Entry
One Hundred Forty-Six.
Thursday, 2011.10.06, 2:20 PM CST.
A
big "Thank you" to Steve Jobs.
Current Mood: Not too shabby, though
I've got a lot to get done.
Current Scent: Sentiment by Escada.
Back
in 1985, when I was only 14 years old, my parents bought me my second
computer - an Apple IIe (pronounced two-E), with a black-and-white monitor
(which we quickly upgraded to a colour one) and a dot matrix printer.
It was a severe upgrade from the TRS-80 Colour Computer that they'd
bought back in 1983, and I was thrilled.
It
was the first computer I ever had which had a disk drive, which made
the loading and saving of files much less time-consuming than the cassette
tape drive (!) I'd used on my old CoCo.
On
the Apple IIe, I played some of the most advanced games at the time
(as well as some of the most violent, like the legendary axe fighting
game "The Bilestoad" and the quite graphic "Crypt of
Medea"), and I did a lot of writing and early graphic design.
I even saw my first "adult-oriented" computer image on the
IIe- a crude painting of a pair of topless brunette "twins"
which somehow got included onto a floppy disk of shareware.
The
Apple IIe changed my life in numerous ways. In fact (as I've detailed
in Journal Entry 144
as well as numerous other places on this site), it was the work that
I was able to do on that very machine for my friend and mentor Dave
French that eventually led to my involvement in the world of DJing.
That
Apple IIe was what I used at home until I upgraded to my first PC clone
in 1993. I quickly moved away from using the IIe altogether due
to its obsolescence, but I still have it (as well as a lot of software
for it) around, and someday I might just plug it back in and see if
it still works.
Without
Steve Jobs, there wouldn't have been Apple, and without Apple, there
wouldn't have been my Apple IIe. I don't want to think about how
much different my life may have turned out without that beautiful machine.
So,
thanks very much for that.
Steve
Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple, passed away yesterday at the
age of 56. May he rest in peace.
Badger
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