Remembering the Apple IIc

A couple of months ago, the venerable Apple IIc had its 22nd birthday. The year it came out, my family bought one, and life was never the same again. That single purchase led to my current profession, most of my hobbies and obviously, my articles on this site.

Apple IIc: ‘c’ for compact
We bought an Apple IIc, along with close to half-a-million other people that year, for nearly $2,000 with a printer and software. A 1MHz processor with 128K of RAM, a 5.25” floppy drive and though I think the machine could support color, we had a nice little monochrome monitor. The machine, which included the keyboard on the same box as the CPU, was the weight of a bulky modern laptop- the ‘c’ in ‘IIc’ stood for ‘compact’. We had a printer that shrieked as it printed and an old Atari-style joystick.

Of course, as with all home computer purchases of the time, the idea was that it would help in our education and my Dad would get all his home office-like stuff done on it but in reality it we got interested in it for the games.

Super Bunny and Other Distractions
The game Super Bunny was a phenomenon at our house- from parents to children to visiting cousins, everyone tried to get on that high score list. It was similar to the arcade game Frogger in that the super bunny had to jump across moving elevator platforms to claim a dangling carrot- and for anyone who has played Frogger, you know how addictive that can be.

Rescue Raiders was the extent of violence in games at our house and it had periods for bullets and little pineapple-shaped things for bombs. It started in a world war II battle at Cherbourg, Normandy and since we were never very good at it, we rarely got beyond the Cherbourg. Of course, some of our other games had implicit violence- our favorite text-based adventure, Ootopos, would invariably tell us that we had been blown out of the room by a Grix. We saw the Grix and were thankful that the blowing scene was not animated.

The best game we had on the IIc was Neuromancer. Based on the cyberunk novel by William Gibson that coined the term cyberspace, this game had us walking around the city of Chiba gathering credits to get in to cyberspace. Of course, we were never quite sure what cyberspace was and so did not know if we should be looking forward to it. I have now seen today’s cyberspace and am sure our fragile minds would not have been able to take it. Of course, we enjoyed walking in to the organ donor shop and selling every single one of our organs for bionic replacements, becoming a millionaire in the process. Truly a 6 million dollar man.

Playing all those games on a computer like the Apple IIc, led to the inevitable—we wanted to write our own games.

BASIC, LOGO and more
At a very young age, I was programming in BASIC and LOGO for only two simple reasons- because I wanted to make games and because my elder sister already could. You see, my sister would build little quiz-type games for me to answer and while I had fun playing them, it seemed like building my own would be more fun. And so I did.

Somewhere around the late 1980s I embarked on the greatest project of my life- to build a text-based game of Cricket (the British game, not the insect) written entirely in BASIC. I wrote tons of code, documented even more ideas on how to mix skill with chance and it would be cross-platform since I had just discovered that my newly acquired IBM-compatible ran BASIC too.

The project is still incomplete, the code is lost, the documentation missing and the world has never seen a text-based computer game of Cricket yet.

Apple IId: ‘d’ for Demise
Of course, the Macintosh was introduced around the same time as the IIc and so the it was doomed to begin with. With support and available software waning as years went on, the machine became something that was not quite familiar then but is now- a computer that is too old to be useful but too recent to really warrant being thrown away. It was also a relic of our childhood though we used it less often as we grew up, until one day something inside it blew. It never worked again.

I still harbor dreams of reviving that machine—the Apple IIc that lies in a dark closet in my childhood home—and playing a game of Ootopos, writing a few lines of BASIC or finally getting my Dad’s household accounts in order.