Deryl McCarty
Active Member
And when you kids had Atari's and Commodores, I happened to be stationed overseas and Japples (Pineapples if you acquired them in HK) were big in the Pacific. You could add or subtract a multitude of cards and gadgets (like 3 or 4) and they were obviously Apple II knockoffs (kinda). You could even buy (and I did) ROM burners and readers and fiddle with BIOS directly. But they were imperfect at best. And everyone gathered in these coffee shop-like places that were really out of the way in Manila or HK or Tokyo and traded or used each others ROMs and 5.25" floppies. Not very satisfying. So I bought the real McCoy a IIe and loved it. And since many of the basic programs were similar, I too copied tools and programs from magazines - one keystroke at a time. But overseas, the magazines came late...sometimes a month late. (Al Gore had not yet invented the internet, so I had to wait on the USPS). Then, I found the absolute finest computer of all time, the 6516 computing behemoth: the Apple IIgs. I put every card I could find (especially from Applied Engineering) into that hummer (along with the obligatory plastic separators else shorting or overheating would occur.) What fun. I went to club meetings and brought the GS - whatever the physical impediments. Then, Apple decided that the 6502-series could not be expanded or supported to the 6532 or 6564 level (total BS, but whatever) and they went to the 68000 Mac and I did not again use ANY Apple product. Still don't. Remember the 1.5 inch Computer Shopper magazine? Every thing for every computer from Atari, to Commodore to 286, 386 and that new fangled 486. I even bought a super 486 through Computer Shopper from a start-up Taiwan company called High Tech Computers. (I think their computers nowadays are much smaller and way more powerful.) I can even recall buying 4MB of expansion memory for my 486 for an effing $3000. Now for $3000 I can buy a memory fabricator. Hmm, maybe you young folks don't have it so bad after all. Merry Christmas.
