Apple IIGS

Woz, I want you to know that you have been a real shaping force in my life. When I was in elementary school, one of my teachers brought an Apple II to school one day and we salivated over it for the rest of the term. It had a clever little edugame on it where the protagonist solves a crime by working out word problems. It was a touch of greatness in a very small town.

Later, someone told me about the Apple IIGS, with color graphics and a digital sound chip. I begged and begged my dad to take me to the only computer store in the area where I could get a look at one. I brought home the brochure, and looked at it every night like it was a centerfold. Later, after I begged him beyond his ability to reason, my dad bought me a IIGS (Woz Edition) for about $800. There it sat in it’s box for over a year, since we couldn’t afford the display or floppy drive (I kid you not). I would take it out, plug it in and listen to it hum. No floppy to give it life, no display to shine in my darkened bedroom, but it was magic nonetheless.

When we finally got the display, floppy, and some memory (you had to upgrade the RAM before you could even use the thing), I spent every waking hour with it. I wrote a hundred text-based adventure games saved on those awesome 3.5 inch floppies (I was a ZORK fanatic). I composed opus one through six on a neat little program called Musicwriter (I still have tapes of the little ditties I composed). It was awesome. So here I am, after having graduated with a BA in Music Composition, now in pursuit of a BS in Computer Science Engineering. The box you guys made gave me a direction and a future. Now I read you’re happily at work teaching young minds how to find their dreams in the digital revolution. What a fitting end to a simply inspiring life.