True. At lease the case was.

The Apple I, circa 1976, was made and designed by Steve Wozniak in Palo Alto, California. Only 200 were made, and sold for US$600 fully assembled as a circuit board, but to get it to work you needed to purchase a case, power supply, keyboard and display. Its CPU was a MOS 6502 running at 1kHz. It came standard with 4kb memory. It was discontinued a year later when the Apple ][ came out.

Today, maybe 30 to 50 units still exist. At an auction in 1999, one sold for US$50,000.

Humble beginnings, and the start of something good.

My love affair with Macs began with a dalliance in the early 80s with an Apple ][ Plus that look exactly like this. Well, kinda; only I had just one drive, not two. The other chunky metal floppy drive came much later. Actually, come to think of it, even the first drive came late too; I started with a little cassette recorder to load up apps and games, and to save files. On cassettes, I kid you not. I used to listen to the stored programs, and they sounded exactly like modems do when they try to connect to some slow-ass provider. I remember my favorite program was a game called Space Invaders, a 20k app which took fifteen minutes to load up and start.

The Apple ][ Plus wasn’t a Mac, no. The Mac came later in my life. But this is the computer that started me on Apple, and onto the Mac. This is how it all began.

Later I’d get a Z80 card and a 64k memory expansion card so I could run CP/M, which is a command-line operating system that wasn’t made by Apple (strictly speaking, I wasn’t using Apple software, just the hardware - later I’d live and breathe Appleworks, but in the early days it was Wordstar and dBase and VisiCalc). CP/M was the ancestor of MS-DOS, and CP/M itself grew up to become DR-DOS, if I’m not mistaken. I’d later graduate into a Apple //e, and then an Apple //e-Enhanced, (which was silly when you come to think about it - the e in //e stood for “enhanced” already) - and a color composite monitor and more colorful games like Centipede and Karateka, and then, finally, a Macintosh.

My //e still lives and breathes, by the way, a 25-year-old geezer. I love that thing.

Seemed appropriate to talk about my roots, at this juncture. Great to put things in perspective; there are so many proud, chest-thumping newbie Mac fanboys whose earliest memories start with the Aluminum Powerbooks. Man, you don’t even know the half of it, you young whippersnappers. *grumble* Let’s just say, if you’ve never wrestled with system extensions to get your Mac running, be careful in flaunting your Mac pedigree.

More reminiscing as my memory comes slowly crawling back.