Don’t you mean you bought your first Apple computer in 1979?
Good point. I bought my first apple in 1979 or 1980. Apple II+. Still have it.
That’s an old one. I took computer classes using the Apple ii-e…
If it’s working and in good shape it might worth something as a collectible. My first PC was a dual floppy with no hard drive. First laptop, a Tandy (circa 1988) had a whopping 20mb hard drive.
Yes, that’s right, and Apple II+. And yes, technically, not a Mac yet… but the same principle applies regarding the waiting to upgrade OS’ until the bugs are worked out…
They made tons of these. So not likely worth much (does work by the way, last time I fired it up; I now have the body (not monitor or external drives) hanging on the wall in my office as a piece of “art”). Now an Apple II (as opposed to a II+ would be more valuable; and an Apple I, well, that would be worth something).
1 Like
In 1979, my Apple II+ cost $3000. My Grandmother bought it for me. Actually she gave me the cash in $10 bills so I’d see how much money it was. That’s over $10,000 in today’s money…
6 Likes
I lived in L.A. in the early 80’s and bought an Apple II+ Educational System from Computique on Lake Ave. in Pasadena. This had to be 1980 or 1981. It came with 2 disk II floppy disk drives, 48k of RAM and a monitor. It cost over $3K.
I knew nothing about computers when I bought it. I was working as a tool and die maker and used an HP-67 calculator in my work. I was in Computique buying some blank stripes for the HP-67 when I saw this grade school kid playing on this beige thing. He left and I sat down at it. All there was on the screen was the “]” prompt. Nothing I typed did anything. It frustrated me so I came back a week later and bought it.
That was the start of career in computers.
7 Likes
I was working on IBM mainframes in the late 70’s before any PC’s had gone public. so I was in the business as an engineer well ahead of the curve…always had a computer of some description from the early 80’s til now. Never been much of a coder but did manage to customise some things to my needs over the years in C and Basic … but always had no issues with hardware of any description…Hifi, Networking or Computers. Still doing freelance in all three domains.
2 Likes
We had an Apple II at school in about 1980/1 which was very forward thinking for a small primary school in rural England, but as far as I could tell no one was allowed to use it 
Fortunately not long after that the school invested in a few BBC micros and we were allowed to actually touch them.
My first computer at home was a 1980 Sinclair ZX80 which came as a kit you had to build, for about £80. Great learning experience for a 7 year old, but a mostly useless computer once built! I upgraded to a ZX81 the following year and that was much better, it had 16 whole kilobytes of RAM with the external expansion pack plugged in.
I still have my old ZX Spectrum 48k and subsequent Atari 520STFM, and they still work. Not sure either are worth any money though. Might just quickly check on eBay…
1 Like
As the Mac was first introduced on January 24, 1984 you must have been using a very early pre-preproduction model. 
Mine was about the same at that time. Bought a Apple II+, monochrome monitor, two external floppy disk drives), an Epson dot-matrix printer, and a copy of VisiCalc (the predecessor to Lotus123 and Excel). Recall that there was no storage on these machines. Everything needed to be stored on a 5.25" floppy disk, inlcuding one’s programs and data. But there was a trick to double your space on a floppy disk. One used a hole punch to create a notch on the opposite side of a floppy disk. Then one could flip the disk over, insert it into the drive, and get double the storage.
I recall having to add some module inside the machine to allow it to produce upper and lower case. Without it, text was upper-case only.
Edit: and in 1981 or 1982, I added a 300baud dialup modem. This was pre internet, but I was able to connect with the university network and submit jobs to the IBM mainframe and send rudimentary messages to other network users.
1 Like
Ditto
ZX81 with a 16 Kb RAM pack
Then Apple ][ strictly by the way
Then the 80 column card, allowing upper and lower case
2 external drives
There was a 10mb Winchester Disc Drive , it was as big as the computer box , and ridiculously ex pensive
I even persuaded my boss to buy a computer for the brewery office. As far as I know we had the first computerised brewing records , courtesy of Apple Pascal
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be
2 Likes
That UCSD Pascal-based system worked best with 3 drives. I remember buying a second Disk II controller card and the third drive.
2 Likes
I was a bit of a software pirate too. I spent a lot of time collecting and trading software and did my fair share cracking copy protection schemes. For the more difficult software like “Wizardy”, we used Locksmith 4.1.
1 Like
In 1981 I went to the bank to take out a loan for an Apple II+, 48K memory and the floppy drives. I was a graduate student then making $5,000/yr. My wife thought I was nuts (it wasn’t her first clue).
Years later (and still not in my first real job) I sold the Apple and bought a Commodore Amiga.
1 Like
I used to make 880K floppy drives for the amiga 1000 back in the day. The DB23 connector was the hardest to get back then…even designed my own logic board to house the chips and connector needed. A friend made a memory board that sat on the expansion bus and had a 50pin SCSI to ST-506 (iirc) interface for adding 2 x 75MB full height micropolis hard drives in an external chassis…we were going places back then…now my watch has more memory than that.
2 Likes
Oh, you guys…
My boss bought a Lisa when it came out, and I tried to do some things with it, but it was way too slow. By then I’d been hooked on text-based timeshare computing for years, and (at work) had my own PDP-11/45 and VT-100 (later VT-241) and 1200 baud modem for home access (where I had a Z80-based S-100 box with dual 8" floppies running UCSD Pascal). Same story with the Mac when it came out – by that time we had Xerox Star and PARC Dolphin computers with InterLisp at work, and the Mac paled by comparison. I did try an IBM PC (my dad won one in 1983 as a door prize at some meeting), wrote a program in Basic to do stock inventory for my bar. But by that time I had a VAX-11/780 at my disposal…
Moved to Texas and UT and a Sun-3, then California and Sun workstations throughout the 90’s. My first real Mac as a primary workstation was in 2003, when I’d been convinced by OS X that they were “real computers”. Had one of those funky removable hard drives in it. Good machine. Shame to see Apple slipping away from the NeXT paradigm, but it always was an odd fit.
2 Likes
I recall the Lisa. I may have been one of the few people to use an Apple III. The company I worked for bought an Apple III to replace the II+ it started with. After I left the company, they let me use the Apple III to do some simulation work for my Master’s thesis that my Apple II+ couldn’t handle.
The Company’s Apple II+ was at the suggestion of me and a colleague (we were 2nd year employees fresh out of college). I’ll never forget my boss’s response to the written request a colleague and I put together on how the group could benefit from a II+. He honestly looked at us and said, “well, OK I guess, but I’m having a hard time figuring out how we’d need an entire computer for only 50 people.” At the time, this company had probably 30,000 employees nationwide and had a single main-frame computer at national headquarters that wasn’t really used by anyone outside a tiny group. Turned out that the one computer for 50 people was so popular, that we had a second one within 4 weeks. And within a couple of years every two people shared a Compaq “luggable” portable.
1 Like
neXT was always the real innovation IMO. They had something called The Cube as I recall? And they developed Objective-C.
Another Steve Jobs build. Without him, Apple seems to be slipping from tech innovation into being just another high-margin luxury goods company. Perfect for audiophiles, I guess. 
Maybe they’ll merge with LVMH sometime.
1 Like