I’d love to hear from others on this post.
Just after I graduated from high school, 1981, a friend of a friend had an Apple IIe with the two 5 1/4″ drives stacked up next to it. That was the first Apple I ever used.
Having owned an Apple II since the very end of 1984 I’ve used mine for some household stuff. I’ve kept my checkbook balanced using AppleWorks. I’ve sent letters typed in AppleWorks and printed greeting cards and signs using PrintShop. I’ve spent a lot of hours programming with Applesoft, ZBasic, Kyan Pascal, and assembler (never finished anything of note, but enjoyed learning.). I created a database in AppleWorks to keep track of my books which totaled more than 300.
Games, pretty much go without saying. Played the Ultima games, Inforcom text adventures (Zork), Eamon and of course the Flight Simulator. BBS’s were another place to play, calling them at vast 1200 baud speeds, well vast when compared to the 110 baud terminals I first used in high school (KSR 33). You could play online games and read online postings from other Apple II users.
When I worked for a small publisher and printer, They had an author who typed up an entire law book using his Apple II. He would type in the text and use text coding like you would with HTML, then send us a copy of his disks. We would hook up an Apple //c to an editwriter typesetting system and print out galleys. The editor would make a pass on them and send them back to the author who would make corrections and send it all back. Between publishings of his book the owner would keep the Apple //c in his office and use it to type stuff up. He had the worst handwriting but could type pretty well, so he would type and print stuff out and give it to a clerk to redo on a typewriter.
I used my Apple IIGS to collect information about the Apple II story, utilizing knowledgeable sources on GEnie. I compiled this information on my Apple IIGS, using AppleWorks and an UltraMacros package that helped create “note cards” to organize the information. I then used that to write the Apple II story that was the basis of the current Apple II History today.
I taught myself Applesoft and 6502 assembly language, created some simple extensions using ProCMD. Wrote my one and only shareware program, SmartBoot, to solve a problem associated with the hard drive I bought to use with my Apple IIc. Played a few Infocom games and really enjoyed them.
I recently used my Apple //c and ADTPro to create a diskette for my MacPlus and MacSE. It was kind of hit or miss on reliability, but I did manage to move some files from my PC to my Mac’s and back. I believe the problems I had were related to the interleave being slightly different on the Mac and the Apple II.