Saturday

I visited with an old friend today.  He used to live with two other guys in a three bedroom apartment on the other side of town from me.

One of the friends owned an Apple IIe with two disk II drives and a monochrome monitor, which he kept set up on the dining room table and my friend was frequently playing Ultima on it when I was over.

That was the first Apple II that I had any experience with.  It was also the first computer with actual graphics and sound that I’d ever come across.  Before that the only sound the computer generated other than operating noise was the bell.  Graphics was limited to Ascii art, some of which was  surprisingly good considering the medium.

Its hard to explain the changes in computer experiences to someone whose viewpoint is from the present.  I learned about computers on a time-shared mini-computer with a mix of paper terminals and video display terminals.  The first games I played were written in basic, most of which we could list and modify as we played them.  Later they added Crowther’s Adventure and Dungeo.  Response time could be a second or two after entering a command, depending on how many other people were working on the computer at that time.

Enter the personal computer, in this case a small Apple IIe that only one person at a time was using with practically instant response time.  Add to that graphics and sound, even limited as they were and it provides quite a culture shock.

The closest I can come in comparison is going from the desktop computer to the smart phones and even that does not do it justice.

The computer I started on had 256K of memory, an 88MB hard drive and a second private 88MB hard drive.  Most people were limited to around 100 blocks of disk space.  The cabinet for the computer was about 6 feet high and 15 feet wide and each hard drive was the size of a washing machine.  Cost was in excess of $250,000.

The Apple IIe had 128K and either one or two 140K drives and fit on your desktop.  Response time seemed about the same and cost was less than $3000.  All this with graphics and sound.

For comparison I looked up a cheap laptop on the internet.  I comes with 2GB ram and 320GB hard drive and cost under $250 (My wife’s six year old laptop has 3GB and 320GB).  To equal that 320GB hard drive on the laptop, the computer I learned on, would require 3,724 washing machine sized hard drives (Picture the biggest laudromat you have ever seen).

Imagine what it will be like in the next 30 years.

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