Thread by @JohnFPfaff

Oh.
My.
God.

An Apple IIe. Sat in my parents’ attic for years. Decades.

And it works.

Put in an old game disk. Asks if I want to restore a saved game.

And finds one!

It must be 30 years old.

I’m 10 years old again.

This is tricky, because three decades later I can’t quite remember where I left off this round of Adventureland.

Hm. I rocked this version of One on One. Could hit a three from anywhere.

But the boxes my mom sent have no joystick!!

Will GameStop have one that fits these ports?

My kids thought things were insanely retro when my wife and I played NES Super Mario on the oldest’s Switch.

Tomorrow morning their definition of retro is going to shift significantly.

My dad typed up labels for all my floppies, which is really sweet to remember.

He was so thorough that he even included... who hacked the games.

(I’m the only person in my immediately family who went to law school.)

Hacker screens!

And ASCII art!

On a 35 year old 5.25” magnetic disk from the first Reagan Administration.

Wow. So this was an old trivia game I loved (Millionware). This screen gets to the point where it says “Say ‘Hello’ to our contestants Donna.”

And then the disk drive whirs w its little red light.

Then you get “Thank you, Donna.”

1984 computer humor.

Of course, there is the downside. Here’s everything I wrote my senior year in high school, unreadable thanks to the absence of the necessary program disk (AppleWorks).

That, though... may be for the best.

It’s like riding a bicycle.

But need to get that 100m dash time down a bit. That was respectable in the 1980s, but not anymore.

This game... never got past the first level despite HOURS of (pre-internet cheating) trying.

Now w the web, I have a shot.

The music, tho. That classic Apple IIe music.

“No, look, kids. This computer has. no. hard-drive. The reason those giant disks say ‘Disk Side’ 1-4 is you had to keep flipping them over as you played.”

Hi-def Mario Kart 8 for the Switch there for comparison.

Well, I can delete my Twitter account now, bc I’ll never top this.

I FOUND THE APPLEWORKS PROGRAM DISK.

Insanely, it had been sitting in the disk drive for 30 years. I took it out without looking at the title.

Going w 1995 to avoid any Y2K issues.

And look: “folders.”

Maybe I’ll stop complaining about Word’s clunkiness.

That’s a lie—I’m Scrivener thru and thru—but still....

Also, in the days before the Cloud, kids, you had to make sure you backed up your backups, bc those floppies could betray you.

My dad wrote a computer financial modeling textbook. He... wasn’t joking abt backups.

Not sure why he went w the fancy Roman numerals tho (w “6” too!).

Just found this letter my dad typed to me in 1986, when I was 11 and at summer camp.

I REALLY WONDER what my theory abt the daily newspaper comics Spider-Man was.

My dad passed away almost exactly a year ago. It’s amazing to come across something so “ordinary” from him.

Ok, my kids won’t care why I didn’t go to bed when they wake up at dawn tomorrow (well, today).

I’m so happy that this thread seems to have brought back so many good memories for so many ppl. That’s not how my TL usually is, and it’s been a fantastic chance of pace.

Night, all!

So to all my new followers, first: hi!

Second, just fair warning. My TL spends a lot of time talking about things that haven’t changed over the past 30 years, but most of the time it’s about mass incarceration (amazon.com/Locked-Causes-…), not computers.