Richmond Schools Rescues 500 1981 Apple II-E computers from Time Capsule

Richmond city school superintendent Yvonne Brandon states she "knew all along" that about 500 circa 1981 Apple II-E computers were placed in a "time capsule" on a shelf in a city warehouse on Carolina Avenue, to be exhumed this year in time for summer classes.

"The 80's are in, and the Apple II-E was so far ahead of its time technologically that we were  forced to wait 30 years to bring them online as part of an exciting "DOS Re-Boot" Information Systems initiative" Stated Dr. Brandon, appearing as if she were making it up as she went along. "After a custodian discov- that is, opened the time capsule, we knew that Richmond public school students were ready to embrace 1981 desktop technology, both as a learning tool and to justify the $2 million of public money used to buy the things way back then. Why, with inflation, they could be worth twice that much today!"


Preliminary work done by a few more advanced summer school students shows tepid excitement toward the labor-intensive technology. "Students find wonder and excitement sitting and squinting at a flashing DOS prompt on a 7"x13" black & white monitor" Dr. Brandon said after the two days it took to hoist the locomotive-like contraptions into the Henrico High School IT Learning Center. "And they are quickly learning the embedded commands necessary to start a game of 'Brick-Out' - why one student found he only had to type 'E\emb\start\EcP14 start game\' to open it, and you know, it was more fun than I would remember if I were that old."

IT student Brendan Walker stated he found the Brick-Out game elementary and stupid. "the right side of the screen is a brick wall of white rectangles, and you use a little underscore at the left of the screen to bounce a ball into the bricks, taking them out one by one. I took out about half of them with my eyes closed before the screen froze up, and I had to re-format the 8" 64K floppy disk and insert a new systems disk to boot it back up. Man, this computer is hosed."

Dr. Brandon says she is thrilled with the possibilities the buzzing, beeping and bumping antique machines can offer today's Facebook and Twitter-savvy teenager. "Students will forget all about texting and messaging and what not when they start poring over multiple lines of tiny coded commands just to print a 2-page book report, and once they spend hours threading and aligning paper, and hear that zip-zip-zip of the dot matrix printer, and tear the edges off . . . it all screams modern, like that movie."

"What an era we live in!"