I was thinking back to when I first got my Apple //c. I had the whole system set up on a card table in the corner of my one bedroom apartment. At that time I had an Apple //c, a 9″ monochrome monitor, an external 5 1/4″ floppy drive, a scribe printer and a cricket.
For those that don’t know what a cricket was, it was a little box that plugged into one of the serial ports, I think it was the modem port. It contained both a clock and a speech synthesizer. Using the drivers, Prodos would recognize the clock so you could use date and time stamps on files. It would also let you add voices to programs through the speech synthesizer. You could do all this using Applesoft. It was made/sold by Street Electronics and they had a similar system for the Apple //e (I believe it was called the echo).
I know I spent hours at a time writing silly programs to play with the speech. I was always surprised more programs never came out for the Cricket. I very rarely see either come up on ebay even though I keep looking. Mine died many years ago.
— (boring PC stuff to follow)
My CPU fans came in today. I was very excited. Three hours and three tries later and a little less excited. My laptop was up and running. Time for a break and then on to my wife’s laptop. After two hours and three tries on hers, I still don’t have it up and running. Time to call it a day. Both are second hand and we bought them from the same company at the same time. Both machines had been opened by someone else. Mine was missing two screws and hers had a stripped screw, which was a pain to get out.
—
44/45
Leave a Reply