Follow-up of 3 boys introduced to the Apple II computer in 1978

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I am not spending much time blogging now. Instead I am working on a description of Betty's life and accomplishments to leave behind for our descendants. Primarily, I am continuing the project she was working on before she died and collating the family history material she had collected. Periodically, I will post here stories that could be of general interest. This is an example from the chapter about the 24 years we lived in Birmingham, AL.

In the late 70s, Betty was encouraging me to spend more time with the boys. She had some suggestions about how to accomplish this. I don’t remember the suggestions, only that I wasn’t eager to do the things she suggested. I countered with the idea that I could do something with the boys that would be fun for them and for me. So, in 1978 I bought an Apple II computer, the version with a tape recorder, before Apple implemented a floppy disk unit. I brought the computer home and the boys gathered around as we set it up downstairs. Then we started working through the instruction manual. At some point I began to get tired and told the boys we could continue tomorrow. That was the end of me spending time with them via the Apple II computer. By the next morning, they had it all figured out and knew much more about how the Apple II worked than I would ever know.

Greg (11 years old at the time) and his friends Archie Cobbs and Mark Russinovich became Apple II experts. The owners of the local computer store let them hang out there because they were so helpful when potential customers had questions. They became good programmers using whatever software was available for that machine at the time. While they were high school students, Greg got a summer job programming for people I knew in the Vision Research community and Archie programmed for someone in the chemistry department. Archie and Mark both wrote articles for “Nibble” Magazine, which was an Apple II magazine.

Greg is a graduate of the University of Texas in Austin with a major in Computer Science. Currently he is Senior Technical Support Engineer for Dell EMC.

Archie got a B.A in Mathematics at Princeton, M.A. in Mathematics and a PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is Founder and CEO of various software companies specializing in medical applications. He has several patents for Java methodologies.

From Wikipedia: Mark Eugene Russinovich serves as CTO of Microsoft Azure. In 1989, Russinovich earned his Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, Master of Science degree in computer engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Ph.D. in computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon. He was introduced to computers when his friend’s father got an Apple II in the 1970s. He was able to reverse engineer its ROM and write programs for it. At age 15, he bought himself his first computer, a Texas Instruments TI99/4A. About six months later his parents bought him an Apple II+ from his local high school when it upgraded the computer labs to Apple IIes. He also wrote magazine articles about Apple II.

Apple II - 1978 vintage - Photo downloaded from Google images.

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David Sparks

I retired in 2005 after 40 years of research and teaching at the University of Alabama in Birmingham (24 years), the University of Pennsylvania (8 years) and the Baylor College of Medicine (8 years). Photography is my retirement hobby.

Nature photography, especially bird photography, combines a number of things that I really enjoy: bird-watching, being outdoors, photography, travel, messing about with computers, and learning new skills and concepts.  I now spend much of my time engaged in these activities.

David Sibley in the preface to The Sibley Guide to Birds wrote "Birds are beautiful, in spectacular as well as subtle ways; their colors, shapes, actions, and sounds are among the most aesthetically pleasing in nature."  My goal is to acquire images that capture the beauty and uniqueness of selected species as well as images that highlight the engaging behaviors the birds exhibit.