Apple IIe

And I didn't, there was not a singular computer in my classroom until fourth grade.

We had a library that had four Apple IIe's in it.

And so you could go into the library and you had to read, but they would rotate.

So like if you weren't reading, you could like alternate and do the game stuff.

So any who like Apple, basically when we talk about this early piece, it's going to be from me in the library on Apple two B's.

Okay.

I don't know if I've ever, I'm not sure if I've ever worked on an Apple IIe.

There may have been one time, because I remember playing the original Oregon Trail, which I know was an Apple IIe game.

So as the father to a one-year-old, I'm very conscious of all the...

the fact that all the technology we have now and, say, for the next like five years, for him, that's gonna be like the equivalent of what the Apple IIe computer and Atari 2600-

Yeah

... were for me when he's my age.

I grew up on PC and JAWS.

Heck, I even go all the way back to the MS-DOS and Apple IIe days.

But I switched, I guess, for lack of a better term, back to the Mac in 2010 because I got my hands on an iPhone.

It was great.

But then there were computer ports for the Apple II.

which was very late for the Apple IIe.

It's like, you know, 88, 89 is sort of the last hurrah for the Apple IIe.

And it's really impressive.

And I'm going to gush about it because that's the version I mostly grew up with.

But slow works in your advantage in this game.

Because if you play, like, say, the Commodore 64 version, which...

Looks like the Apple IIe version, but does not have any of that slowdown.

In 1983, he announced that he'd been working for the past two weeks until four to five o'clock in the morning trying to learn computerese so that yours truly may talk to that monster in its language and on its own terms.

He soon after launched the first white supremacy bulletin board, Liberty Bell Network, on an Apple IIe personal computer.

His efforts were quickly followed by the launch in 1984 of more bulletin boards, including the Aryan Nations Liberty Net, Aryan Nations stroke Ku Klux Klan Computer Net, and White Aryan Resistance.

Members of these groups also brought their style and their ideas into discussion groups on America Online and CompuServe.

They got $999.

And there's an Apple IIe, new unused.

An Apple IIe Platinum, new unused.

Original factory

packaging.

So California passes this law.

Apple ends up giving a Apple IIe desktop computer to thousands of California schools, and then you see other companies come in, like IBM and RadioShack and whatever, and there's this massive race.

You know, Time Magazine had a headline that tech companies were duking it out in the schoolyard to get into classrooms.

So that's one of the first moments, I think, where we see the tech industry really influencing it.