JULY 08, 2011 - GETTING STARTED

I got off work slightly early today, came home, and promptly set up the IIe on the dining room table:

I didn't bother to label the good monitors and disk drives the last time around, so I had swap the monitor out. Come to think of it, Im not sure I grabbed the IIe whose keyboard isn't functioning. I checked that it booted, but didn't type anything in. I guess that's next.

I grabbed a few of the programming books I have from back in the day:

My dad bought our IIe's within a short span of each other (a year apart maybe), the first one coming in 1983. Apart from some slight fiddling with my dad's Tandy 100/102's my entire computing experience was on IIe's until I got an IBM PC in 1996. In fact, the High School I went to (grades 9-12 for you foreigners) was so small and underfunded that all of the computer sciences classes I could take involved IIe's (there was a IIGS available, but only one). As such, the programming classes avaliable to me were BASIC and Apple Pascal.

At this point I would be ready to start programming, except it has been a million years since I did anything meaningful with BASIC. This is why I am updating my blog now instead of actually doing something. I'm going to spend some time with the book tonight to figure out how to do what I need to do. Specifically, I need to figure out how to save each recipe to disk, and be able to load it again into the program for updating.

So I'm off, accompanied by a homebrew and a school of Lakemaids.