Apple will be celebrating its 50th birthday in April. Fifty years since the company was formed to sell simple computer kits designed by Steve Wozniak to local computer hobbyists in and around Palo Alto.
Meda and I jumped on the Apple bandwagon not long after the introduction of the Apple II in 1977, probably late that same year.
I knew nothing about computers. When we were in college, “computer” meant the room of electronic equipment in the administration building where an anointed few had access. The rest of us used fancy addling machines. Even handheld calculators were still in the future.
But I had been reading that these new “personal” computers would be fundamental “game changers” and wanted to learn more. I finally convinced Meda that we should just buy one and see what it could do, and we did.
That was the year we turned 30, and over the next nearly 50 years we have remained firmly in the Apple camp.
The original Apple II introduced what became the familiar beige case with an apple in rainbow colors. It had very limited memory, no disk storage and no built in software. The few programs that were available for purchase came on standard audio tape cassettes. You would plug your cassette player into a port on the computer and manually download each program. I remember the thrill of playing “Little Brick Out” at the Apple II’s slow speed after loading it from a cassette. It was like magic!
I can date our first Apple purchase by the use of cassette tapes. A year late, in mid-1978, Apple introduced a floppy disk drive priced at $600. It stored what was then a dramatic amount of data–113K, that is, kilobytes. It seemed to open up whole new worlds.
The following year, Apple introduced the Apple II+. We quickly got on that bandwagon via a Bell & Howell black Apple II+ manufactured under license for the education market. One day we walked into a small Honolulu computer hobbyist store and saw a stack of black Apples, and took one home.
That same year, 1979, saw the introduction of Apple Writer and VisiCalc, which turned the hobbyist-oriented Apple II into something that could do real work!
A few years later, Apple added the Apple IIe, with more memory and other features.
By that time, we had yielded to the “need” for his and her Apples at home, along with Apple’s for our office desktops as well.
Apple added Macintosh in 1984, but we didn’t invest in the new computer until the Macintosh Plus was introduced two years later. Unfortunately, the mists of time have erased any memory of which exact models followed as the first Mac Plus was replaced with newer iterations.
We invested thousands of dollars in new Macs over the years, more than I can recall at this point. Each made us more productive, or perhaps simply more efficient.
But it’s fair to say that our affair with Apple changed our lives for the better.
So I’ll simply say, Happy Anniversary, Apple!