hello
It all began in 1982
Hello and Welcome to Retro Apple Computing
The year was 1982, when I saw my first personal computer. I was twenty, in Switzerland and the beauty of a machine was a Euro Apple ][ computer. Today, we take computers for ganted. We carry a very powerful computer with us all the time. 1982 was right at the beginning of the Personal Computer explosion, with the Personal Computer being named Time Magazine's Machine of the Year, at the end of the year. I had no clue what I wanted to do for a career, but now I knew what I wanted to do, create stuff on the computer. I returned to the US in the winter of 1982, I wanted to learn how program and use computers, so I bought an Apple ][+.
My passion is in the creative arts and the potential of the personal computer seemed endless. I had four purposes for a computer, graphic art, electronic music, creative writing and programming. These were only partially realized to my creative desires.
It was a time when computing was still in the hands of the hobbyists, but was rapidly changing with business adopting the IBM PC and the clones. Apple Computer courted the non-business users, focusing on the hobbyists and creative computer users. This appealled to my creative asperations.
Then Apple changed the computing world with the Macintosh. It was leaps and bounds ahead of any other computer. I had to have it.
I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area. I joined the San Francisco Apple Core, wrote articles for the Cider Press newsletter, attended the West Coast Computer Faire and MacWorld Expos. I upgraded the heck out of the computers that I owned.
Recently, I was taken back to those early days of personal computing. Most of the stuff I had was gone, recyled, sold or given away. I discovered there were emulators for the 68K and PPC architectures and a large part old software was readily available. My fondness for these early computers were renewed and I started buying these vintage computers on eBay.
There is a fairly large community of people that are still actively doing things with these vintage computers. I've decided to join them to do some old and new things with these fabulous machine. Join me on my rediscovery of retro Apple computers.