[G4] Buying your own work computer

[Skygram]

Robert,

Your email was delightful. I bought my first Mac when I could get either of
the two Steve's on the phone. This was because every so often we would hit a
dead end and since there wasn't an operating manual to go with our Apple II,
we had to call Calf. from Montreal to get answers. I still have the manual
they sent to me later. This was very early in the personal computer game. I
could be wrong but I think we received the first machine in late 1976 and we
received the manual for it in early 1977. The book is presently in storage
or I would get the specifics,  because it came with a form letter from Apple
explaining why the manual had not been ready when they shipped the Apple
IIs.

My partner at the time and I were ostensibly writing a book on Basic
language using these machines.  At least that is what I thought. What I
didn't know was that my partner was stealing small basic programs from DEC.
I didn't find that out until many years later. We sold the book to a
publisher who it seems went on to make a lot of money with it. We put the
book together for about $2500.00 in cash and no royalties. The book went on
to sell close to a million copies according to the U.S. Library of Congress.
That is a long and bizarre story. Ultimately we had cashed in our pop
bottles and sold the Altair 8800 we had keeping the front door open as a
door stop. At the time the Altair could do very little but the "cool factor"
of owning it was huge. Asking beautiful young ladies if they wanted to come
over to our office to see our computer... It was a technological up date on
the etchings query. To get the new Apples, we sold the Altair computer for
quite a bit of money for that time. After pooling our resources we had two
Apple II with various peripherals. We used Panasonic cassette decks for
storage and two 12inch B&W televisions as monitors.

We had an amazing amount of fun during those years. It was a great way to
learn about computers.

Bill