50 Things We Miss About Old-School Apple
Posted 08/27/2009 at 1:36pm
| by Michael Simon

13. You have died of dysentery
We doubt we’d have quite so much knowledge of Conestoga wagons, Independence, Mo., the Willamette Valley, Kansas River or really much of anything about 19th-century pioneer life without our Apple IIs and the Oregon Trail. Plus, we couldn't type "BANG" nearly as quickly.

14. How LOGO can you go?
Back when the Mac was still a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye, Apple made serious education inroads by partnering with LCSI on one of the earliest (and most successful) implementations of the Logo programming language, better known to students as a well-behaved, easily trained turtle graphic. And we've heard if you look closely enough, it was actually carrying a tiny pair of nunchucks.

15. Your basic, average symbolic instruction code
Since Apple couldn’t figure it out on its own, a deal was struck with Microsoft in the late ’70s to provide a version of its Altair BASIC for Apple II coders, resulting in the curious amalgam Applesoft. It wasn’t as fast or bug-free as we would have liked, but GOTO programmers accepted no substitute--just as long as they stayed away from ONERR.

16. Clothes make the man
You may not believe it, but Steve's attire wasn't always so darned predictable. Suit vest anyone?

17. Boom Boom Pow
There was a time when we didn't need to plunk down $50-$100 to make our Mac sound respectable (and no, we're not talking about TAM's custom-made Bose system). Six months earlier, the Performa 6400 included a kick-ass integrated subwoofer that let the neighbors know every time we had to restart.

18. The price of power
We know it's all quad-core and everything, but we really wish Apple still offered an expandable tower that didn't have to set us back two months on the rent. Remember when $1,599 bought you a ticket to the future?