Bill’s Blog

As I was organizing some old photos today, I came across a picture I took of Steve Wozniak at the 1988 AppleFest (a conference for Apple II and Mac users) in San Francisco. I was fifteen years old at the time, and had an Apple IIGS, which I loved.

At first, I wasn’t entirely sure what year the picture was taken - I attended AppleFest twice in the late ’80s. I had to dig around online to try to find some context for the picture. It’s striking how little information is available about non-newsworthy events that occurred before Internet use became more widespread. I eventually came across a web site under a South African domain name that had archived some old Apple II-related publications. One of the articles complained that Woz was not in attendance at the 1989 AppleFest, so I knew this photo had to be from 1988. But on the way to this discovery, I got caught up in nostalgia for my faithful old IIGS.

My teenage years mostly revolved around computers - I was a total nerd (today I’m only slightly less of one). Even before I had one at home, I would devour computer magazines and write programs in AppleSoft basic on notebook paper. Once our family got the IIGS, I played games on it, dialed into BBS systems, chatted on AppleLink Personal Edition (which later became AOL), and connected it to the Internet in 1990, long before the ‘net went mainstream. I continued using my IIGS until the hard drive died sometime around 1995, by which point it was very dated.

While I searched around online and scoured old Apple II publications and such, I was flooded with these memories, and I soon discovered that all those fun times I had with my IIGS might still be available to me! After all, I could just get a IIGS on Ebay, upgrade it with some hardware from GSE-Reactive, buy some old IIGS software on Syndicomm, subscribe to Juiced.GS, keep up with the latest news on A2Central, and maybe attend KansasFest next year. I could get a IIGS emulator to save a bit on the hardware, but where’s the fun in that? Either way, there’s still a thriving Apple II community out there that I could be a part of.

But then I started to question how much time I should invest in trying to recapture my youth.

So far, the most frustrating thing about getting older is that I keep accumulating interests while the amount of time in a day remains the same. There are books I want to read, blogs I want to write, and songs I want to listen to. I want to learn more about investing and finance, programming, and digital photography. I want to play D&D, Vanguard, and Halo 3. I want to spend time with my significant other, my friends, and my family. And tonight, I want to finish organizing my damn photos, which is how this all started. Meanwhile, my life is ticking away. Even if I have another 50 or 60 years in me, that doesn’t seem like much. I know there was a time in my life when I could get bored, but the prospect of boredom is so distant now that it’s fascinating to try and recall what it was like. Is investing my time in nostalgia worth the cost in time taken from my other interests?

I suppose that recapturing my youth through the use of old software and older hardware could be a long shot anyway. It may bring some faded old memories into vibrant color for a while, but the novelty might soon fade when I’m confronted with the limitations of 20-year-old technology.

Cheers to the people keeping the Apple II community alive. I decided that I don’t have enough time in the present to re-live the past, but I hope you’re still around when I have my mid-life crisis. Setting up a IIGS and playing Tunnels of Armageddon might be just the ticket.