A New York professor has Gen Xers reminiscing about their childhood after he posted images of his decades old Apple lle computer on Twitter Saturday night.
John Pfaff dusted off the old computer that has been sitting in his parent’s attic for decades, and to his surprised it still turned on.
“Put in an old game disk. Asks if I want to restore a saved game. And finds one!,” he tweeted. “It must be 30 years old. I’m 10 years old again.”
Apple IIe was the third model in the Apple II series and released in 1983.
This version touted features such as the ability to use both upper and lower case letters and full functionality of the Shift and Caps Lock keys.
All models of this computer were discontinued in 1993.
Pfaff restored the saved game of Adventureland, a text command game released for microcomputers by Scott Adams in 1978.
“What shall I do next,” reads the prompt on the screen.
“This is tricky, because three decades later I can’t quite remember where
I left off this round of Adventureland.”
Pfaff found floppy disks with several different games of the time including; Millionware, Neuromancer and Olympic Decathlon.
Besides finding games on the floppy disks, Pfaff came across saved copies of his high school assignments and a note from his late father.
“Just found this letter my dad typed to me in 1986, when I was 11 and at summer camp,” he tweeted. “My dad passed away almost exactly a year ago. It’s amazing to come across something so ‘ordinary’ from him.”
Pfaff showed off the vintage system to his own children and their reaction is what you’d expect from a generation that has moved on to an iPhone X.
“My oldest, who is 9, exclaimed “that’s a computer?!” in genuine surprise, and then pointed at the floppy drives and asked “what are those?” My younger twins just kept laughing at how silly it seemed to them.”
