In 1980 I got acquainted with Apple. In the company we had CP/M machine like the Superbrain (see photograph from the VNU Koerier). But as we were a new media lab, we tried everything; also Apple. To me the Apple was the same as the CP/M machines, but in 1980 the Apple was fascinating to me in as far as it made music. Apple as well as CP/M computers were ready for programming in Basic, text processing in Wordstar and calculating with Visicalc.
But at Christmas 1980, I took the Apple machine home and discovered the music on it. At that time to me a computer was no more than an automated typewriter and an enlarged calculator. The Apple II had a computer version of Switch-on Bach (listen to a fragment of the analogue version), a bestseller of the MOOG synthesizer music. I had bought the vinyl version in 1968 and still have it. It still makes Christmas 1980 stand out.
The Apple IIe in my collection is not the first Apple I worked with. From an acquaintance I got an Apple IIe, a machine produced from 1983 onwards. The keyboard was fixed to the machine. On top of it there is a separate dual floppy disk drive. The monitor is still in one of my moving boxes.Come to think of it, the first confrontation with an Apple did not convert me to the Apple section. Despite the fact that I was impressed by the interface, I never bought an Apple for the company. When I worked for the newspaper company Wegener for one year in 1995, I was issued a portable Apple as the company was into graphics. I enjoyed the use of it, but once the year was over I did not feel unhappy going back to my Windows PC.
Yet I have always been impressed by the inventiveness of the company. Besides the many computers as Apple II, Lisa and Apple Book, it created the personal digital assistant Newton with handwriting recognition software; the iPOD; iTunes, the iPhone. Apple brought and still brings sound and vision to computing.
Blog Posting Number: 831
Tag: digital heritage
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