I was expecting beach ball references/metaphors for Steve Jobs’s death and was a little surprised when I saw none yesterday in the first hours (I admit I wasn’t scouring the internet for them either) – but, lo, all is as it should, XKCD drew pretty much exactly what I had imagined.
chr0me said on twitter: “The first program I ever wrote was in BASIC on an Apple in the 80s, and I’m typing this on my Mac: Rest in Peace, Steve Jobs.”
That made me think.
The first computer Dad brought home was an Apple II (maybe a IIgs?), probably in ’82, and when he started his tiny ‘computer club’ to teach his adult friends computing basics, including, well, BASIC, I was there with bells on, the youngest (10) member at the Tuesday night gatherings. I used to play games on that machine, mostly a game of snake that I remember vividly though I don’t know what it was called – maybe Serpentine? I’m sure it wasn’t Snake itself, the screenshots look nothing like my memories. For a while there I had a ritual of playing a few rounds every morning right after breakfast, before it was time for the bus to school.
There are Apple II emulators our there of course, like Sweet16 for example. I’ve half a mind to install a few and hunt down that snake game. I always sucked at it (I still suck at snake games – at very many video games, to be honest), but that doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be fun.
Anyway, I digress. There was that Apple II, first.
And then in August 2011, just now, I got this amazing, amazing birthday present of a Macbook Pro.
In between, I spent… well, thirty years using Windows, from 3.11 (I have really fond memories on Word in DOS, you guys) to Vista without, thank fuck, having to suffer through Me. I remember reinstalling 95 every three months, and 98 every year, and cursing all the bosses who didn’t allow me to keep trucking on with NT, much more stable despite its inherent steam-engine crankiness. *g*
Anyway – I’ve had iPods since the turn of the century, or what feels like it (2002 maybe?) – still have them all even the bricked ones: a 3rd gen 40gb (dead) & a 4th gen 40gb (on its death bed), before they were called ‘classic’, a button-less 4gb shuffle & a 4th gen Touch – so it’s not that Jobs’ genius didn’t impact me personally as well as, like everybody, peripherally…
But with all that PC-using history of mine, all my Windows proficiency… I was really, REALLY surprised to be able to say this:
The first program I ever wrote was in BASIC on an Apple in the 80s, and I’m typing this on my Mac: rest in peace, Steve Jobs.
Comments are closed.