I took this week off to burn up some excess vacation time. I’ve been cutting a lot of wood and doing stuff around the house, but yesterday morning I had the opportunity to go to school with Jake. Some helper parents were needed to do an applesauce activity…how could I say no? The chance to see first graders in action and have a snack…for free!

Rock on.

I had an awesome time and want to go back again. His teacher is really quite good. She plans for twice as much activity as can possibly be completed, but selects the next phase on the fly, responsive to her audience. It really was like watching a good performer reacting to the crowd and going with the scene appropriate repertoire. He is definitely lucky to have a teacher that is so creative and responsive. Not that Sister Geraldine wasn’t great and all, but she had nothing on Mrs. M.

Anyway, in the back of the classroom I spotted three computers. Two were fairly recent Dell desktops, but in between was a real classic. It was an Apple IIE. I was like “Holy crap!” I had one of these when I was in school. Actually, I first had a Pineapple we bought in a New Jersey parking garage computer show in the early 80s (who remembers those?) The Pineapple was actually an Apple clone. There was a point when Apple actually planned on approving clones using their OS, but they killed it. Since a number of manufacturers had anticipated being able to legally sell clones (ooooops!), a bunch got made as kits, and ended up at computer shows.

Later I had a machine my father built that was more or less an Apple IIE, but it could do some Apple II+ stuff the IIE couldn’t do. It looked just like the monstrosity in the first grade classroom. Tan and fingerprint encrusted. Tiny monochrome green monitor. Floppy drive on the side, because there was no hard drive to speak of. Actually, in High School I upgraded to a side by side low vertical profile dual floppy that I put under my monitor. Yeah baby, I was a stud. A superstud. I got all the hot chicks.