The first computer I ever knew wasn’t sleek or friendly or pretending to be helpful. It didn’t invite you in. It challenged you to prove you deserved to touch it.

We had a typewriter first. A real one. Heavy. Mechanical. Mean. You didn’t “edit” on that thing—you committed. Every mistake was permanent, hammered into the page like a bad decision you had to live with. The clack of keys was honest noise. It taught you that words mattered because fixing them was a pain in the ass.

Then came the Apple IIe.

That machine felt like it arrived from the future by mistake and decided to stay out of spite. Beige plastic shell. Green phosphor glow. No mouse. No hand-holding. Just a blinking cursor daring you to do something intelligent. It didn’t explain itself. It didn’t care about your feelings. You either learned how it worked, or you stared at the screen like an idiot until bedtime.

Loading programs felt like a ritual. Floppy disks slid in with all the confidence of a vinyl record, and you waited—sometimes forever—listening to whirs and clicks like the machine was thinking about whether you were worth the effort. When it finally worked, it felt earned. Like you’d negotiated a fragile peace treaty with technology.

That computer didn’t entertain so much as initiate. It taught logic without ever saying the word. Cause and effect. Type the wrong thing, get nothing. Type the right thing, and suddenly the universe responds. That was intoxicating. Dangerous, even. You could feel your brain rewiring itself in real time.

The Apple IIe didn’t replace the typewriter—it lived alongside it. One taught discipline. The other taught possibility. Between the two of them, I learned that words and machines were just different tools for the same impulse: to understand the world, control a small part of it, or at least leave a mark before someone turned the power off.

Looking back, it makes sense. I grew up straddling analog and digital, paper and code, noise and signal. Half my instincts come from ink and impact. The other half from glowing screens and late-night curiosity.

That old Apple didn’t promise the future.

It demanded you build it.