[dhosek]

I had a similar situation, first computer access was a single Apple (Packard-Bell) ][+ on a rolling cart that normally lived in the closet of the 6–8 grade science teacher at my elementary school. I would stay after school every day to write programs on that, first in BASIC and later in 6502 Assembly. Floppy disks were a luxury to me, let alone actually owning a computer, and all my programs were handwritten in spiral-bound graph-paper notebooks. Even though I wouldn’t own my first Apple computer until 15 years later, I was still a life-long Apple fan, even when I was stuck on other operating systems over the decades.

[dhosek]

To this day, my mental model of a computer is still a 64K Apple ][+ and my imaginings of how I would extend it given the capability to do so. My idea of a graphics system that didn’t rely on main memory to represent the bit map turned out to be predictive of how graphics cards now work, albeit constrained by the imagination of a high school student in the 80s.

[moosedev]

> a single Apple (Packard-Bell) ][+

I'm curious what were you referring to here. Did Packard Bell make Apple 2 clones? I didn't find anything in a quick search.

[UncleSlacky]

They might be thinking of the Bell+Howell clone:

https://www.oldcomputers.net/bellandhowell.html

https://dfarq.homeip.net/the-bell-and-howell-apple-ii/

[dhosek]

Yeah, that’s what I meant. Oops.

[moosedev]

Aha, thanks!