Something from my bar whenever I feel like it episode DLXI

fubar-bdhr (68)in #blog • 7 years ago

Little bonus for today. You get 4 books instead of 1. These are my original Apple ][+ manuals. These date all the way back to the dawn of the home computer age. 1980. Well unless you were adventurous enough to build and Apple 1.
Not sure why these are still sitting around and not in storage with other books or the Apple ][+ itself. Yes I still have it. There are 4 books that I know of that came with the system. The first is the all important Reference Manual. Let's face it back then you needed to RTFM if you wanted to do anything. Things weren't simple either. There is a reason there is a picture of how to take everything apart in there. You had to learn to take things apart. Even something as simple as a joystick install required pulling a chip. Heck the manual even includes a full schematic of the system. Could you imagine how big one would be for today's circuit boards? Next and just as important was the DOS Manual. DOS before Bill Gates. The only thing you could do without DOS was BASIC programming. Those 5.25" single sided bootable floppy disks made the system useful. Speaking of BASIC that's the 3rd manual. While BASIC was part of DOS there was also a built in version on the motherboard. You could boot the system up without any disks and program. Of course whatever you programmed was lost when you powered off. Finally there was the Apple Logo manual. Logo was Apple's primitive graphics language. It was really more trouble than it was worth to try to do graphics with it. Most games of the day that even had graphics used assembly for them not Logo. My memory is fuzzy but I only remember doing 1 thing in them. Anyway these old manuals saw a lot of use back in the day. If your wondering why the white boxes are on 2 of them well they have my name written on them. These were carried to school and meetups back then. Parents thought putting my name on them would keep them from getting stolen.