alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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> 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.
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.