Apple II Turns 30, and I Get Misty-Eyed

You may have noticed that Apple's line of MacBook Pro laptops got some significant upgrades today, including power-saving LED displays, the latest crop of Santa Rosa processors from Intel, and a pumped-up NVidia GeForce graphics card—very nice. But today marks an even more important occasion: the 30th birthday of the computer that started it all. Raise your glass to the Apple II.

My dad got us an Apple II+ with 48K of RAM—that's "k", people—back in 1979, for about $2,600. We didn't have the Disk II floppy drive at first (that would come later), so we had to load programs onto the II using an old cassette deck—a painstaking, trial-and-error process of playing the tape over and over while tweaking the volume control. The II came with a few games: a low-res version of Breakout; Apple Trek, a text-only, turn-based (and still fun) take on "Star Trek"; and "Space War," a crude "Star Wars"-type shooter that you controlled with a pair of flimsy gaming paddles (which I managed to break within a matter of weeks).

We did finally get the classic Disk II drive, plus some classic software to go along with it: VisiCalc (the original spreadsheet program, which seemed incredibly pointless to me at the time), Adventure (one of the first adventure games, all-text of course), Zork, Bloody Murder ("Oh! You got me!"), and a pair of ground-breaking role-playing games, Ultima and Wizardry. (Check out this exhaustive list of the most popular software for the Apple II.) We also got a dot-matrix printer for my book reports, but it was years before we got an actual color monitor—instead, we settled for a green monochrome screen. Nice.

Ready to wallow in a little more nostalgia? Check out Retro Thing's thoughtful appreciation of the Apple II, and take a gander of the Apple's big competitor back in those days: Tandy's TRS-80, which me and my little buddies oh-so-cleverly called the "Trash 80."

Related:
Apple II Turns 30 Years Old [Retro Thing, via the Unofficial Apple Weblog]