation. It gave him a foundation that launched a career (http://www.heynorton.org/).

Why these musings today? We got some new computers at work. My boss and I desperately needed upgrades and I spent most of the day working on the change over. I gave him frequent blow by blow reports and he said, "You really enjoy this stuff don't you?"

I do.