A humorous item in PC Magazine about an obsolete Apple //c computer being used as home plate at a Little League baseball diamond has sparked a wave of nostalgia, so bear with us. Waaaay back at the Dawn of Time (which archaeologists refer to by its technical name-- the "Mid-Eighties"), yours truly hoarded the spoils of various odd jobs and the contents of many a birthday card with only one goal in sight: the purchase of a home computer. And even at the tender age of thirteen, I had decided that nothing but an Apple computer would do. When I had finally scraped together enough cash, the family headed on down to the local computer store (where I could be found after school four days out of five, playing on the display models until they kicked me out at closing time) where I shocked the salespeople by transforming into a Paying Customer® and buying a brand new Apple //e.

That //e served me well, and was used for just about everything you could do on a home computer those days, including-- but by no means limited to-- tasks such as writing English papers, programming Newtonian physics demonstrations, generating fractal patterns (albeit very slowly), playing kick-ass games like Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, helping my mother run the restaurant she managed, and producing videos for French class. (When I started to get into animation for video, I found I had to lay out another hard-earned $120 to double the machine's RAM from 64 KB to a mind-bending 128, but other than that, it was a solid workhorse that needed very little upkeep.) When college came, I left the little beast behind, fearing that it would get damaged on the thousand-mile trip. I used the free computers at school instead, which weren't quite as inviting, but they served their purpose. A couple of years later, when money became tight, I sold my beloved //e and watched sadly as it was carted away.

Of course, looking back, it was certainly the right decision; the $1000 (!) I got for that unused system went a long way towards feeding me for the rest of my college career. But a few months ago I downloaded the shareware emulator //e to emulate my old workhorse on my current workhorse, just to remember what it was like to program using six-color graphics and AppleSoft BASIC. And if I can ever dig my old 5 1/4" floppies out of wherever it is they're stored and figure out some way of getting them into my Mac, you can bet that I'll register //e just to dig through all the stuff I produced on my first Apple computer. Or perhaps I'll go whole hog and buy an actual //e, if I find one being used as an oversized base in some sandlot baseball game.