Mike Schaeffer's Blog

A little over a year ago, I wrote about some formative experiences I had with computers early in my life. That article focused on the Timex Sinclair 1000, but sitting off in the wings are two other computers - the Commodore 64 and the Apple II. A few weeks ago, there was some dialog between John Gruber, Drew Saur, and Jason Snell that's brought those two machines back to mind. It's all very worth reading if you have any interest in the early history of personal computing.

It's hard for me to admit that it's early history, but these machines are five years further in the past to us today than the ENIAC would've been to somebody opening up a brand new Apple II. Time flies.

Like you might expect, there are partisans for each machine. Drew Saur likes the Commodore and the other two prefer the Apple machines. Having spent some time using and thinking about both, I have my preferences also, but I've also come to a different conclusion. While the Apple and the Commodore competed in a similar place in the early 1980's market, it's equally true that they are products of different times, different design philsophies, and of companies with different goals. For me, it's hard to reduce it to a single "favorite" machine, and it's hard to boil it down to specifications and case design. There's more to the story.

As a child of the 80's, I had a front row seat to the beginning of what was then called personal computing. My elementary school got its first Apple around the time I entered kindergarten. That was also the time personal computers were starting to make inroads into offices (largely thanks to VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3). By modern standards these machines weren't very good. At the time they were transformative. They brought computing to places it hadn't been before, and gave access to entirely new sets of people. For someone with an early adopter's mindset, it an optimistic and exploratory time. It's for this reason (and the fact it was my childhood) that I like looking back on these old machines. That's something I hope to do here in an informal series of posts. If there happen to be a few lessons for modern computing along the way, so much the better.

If you're reading this, you're probably familar with retrocomputing. It's easy to go to eBay, buy some used equipment, and play around with a period machine from the early 80's. Emulators make it even easier. As much as I appreciate the movement, it doesn't quite provide the full experience of the time. To put it in perspective, an Apple //e was a $4,000 purchase in today's money. This is before adding disk drives, software, or a monitor. After bringing it home, and turning it on, all you had was a black screen and a blinking prompt from Applesoft basic. If you needed help, you were limited to the manual, a few books and magazines at the local bookstore, and whoever else you happened to know. The costs were high, the utility wasn't obvious, and there wasn't a huge network of people to fall back on for help. It was a different time in a way retrocomputing doesn't quite capture.

My goal here is to talk about my own experiences in that time. What it was like to grow up with these machines, both in school and at home. It's one person's perspective (from a position of privlidge) but hopefully it'll capture a little of the spirit of the day.