The Old Apple
The Old Apple
We are having an old fashioned winter. So I have been spending most of my spare time in the lab where it is nice and warm. My wife wanted the old Apple out of the house as it had been taking up storage space for years. Looking at it again brought back fond memories. I just had to set it up again to see if it would still run. I couldn’t bear to pack it up and hide it away. It was an amazing machine in it’s day.
The year we acquired it, my son Jeremy was in Jr High and was very interested in computers. We had an Apple II my sister had sold me. He put a lot of hours in on that old machine. The Principle of his school took me aside and told me I really needed to buy a new Apple GS for Jeremy. He said it would be an investment in Jeremy’s future.
My son had been talking about how great a machine the GS was, as he had limited access to one in school. I checked on price and was told a little better than two grand. That was a lot of money for the family at that time. Farming hadn’t been going well, I was working part time and had started a small retailing business.
I told Jeremy that if gross receipts exceeded X amount for the coming season we would buy the new GS. What followed was a fabulous summer vending, our sales were well ahead of the year before. I say our sales, because Jeremy was very active in the business. He was a master salesman.
Needless to say we picked that Apple GS up in Willmar that fall. Complete with a color Monitor, extra memory, a 5.25 inch floppy disc drive (remember those), a 3.5 inch disc drive, and a dot matrix printer. With the tax it was over 3,000 bucks.
We both put in a lot of time on that machine, it was a world ahead of the Apple II. I even started doing books for the business on it. It was a good buy for the time. We put lots of hours on it, so the price per hour wasn’t bad. He even took it to college his first year but times were changing fast. My son got a Mac lap top and the GS stayed home in my office.
After college my son worked in the computer world, Anderson Enterprises kept growing. Machines came out that had hard drives, Internet access ,were faster, bigger and much cheaper. So we moved on.
The GS seems primitive now. Back then it was state of the art. The first home computer with graphic operating system and a mouse. Windows copied much from Apple.
I set it up so my grand kids can see this antique work and play a game or two. I like to look at it too.