Computer History for Michele LaSelva

Please bear with me since I had to dig way back for this one. My first computer was an Apple IIe. It was in the eighties and I was teaching part time. This computer was the rage among educators and of course I had to have one. So my husband bought one for me and paid close to $2,000 for it (do you believe that!). It was enclosed in a plastic case, had an integrated keyboard, had two 5.25” disk drives, and 64K RAM. ProDos was the operating system. My husband also bought an ImageWriter printer to go with it. This was a dot matrix printer and I remember that it was slow. My kids played educational games on the computer and I used Apple Works which was a combination word processor, spreadsheet, and database program. Though at the time I knew very little about computers, I did know that a word processor was the way to go---especially for a teacher. To be able to create documents and edit them and save them was too cool. I do remember playing with the spreadsheet but I really didn’t get into spreadsheets until my next computer which included Microsoft Works. I also remember using my Apple to learn Turtle Logos (for all you youngsters, this was a computer language). My Apple IIe was a great introduction to computers and the building block for what was to come.