My friend was selling his Apple II clone (an “Aloha 66“). I talked to my Dad and convinced him that he could write his life story with it and do many other things too (none of which I could fully explain or justify very well).
After getting some time on microcomputers at art school, I’d become smitten with the touch, smell, sounds, and concepts around electronic computing devices. It was a lot like the obsession with a calculator I’d gotten for Christmas ten years earlier, but it was way stronger.
Dad allowed me to buy it from my friend, and I brought it over to Dad’s little room to show him. He’d seen computer terminals when he’d worked at TRIUMF, up at UBC, but desktop microcomputers were still not very common in the home back in 1986, so this whole idea was new to him.
I was so pumped! I started going on excitedly about loading games off the 5.25 inch floppy disks and how one could write programs in Applesoft Basic. It had an amber monochrome display, two disk drives, and 66 Kb of memory! It was a step behind the Commodore 64s at school, but having a computer closer at hand would be an exciting new opportunity to learn.
Dad smirked and asked me about the system specs, and to pass him the manual. I handed it to him, and he flipped right to the last page at the back. I didn’t know why he’d want to see that. As a recent inductee to digital computing, I was thinking about all the applications and activities it could run – what you might do with it – but my Dad was an old-school analog powerand RF techician; he needed to see how much power this device consumed.
After reading for a few moments, he adjusted his glasses and sniffed. “Why don’t you take it?” I was surprised at the gift, but not surprised that the old man had seen right through me.
A few months later, at Dad’s request, I bought him a small electric typewriter. We put it on his desk where the computer had briefly sat. He might have tapped at it a few times, but Dad never did start writing his life story or developing his great Canadian novel.
Meanwhile, at my home, I used that Apple clone for years, to word process essays, program in BASIC, poke around in machine language, or play Lode Runner. It was the first in a long line of computers that I’ve owned ever since.
