Meanwhile, Today The Apple II Turns 30

Posted by: Arik Hesseldahl on June 05, 2007

TUAW notes that today is the 30th Birthday of the Apple II. Ah yes, I remember them well. My computer at home was a Commodore 64, but the computers at school, from about sixth grade on, were all Apple IIs. I debated the finer points of computer choice with my school pals — the main choice at the time was C64 vs Apple II — and I defended the 64 with the same ideological devotion that powers my devotion to the Mac vs. Windows debate today.

I learned to program in BASIC on both the Commodore and the Apple, and played a lot of games on both. The one that engrossed me the most, I must confess, was Odyssey: The Compleat Adventure. Not many links on the Web about the game, but here’s a note from the Feb. 1982 issue of Compute! magazine. What else did we play when the teachers weren’t looking? Spare Change, which involved getting coins and occupying a pair of robots that chase you around a penny arcade, then there was a spaceship game that looked a lot like Defender but the name of which I forget, and also Taxman, a complete Pac-Man rip-off, but which was far better than the Atari 2600 version of Pac-Man that was available at the time.

More on the subject here at Retro Thing. Give us your best Apple II memories in the comments space below.

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