RUSH: Ron in Cincinnati, Open Line Friday, great to have you here, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Mega computing dittos.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I was wanting to know what you were first home computer was. I’ve been wanting to know for many years. I don’t believe you’ve ever say.
RUSH: My first home computer was an Apple IIc.
CALLER: Oh, I remember using those in school.
RUSH: Yeah, is a tiny little thing. It was not the IIE, it was a IIc, and had it for about a year and then made the plunge to a mathematic.
CALLER: Yeah, was a Commodore and Commodore Amiga guy back in the day. I was getting on Internet —
RUSH: Ah.
CALLER: — with a 65 baud modem and a Commodore 64.
RUSH: That was a game console.
CALLER: The Commodore?
RUSH: Yeah, you were playing games on that thing.
CALLER: No, I programmed the thing, ran bulletin boards back in the day.
RUSH: Well, all I remember about the IIc is I remember Roy Scheider used one in the second 2001: A Space Odyssey.
CALLER: Oh, yeah.
RUSH: It was 2010, whatever the sequel they made.
CALLER: Yeah, yeah 2010. You’re absolutely right.
RUSH: Bob Balaban was in it, and he was using one on the beach, and I said, “That’s not possible; the screen’s not bright enough to use one of these things outside.”
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: But it used the ProDOS system as opposed to MS-DOS, and that was the first one. I was like a kid in a candy store. That’s when I first started downloading. It’s just Apple’s version of MS-DOS, just their version of code, the operating system. It was a year later it went to the Mac.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Yeah, so it’s not… It had to be 1985 that I got the Apple IIc and I had CompuServe and the Dow Jones News retrieval, and that’s when I started downloading. CompuServe back then, AP didn’t know what was going on. UPI did not know what was going on. You had access to everything. UPI welcome back AP didn’t know it. It was so new you were able to pirate the feed. AP, it took ’em a few years. They figured out what was going on and started instituting now the price that you had to pay. For a while there it was cool, and Dow Jones News retrieval. The monitor was green dots, and they had an ink-jet printer (impression) that took forever to print things. (interruption)
I did. I started e-mailing then. I started e-mailing with that computer. I don’t remember what the program was. Was some — whatever was built into the IIc and quickly then went to the Macintosh after a year. But no, I’ve had every top-of-the-line Mac desktop that there is. Every time they came out with a new revision, I got one. (interruption) No, I think they’re gonna have one more rev of the Mac Pro in the third quarter of this year and then it’s probably done. One more rev, and I can’t wait ’cause it’s the only thing they’ve got that doesn’t have Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is this wicked fast data transfer. It’s about twice as fast as FireWire 800.