1978—Apple ][ !
It must have been about this time that Clark came up behind me in the hall by the mailboxes and exclaimed, “Andy! You should surely have an Apple!” I’d been only vaguely aware of the Apple Corporation, to this point, and Eve’s classic fruit had never been my favorite. But I was delighted to find a brand-new Apple ][ on my desk after lunch, courtesy of our Chief Resident Innovator.
For me, as for pretty much all of Steve Jobs’ customers in those practically-prehistoric days, this little device was the first personal computer in my experience, and I wasted no time in wrapping my delighted brain around its mysteries.

I don’t recall how much computing capacity it offered, but you can form a judicious guess from my enhanced delight when its successor (an Apple //e) arrived, very shortly, boasting (1) BOTH upper- and lower-case letters on the little green screen AT THE SAME TIME! and (2) an array of 64 KILOBYTES of random-access memory! Ah, the power! I couldn’t imagine anybody ever wanting more than that for any task. 		Apple
Yes, I know, my slightly-obsolete Apple iPhone 6 Plus hand-held computer holds (today, 2019) 64 gigabytes of memory: that’s a cool million times as much as fit into a desktop box, four decades ago. I don’t know how much of that is RAM, but really! Could we really do anything useful or marketable with 64K?
AAIS Well, only three years later, Abt Microcomputer Software offered nine items for the empowerment of Apple users. Each, I believe, required only the 48K of RAM that came with the original Apple ][ .

My own creation, SampleCalc, you’ll notice, appears at the bottom of the list, in boldface, at a mid-range price. I’ll introduce it later.
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