I had a loaded Apple IIe from 1984 to 1990. I sold it to get money together to build the PC I needed for school. I never forgot the Apple II that I started on, though Apple sure did. The architecture was abandoned at the command of Steve Jobs, to make room in the product line for the Macintosh.

I bought this Apple IIgs in 1998 from the daughter of an aquaintance for $10. I thought it was a steal. I brought it all home in the rain, cleaned it up, added a SCSI card and 500MB hard drive, and got someone on the Internet to make me some System 6.0.1 disks. I attached a Dayna Mini-EtherPrint box (really a LocalTalk to EtherTalk gateway) and configured the Columbia AppleTalk Package on my SPARC so that I could share the gigabytes of Apple software I had downloaded from the Internet. Suddenly, I could make disks from the images I had available and play all those old games, like Choplifter, Rescue Raiders, and Karateka. Real super-geek stuff here, but it's like finding your childhood Daisy Red Rider BB gun in a box in the attic.

Click here for some of the details on getting a 1980's vintage Apple to talk to a UNIX machine without using TCP/IP.