Visiting Old Friends in the Computer Museum

I've been having a lot of fun with the site Old-Computers.com. Click on the "Museum" link to see if you can find one or more of your old friends. I came up in the 80's, so my two old friends are the Apple II (including the II+, IIC and IIE) and the Tandy Radio Shack Color Computer III, affectionately known as the CoCo III.

The middle and high schools that I attended all had a plentiful supply of Apple II's, which was in retrospect was a great gift that exposed me to computers at an early age. My first real program was a vulgar version of the Mad Libs game. Luckily our teacher never figured out who wrote it and put it on all the 5.25" floppies stored in the supply cabinet with the filename PLAYMENOW, or I surely would have been kicked out of school. I also remember playing a lot of ZORK and Chopper Command on those Apples.

My dad was a die-hard gadget-head, ham radio enthusuiast, and Popular Mechanics reader, so we always had great electronics stuff at home too. We started with the original Color Computer and later moved up to the CoCo III. We had the 512K memory exapansion, an external 5.25" floppy drive, a dot matrix printer, an RGB monitor, and the 800 baud VolksModem, which I never really got to work (mainly because there wasn't much to connect to). This computer got me through high school and college. I wrote a ton of school papers and fiction short stories on it. It had some great games too. Anyone remember Raaka Tu?

Do you recognize any of your old friends in the computer museum?