vernonw@dasys1.UUCP (Vernon L. Williams) (11/11/89)
I figure the newsgroup needs more positive messages so... I admit it! I'm an Apple II user!! I love the Ii mainly because it has "been there" for me all the time. I could probably say that without my trusty IIc (ZED) I would probably be a very different person today. It all began in 1981 when I went away to a boarding school (Western Reserve Academy -- for you Ohioans out there) I'd never been within six feet of a computer before and one day was asked to drop by the computer lab, where a bunch of Apple II's (yes II not II+, etc) were being used. Thinking that computers were the amazing brains that they were dipicted as on television, I typed in a simple query: ]WHO WAS THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES The machine quickly replied "SYNTAX ERROR" and I tried it again till someone told me that it was fruitless (no pun intended) to continue. After a brief acquaintance with AppleSoft (required for the "computer literacy" portion of the mathematics curriculum. I didn't need to use the computers that I'd first seen only a year before. Or did I? The school bought the II+, and finally the IIe. The IIe was great, I thought 80 columns was amazing, especially for someone who'd been stuck in 40 since he'd first seen an Apple II! The new version of AppleWriter was just as amazing. Lots of papers, and math programming assignments later it was time to graduate. (This is where the Apple II proved a liability of sorts -- my Senior Research Paper was run through a spell checker which marked words that it didn't "understand" by replacing the last letter with a ^. Unfortunately since the person who loaned me the spell checker didn't loan me his dictionary disk I ended up having to delete a lot of those ^ marks!) I had to find a way to get by in college with my amazingly poor typing abilities. The answer? Buy a computer. I was lucky in that my mother thought it was a good idea and offered to buy me a computer for a graduation present. It was between two computers, the Apple IIc and the new Mac (128K) After weighing the pros and cons, I decided to save mom some money and get the II. Boy am I ever glad I did!!! My II is still working fine...I have no idea what I'd be doing with a 128K Mac right now!! I have since become an apprentice Apple guru and am the Apple Section manager on NYCENET BBS, a BBS run by the NYC Board of Education. Recently, I went to AppleFest. Met a few "old friends" for the first time (only people who do telecommunicating alot will understand that!) met the dynamoc duo of Matt Detherage and Dave Lyons, and visited (guided by my knowledge of Apple trivia, intuition, and a bus map or two) Apple HQ in Cupertino, where I left a picture of ZED with a thank you note at Bandley 5. For those Apple People who didn't see it (perhaps a jealous Mac-person has done away with it:-)) I send thee my thanks, and my best wishes for continued success...for Apple Marketing and management I send thee my resume :-) -- Vernon L. Williams Seeker of the elusive dogcow... Big Electric Cat Public Unix !ccnysci!dasys1!vernonw New York City Education Network (3/12/2400 baud) 1-800-344-8280 AppleLink Personal Edition Pest II, VernonW2