by William Winter | May 20, 2026 | 1980s, Apple 2, Retro Computing
One of the things I miss most about the Apple II era is how much personality surrounded the machine. The Apple II was not just a computer you used – it was a computer you explored. You typed things into it, made mistakes, and discovered strange memory locations....
by Marcus Albers | May 19, 2026 | 1980s, Apple 2, Arcade, Atari, C64 Vic20, Console/Handheld
Most popular video games eventually end up on platforms other than the one for which they were initially created. Obviously, there are exceptions. You wouldn’t have seen a Super Mario Bros title on a Sega console, just like you weren’t going to see the...
by William Winter | May 13, 2026 | 1970s, 1980s, Apple 2, Retro Computing
Some early computer artifacts feel almost impossible to explain today. The original Apple II cassette of Breakout, written in Integer BASIC by Steve Wozniak, is one of them. Yes, distributed on cassette. Not a floppy disk, a cartridge, or a download. A cassette. The...
by Marcus Albers | Apr 29, 2026 | 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Apple 2, C64 Vic20, Early IBM DOS
The majority of my formative years were spent growing up in Minnesota. I didn’t realize until much later in life that I had advantages afforded to me, from a computer technology standpoint, that other states simply did not have. MECC, originally the Minnesota...
by William Winter | Apr 8, 2026 | 1980s, 2020s, Apple 2, Retro Computing
Here is a story about how I learned to code at age 13. How most of us learned. I was 13 in 1980. Back then, at home, our family had an Apple II Plus, but not a lot of software – especially we had very few games to play. But pretty much every computer had BASIC...
by William Winter | Mar 30, 2026 | 1980s, 2020s, Apple 2, Retro Computing
Over the years I’ve worked in the business software industry, I’ve had the pleasure of working on and off with a particular friend I’ve known since high school in the 1980s. One day, just a little while back, while working together in a meeting with engineering and...