The Apple II Lab

Before there were Macs, before fonts and folders and bomb icons, there was the Apple II Lab.

It wasn’t retro yet. It was just old. Decades old. Beige machines with green screens, booting off floppies that bent in your hand like dead leaves. The lab smelled like plastic, dry carpet, and solemnity.

“Don’t touch the keys while it’s booting,” she’d say. The lab lady. “Ever time you press a key-yy, it just take that much longer to boo-oot.

You’d sit still, reverent, as the drive chugged and whined like a rotary ghost. Oregon Trail. Math Blaster. Typing Tutor III. You didn’t play so much as supplicate. The keyboard was a sacred object — only touched when told, and only as instructed.

We didn’t understand the system, but we feared it. And we feared her more. She didn’t smile. She didn’t forget. She kept a binder with all our names. If your name got written in the binder? It stayed there. In ink.

You might have had a Nintendo at home. Maybe even a Packard-Bell. But in the lab? You had CATALOG, RUN HELLO, and the sharp, unknowable gravity of PR#6.

The Apple II Lab wasn’t school. It wasn’t computer class. It was a monastery of blinking cursors and tightly wound authority. And if you did things right, you got to play Lemonade Stand. If you did things wrong? You got The Look. You might still feel it, decades later.

And even now, even after all these years, somewhere in the dark corners of the education system… that lab lady waits. Her binder intact. Her finger hovering over the power switch.

Because every time you press key-yy... it just take that much longer to boo-oot.