The iPod in there has a rechargable battery?

Nostalgia note:

In those days (1984), I was still using my Apple II+. The original model came with 16K and a "cassette drive." I added a 128K floppy and controller card for $525. I can't remember what I paid for the memory upgrades, 16K at a time, but I can tell you that installing the 2K DIPs on the motherboard, - 8 at a time - was no fun, and I made it up to 48K that way. The final 16K was a "memory card" that replaced the system ROM. 'Also had a Koala pad and Computer Eyes. Winchester hard drives were waaay expensive back then; I think the first one I saw was a 5 MB unit that went for $2000.

Most of the software I had was copied from Creative Computing and manually keyed, usually machine language routines that could be called from Applesoft in ROM. Applesoft from Gates and Allen at Microsoft, btw. The II+ also had a mini-assembler, and system monitor in ROM, along with BASIC. I wrote my own graphics editors, text analysis routines, and a bunch of other interesting applications, but I also had Galaxian, Zaxxon, and best of all, Sargon II, an early chess game that was one of the main reasons I bought the machine in the first place - $1200 and change from Computerland.

'Went to work for an engineering outfit a bit later on, and they were all "IBM-compatible" mostly IBM-XTs and ATs (286's). About 1987, we got Compaq 386/20s with 512K video memory, 2MB RAM and 105 MB hard drives. A guy came over from MIS and said he could run the whole company on a machine like that. Macs had moved beyond the early twin floppy models, but I decided to spend $3000 for a Gateway 386/20 (Byte had raved about it) with 65MB RLL drives. Had all the early versions of Windows on that box, and spent over $500 for a second hard drive, 120MB unit. Ran Ventura Publisher, Publisher's Paintbrush, CorelDraw1, WordStar, GEM desktop...

That iPod didn't exist in 1984, of course, and neither did 20GB hard drives, let alone the micro models. I'm not too sure even 20MB hard drives were available then.

Macs are good machines, but overpriced, IMO, and hardly trouble-free like Apple would have you believe. I dislike Gates and Jobs about equally, but Balmer is unsufferable. Woz was the real genius behind the Apple II, and the guys at PARC are the real innovators of the modern PC - GUI, WYSIWYG, the mouse, and more.

S