1980s to 1990s...
Apple had donated IIe s to the local school in a very smart marketing ploy, and that's what my older son was learning on, so we (Wife1 and I) bought two, one for us, and one for the kids and I put my TI 99 4a away in storage.
By then I had learned TI's BASIC, and I was amazed when my son came up with a solution to a programming problem in AppleSoft, Apple's version of BASIC. He had been forging ahead at school with his friends, learning programming, and was actually ahead of me with a lot of techniques.
Hence the amazement.
When I moved out after the divorce, I resurrected the TI 99 and bought a peripheral box for it with plug-in slots for modem, extra memory, 5 1/4" drives, a thermal printer interface and some other stuff.
That thermal printer sucked, since it printed out on a thermal tape only about 4 inches wide, which made word-wrapping a real problem in reading the printouts. Besides being sensitive to any heat source.
Like sunlight.
The peripheral box had its own power supply and sat on the floor of my ham shack (an extra bedroom in my newly-bought "temporary" mobile home) and man, oh, man I burned up the dial-up BBSs with it.
I also generated a ballistics program in BASIC based on Ingall's tables, which worked fine, but accumulated errors based on rounding and single-precision numbers made it slightly inaccurate compared with published tables. Like all my trajectories were off by 1/2" to an inch at 100 yards. But it worked!
I finally recovered one of the Apple 2es from Wife1 and with a new NLQ ("Near Letter Quality") printer I could finally get back to sending out correspondence on real 8 x 11 fanfolded paper.
The "Near Letter Quality" printing was accomplished by backspacing over each line and re-printing with the printing head offest slightly by half the width of each dot.
So each line would be printed twice. Real slow, but the results didn't look bad at all if the ribbon was fresh, and the NLQ function could be switched off for faster printing.
Previously, I wrote correspondence on a wide-carriage IBM Selectric typewriter. ( I sometimes wish I still had that Selectric.)
When I remarried, Wife2 had a Xerox PC (IBM-based) machine which threw me a little because it booted off discs, whereas the Apple had its system built right into ROM on the mother board and was ready-to-go as soon as you turned on the power and the green screen monochrome monitor lit up. I bought the Xerox PC from Wife2 for $100.
But I learned how to handle it, and using Procomm, I transferred all the data on my Apple discs to the IBM, directly from the modem on the Apple to the modem on the IBM with just a regular telephone extension cord.
At 1200 baud! Took a while, but 1200 was the "screamer" of the day, as least as far as my own equipment went.
Later on I donated that machine to the Xerox Museum in New York. It was one of the first, if not the first, machine to use an LCD monitor. They paid the shipping.
I still have the original Apple 2e with CRT monitor and two floppy drives tucked away in storage, but don't know what to do with it. (I also have a IIg --same story.... what do I do with it?)
Terry, 230RN
Pic of that Xerox machine with the LCD monitor. Note that the mouse plugged into the keyboard. The chart stuck onto the "box" on the left side was references for WordPerfect commands. Which I began to call WordSortaOK. :)
