Technology: Apple IIc

The first computer that I ever wanted was the Apple IIc - with its snow white case and small monitor. Growing up in Roswell in 1984, the biggest thing to hit Valley View Elementary was the new Apple II compact. It's snow white case and Not only was it as cool as the Apple IIe but it was tiny in comparison. It was a sign of the times that we were able to build computers smaller than ever before. I would purposely stay in the class room at lunch so I could play on the IIc. There was trivia games and simple games like hangman. Some games would run off a 5 ½ floppy drive. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I remember asking my mother if we could buy one. She was all for it until she called the Sears and discovered the price of $1300. To us, that was the cost of a car. It was food for a year. It was a life time of clothes and books. The closest I would come to owning a IIc was the one sitting in my 6th grade classroom. The world of computers at that moment was the coolest thing to my 12 year old eyes. I asked my mother for a subscription to Computer magazine. I would design smaller computers on my lined notebook paper. Sometimes I would move those designs to graph paper and make them look real technical and realistic. Later, I would take a computer programming class in the 7th grade. We worked on the Apple IIe’s -- spent an entire semester logging and writing code to a graphic that would run only 20 seconds. I remember plotting the color and pixel locations on graph paper and translating them into code. My graphic was a Japanese Zero dropping a bomb on the USS Arizona followed by a U.S. Flag honoring the sailors who died aboard. I think I got an B+. I would later envy a friend when his Dad brought home the brand new IBM PC in the late 80s or early 90s. Yet, I still wanted my own Apple IIc. I think I’ve said it before. Even though it was primitive to today’s machines, it still has a magic to it. Perhaps because it was my first true appreciation of a computer and realizing that they are getting more complex and more sophisticated. I have even gone to ebay looking for a functioning IIc. I know they exist. I visited a school back in the late 1990s and the classrooms still had functioning Apple IIe’s and IIc’s. I was amazed. I should have grabbed one and ran away with it. Those computers would later disappear with the new iMacs. Yes, I look at the IIc’s 2 Mhz processor, 1MB RAM and no hard drive, but wish I had one right now. I would sit in the dark classroom and type my answers, watching the green letters and cursor floating across the monitor – flashing bright. The mini laptop I write this entry on is less than half the size of the IIc and has a memory of 1 GB of RAM and 1.66 Ghz processor and a hard drive of 160 GB. Operating at over 1000 times the power of that IIc, the little Acer is strangely not as cool as that Apple IIc was back then. (not to say I don’t love my tiny Acer.)