I remember begging him for three things, all of which he refused. A color monitor ("bah, I already spent extra for the amber one"), a mouse which was rumored to make gaming a lot easier ("Who cares? I don't need it for my VisiCalc spreadsheets") and a winchester drive a.k.a. a 10 MB hard drive ("Are you kidding? What would we ever do with 10MB of storage! We could never fill that much! That would be a huge waste of money!")
As a result of little storage, no color graphics, and no mouse I mostly just played text based adventure games like Zork.
Heh... my first was in 1984, a IIe, with plain 80 column card (the extended 80 had an additional, whopping 64K), a single Disk ][ and controller card, and a Monitor ][ green screen. Hard drives were nearly a thousand bucks back then, so some people opted for no hard drive, or for using the computers at schools if they were hooked to a 5 meg networked Corvus system (and they had a lot of stuff to store).
Quark Engineering, which was later better known as a Mac software company (Quark Express was a publishing package, loved that on the SE/30) built a 10 meg DOS 3.3 hard drive, big, cube, which it cleared out when it dropped its Apple II lines. They also sold a 65802 pin-compatible CPU upgrade kit. The real hard drive revolution for the Apple II was the Sider, a 10 meg which retailed for $695, then 20 meg, which It think sold for the same price but a couple of years on.
This sounds hilarious now -- but it hasn't been that many years before the first terabyte drives arrived, and those retailed for around $500, but they're pretty much given away with a tank of gas now. I remember the ad for the first mass-market 1 gig driives -- ten grand. "Gosh, you could run an entire company on a gig drive," my friend and I mused. The same friend and I were in a Best Buy not that many years ago, and saw what passed fthen or the largest flat screen, also ten grand. One that size is probably $700 now.
That "vintage 1978" Apple II system that was a prop on "The Big Bang Theory" clearly wasn't from 1978, of course, you probably noticed that too. It was obviously from mid-1980s. :^)
“...just played text based adventure games like Zork...”
LOVED Zork. My wife and I would play that game every evening after we got off work. We got all but 3 points, I think, from Zork I. Never could get the thing (key?) out of that egg without breaking it, and losing the egg points.
“10 MB hard drive (”Are you kidding? What would we ever do with 10MB of storage! We could never fill that much! That would be a huge waste of money!”)”
I remember a similar conversation with a work mate about a 20 meg HD on an IBM around 87 or ‘88.
“It’ll take you 30 years to use all that space!”