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Watch as Kids React to Apple's First Desktop Computer
Yahoo ^ | May 27, 2014 | Ralphie Aversa

Posted on 05/29/2014 6:45:54 AM PDT by C19fan

A new video that shows kids reacting to old technology is stirring up memories of clunky monitors and large floppy disks. The Apple II, which was released in 1977, was the pioneer of desktop computers. The 8-bit Apple computer featured a green and black screen and a floppy disk drive for 3.5-by-5-inch media.

Relative to today's technology, describing the Apple II as simply obsolete or primitive does not do the situation justice. When the computers first hit the marketplace, Apple sold them for about $1,300. Adjusted for inflation, that translates to $5,000 in today's world, and that amount of money would buy you a device with about 32 gigabytes of RAM, or over 67 million times what the Apple II first offered.

(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...


TOPICS: Computers/Internet; History
KEYWORDS: apple; computers
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To: hoosierham

I remember Apple IIe’s having 5.25 floppies when they first arrived. 3.5s became common later (boy, did we think 1.44MB was just the cat’s meow! LOL).

IBM compatible became standard because of the open architecture, which made competition for hardware monies a way for the business managers to save a few dimes.

JMHO, of course - I am not a tech historian. I’m just an aging engineer in the aerospace computing industry! LOL


21 posted on 05/29/2014 7:32:15 AM PDT by MortMan (Avoid temporary variables and strange women.)
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To: C19fan

My father in law still uses his old Apple IIe. And he still writes programs for it for his business.


22 posted on 05/29/2014 7:42:07 AM PDT by Bloody Sam Roberts (Only Liberals can look at an amendment that says "shall not be infringed" and see blank parchment.)
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To: pgyanke
At the time, I was told that virtualization wouldn’t fly.

I'm not sure why virtualization wouldn't work. It's probably just "we don't want to support it".

I've used Virtual Box for Windows desktops, Windows Servers, Linux (as many as 6 of them at a time on a laptop). It's also nice to be able to snapshot a VM and revert if I need to back out a change.

23 posted on 05/29/2014 7:45:33 AM PDT by justlurking (tagline removed, as demanded by Admin Moderator)
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To: hoosierham
Today’s smartphone has more power than mainframes of the 1970s!

Today's smartphone has more computing power than the computers used on Apollo 11.

24 posted on 05/29/2014 7:45:39 AM PDT by Bloody Sam Roberts (Only Liberals can look at an amendment that says "shall not be infringed" and see blank parchment.)
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To: C19fan

The funniest thing I remember about them was what is termed now as garbage collection.

If you were creating, resizing or deleting arrays you had to be sure to run the garbage collector your you would run out of memory fast. Even re-assigning variable values used up space so you always had to reclaim it.


25 posted on 05/29/2014 7:48:45 AM PDT by ImJustAnotherOkie (zerogottago)
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To: Oldeconomybuyer

I was a IIc addict too. I can still remember most of the machine code for the 65C02 microprocessor and some of the memory map for the IIc. In fact, I still have mine in a storage unit, along with AppleWorks and my ImageWriter dot matrix printer, my Texas Instruments TI2500 four-banger LED calculator, and a “brick” cell phone.

One of these days, maybe I’ll open a technology museum.


26 posted on 05/29/2014 8:00:47 AM PDT by IronJack
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To: Bloody Sam Roberts; hoosierham
Today's smartphone has more computing power than the computers used on Apollo 11.

While Apollo 11's computers were state at the art at the time, they weren't particularly powerful. They were soon eclipsed by the first widely available PCs. What made Apollo's computers unique at the time was the compact size and weight.

If you want to compare to a modern smartphone, it's more appropriate to use an late 90's era supercomputer. The iPhone 5S is competitive with even a top-of-the-line Cray supercomputer from 1999, using a benchmark in common use at the time.

27 posted on 05/29/2014 8:02:13 AM PDT by justlurking (tagline removed, as demanded by Admin Moderator)
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To: Dilbert San Diego
Technology has come a long way since then, hasn’t it?

Who could have conceived of cellular phones with internet access in those days? Who would have conceived of the internet itself?


No. Cell phone is just a radio phone. Radio is an old invention. Phone is an old invention.

Which brings us to the digital networking part. Cell (/radio) phone signal is digital instead of analogue.

The "internet" predated Apple computer.

All these capabilities are very old, they've just had incremental additions made to them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcp/ip
28 posted on 05/29/2014 10:13:10 AM PDT by PieterCasparzen (We have to fix things ourselves)
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To: ImJustAnotherOkie

Most “popular” computer languages use garbage collector algorithms. Without garbage collection, a language REQUIRES the programmer to deallocate every variable they allocate.

Hence the popular languages of today are dumbed-down, as any real programmer will always deallocate what they allocate.

If something is allocated but not deallocated, and the program stop using the thing and thus effectively loses track of it, that is called a “memory leak”. It is memory that the program allocated but can’t use any more. With enough memory “leakage”, a program can be a huge drain on system memory.

In an effort to “help” idiots who were bad progammers, “garbage collection” was introduced as a language feature. The language runtime library will try to detect these situations and then do the deallocation for memory that can no longer be accessed. Once the memory is deallocated, it can be reused, i.e., used to satisfy another allocation. Determining whether memory is no longer in use by a program can be tricky, however, since if the garbage collector deallocates something that IS referenced again the program will produce an error when the deallocated memory is referenced.


29 posted on 05/29/2014 10:26:06 AM PDT by PieterCasparzen (We have to fix things ourselves)
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To: C19fan; Gamecock

Mine just keep saying “Do ... you ... want ... to ... play ... a ... game?”


30 posted on 05/29/2014 11:11:29 AM PDT by Larry Lucido
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To: Gamecock; F15Eagle; Dilbert San Diego

I remember being mesmerized by the first T.I. calculator I ever saw in 1973. Didn’t take me long to figure out that it could type out “boobs” and “hello” upside down.

I couldn’t afford the $99.00 price tag so I got a “Willard Instruments” knockoff. But I went broke because the damn thing had me tipping 50% of my restaurant checks!


31 posted on 05/29/2014 11:16:16 AM PDT by Larry Lucido
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To: C19fan
I still have my Apple //e.

In fact, I still play some of the strategy games on my Galaxy S3 with an Apple //e emulator (Candy Apple).

-PJ

32 posted on 05/29/2014 11:23:04 AM PDT by Political Junkie Too (If you are the Posterity of We the People, then you are a Natural Born Citizen.)
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> The 8-bit Apple computer featured a green and black screen and a floppy disk drive for 3.5-by-5-inch media.

The Apple II didn’t come with a monitor, iow eventually Apple had an Apple-branded monitor it sold, but the Apple II would hook to any TV using an RF modulator. Pretty much all those computers of that era would use a TV, either with an RFM or even had one built in.

The cassette commands (SHLOAD for example) were built into the II and II+, and I think even early IIe ROMs; the Shugart 5.25 disk mechanism (the design for which was ‘borrowed’ by Matsushita) had to have a DOS, and that was written in a few weeks by a subcontractor. At hundreds of dollars, the price seems ridiculous, but remember, not many years later the first 1 GIG hard drives were ten grand.

The first Apple II floppy was a 5.25 floppy; the 3.5 floppy came along mid-1980s.

The Apple II was designed with expansion in mind, which reflects the interests of the engineer (Woz) who designed the thing. That approach was deprecated and eventually dumped in favor of the insular, closed-off Mac. Subsequent attempts at a more expandable designs have repeatedly lost out to the closed-off models.

Thanks C19fan.


33 posted on 05/29/2014 6:47:39 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: hoosierham

I loved the SE30, probably the best classic one-box Mac ever made, despite the small b&w screen.


34 posted on 05/29/2014 6:49:47 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: RideForever

The Amiga had a dedicated graphics chip, which was a huge advantage. Never had the software base to thrive as a product though.


35 posted on 05/29/2014 6:51:13 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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To: MortMan

The 1.44mb 3.5 floppies didn’t become standard on the Apple II, those were 800K. 1.44mb came along on the Mac (which had 800K floppies by then) only after it took over the PC market; some third-party Apple II drives supported the 400k (single sided, original Mac style), 720K, 800K, 1440K, and 1600K capacities.


36 posted on 05/29/2014 6:54:58 PM PDT by SunkenCiv (https://secure.freerepublic.com/donate/)
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