Starting them young

My daughter and son started using the computer at a young age.

See how serious my daughter appear at the computer keyboard in the picture below. Poor girl! The chair was too low for her and she had to stretch her neck to look at the monitor screen. She was about 6 years old when the picture was taken.

She had to learn the alphabets, numbers and common command keys on the keyboard, using the 'hunt and peck' typing method with one finger. When the "Mavis Typing Tutor" program was available several years later, she then learnt how to type properly with ten fingers.

The wooden computer cupboard, with a locking panel for the keyboard and disk-drives, was custom-made by a furniture designer friend. I had modified the original design and specifications which was published in an American computer magazine. It would have cost me a bomb to order it from the States and have it shipped to Singapore.

I attended DOS and BASIC computer lessons at the Pasir Panjang Community Center in the evening and class projects and assignments were done on the Apple IIe. I even program some simple arithmatic exercises on addition, subtraction, division and multiplication in DOS for the children. Nothing fanciful....just plain numbers and text with multiple choice questions. If they input the correct answers, the screen will prompt "Good" "Clever" or "Very Good" for the harder questions. If they input the wrong answers, the equation will loop repeatedly with "Try Again", "Try Again" until they input the correct answers. It was not programmed to display "Wrong. You Stupid!" when they did not input the correct answers :)

Original educational software was costly and not easily available. Those were pre-Internet days and shareware program could not be downloaded online like what most kids could do today.

On weekends, I used to bring my children to a small computer shop at Upper Serangoon Shopping Center where shareware software was sold. You will notice the plastic holder with a stack of 5.25" floppy diskettes. Each diskette stores only 360KB of data. Can you believe that?

The standard of the DOS-based games are primitive compared to the virtual games which are available on the market today. The graphic was created in ASCII. No 16-million high-color resolution, no sound, no animation, no interactive mouse-pointing contact, no real-time online Internet gaming with multiple-players..... just the keyboard and a mono-color screen (as those in the days of the Black-and-White TV. You can only play with the computer. Yet it was the best indoor activities the kids could get at that time....and they still found it fun and a novelty!

So it was really very 'yesterday' wasn't it?

In future, when we are connected to the Martians and have "Inter-Terresterial Internet" (ITI), the kind of Internet experience we have today will also become primitive and 'yesterday'....

Computer for the Family

In today's 'new generation lingo', to blog about the Apple IIe as a first computer I use is so 'yesterday'.

I must admit that the earlier versions of the Apple computer systems is history. It is now obsolete and has become technology heritage.

The Apple IIe is the 'Grandfather of the Macintosh'.

According to the Obsolete Technology website, "Early personal computers were nothing like present day computers, they had personality!"

Steve Jobs once explained that the computer he led Woz to create as a result of attending their first computer show: "The real jump of the Apple II was that it was a finished product. It was the first computer that you could buy that wasn't a kit. It was fully assembled and had its own case and its own keyboard, and you could actually sit down and use it. And that was the breakthrough of the Apple II...that it looked like a real product. You didn't have to be a hardware hobbyist with the Apple II. That's what the Apple II was all about."

I am a "techno-curious" kind of guy. Besides learning how to use the Apple IIe, I was also fascinated by the technology behind the invention of the Apple computer. I will blog more on that at a later time.

My First Apple Computer

This is the picture of the complete Apple IIe system from the advertising brochure.

CPU
CPU: MOS Technology/SynerTek 6502
CPU Speed: 1 MHz
FPU: none
Bus Speed: 1 MHz
Data Path: 8 bit
ROM: 16 kB
Onboard RAM: 64 kB
RAM slots: expansion via 1st slot
Maximum RAM: 128 k, with Extended 80 Columns Card
Expansion Slots: 8 proprietary

Video
Max Resolution: 40/80x24 text, 4-bit 40x48, 6 color 140x192, 4-bit 140x192, 1-bit 240x192, 1-bit 560x192

Storage
Floppy Drive: optional

Input/Output
Speaker: mono

Miscellaneous
Codename: Diana
Introduced: January 1983
Terminated: March 1985

Released in January 1983, The Apple ][e was to be one of the most successful Apple computers ever. It was based on the 6502 processor, which could run at 1.02 MHz. It came with 64K of RAM and a 32K ROM which included BASIC, an assembly language interface, and several other hard-coded options. The Apple ][e originally sold for $1,395, and was replaced in 1985 by an updated model. In 1984 the name was changed from Apple ][e to Apple //e, coinciding with the release of the Apple //c.

The first IIe's came with the then standard of DOS 3.3. The computer also came with a green monochrome monitor (shown below)



In March 1985 Apple introduced the Enhanced IIe. It was identical in every aspect to the original IIe, the only difference being four socketed chips had been changed on the motherboard: 6502, CD and EF ROMs, and the Video ROM. The 65C02 CPU added more instruction sets, the new ROM firmware fixed bugs and improved Applesoft BASIC, Monitor and 80 column routines, and finally the new Video ROM added "MouseText" characters first introduced in the IIc. Essentially the Enhancement was to make the IIe more compatible with the Apple II+ and IIc models. The original IIe (including the revision A board) could be easily user upgraded by simply swapping the 4 chips; Apple even sold an Enhancement kit upgrade.

However, I did not modify or upgrade the Apple IIe and had been using it with the original configuration since I received the computer. The only peripheral which I added was a second floppy-disk drive as I would otherwise have to swap the DOS-system diskette and the program diskette which was cumbersome and slow.

Despite the primitive way of using my first computer, it is an experience which personal computer users today will never have to live through, and will never understand how slow is slow to wait for the computer to boot up the operating diskette and run a program.

Its kinda like telling the kids these days what living in a 'kampong' (village) without direct electricity supply to the home was like. No electrical appliances such as refrigerators, microwave ovens, air-conditioners, etc. When homes were lighted with oil or kerosene lamps. What they need nowadays to get electricity to light up the house or power the computer or TV in the home is merely by flicking on the power switch.

Was the "old days" really that good? I wonder.

Every generation is a "transition generation" which evolves with the rapid changes and advances of technology.