NECÂ APC 1 – Advanced Personal Computer
Yesterday, old friend and long time professional NBC camerman Jim Long posted a challenge on Facebook:
“What was your first computer”.
This brought back a raft of memories.
Mine was the NEC (Nippon Electric Corp), APC (Advanced Personal Computer) – show above.
1983
The computer ran on CPM/86 and had two 8-inch floppy drives.
For it’s time, it was pretty impressive.
How I came to buy it is a much more interesting story.
In 1982/3 I was a student at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.
As a student, I was always in need of money, and one day I saw a sign posted on the wall: Teachers Wanted, $10 an Hour.
This looked pretty good to me, so I answered the ad.
It turned out some guy was running an SAT Review course for kids out of his apartment on West 81st Street. I signed up. $10 and hour was pretty good money in 1983.
Teaching the SAT review course was fun and I was pretty good at teaching. Each course ran about 6 weeks so I did a bunch of them. After 4 or 5 of them, the guy who was running it – he was younger than I was – asked me if I wanted to own the Northeast Franchise for his course.
I laughed.
“John”, I said, “you’re a nice guy and all and this is fun, but I was just offered a job as a production secretary at Channel 13, where they are going to be paying me $325 a week.” So I turned him down.
His name was John Katzman and the small course he started in his apartment turned into a company called Princeton Review.
Maybe you have heard of it?
In any event, even while I was working at Channel 13, I kept a relationship with him, teaching courses on the weekends and evenings.
He said I needed to get a computer. I didn’t see why. We didn’t even have computers at Channel 13. We had IBM Selectric typewriters.  But he was pretty persuasive, so I asked him what I should buy.
He said the NEC APC.
So I did.
It was so big (I was living in a shared apartment in Brooklyn), that I had to keep it in my cubicle at Channel 13, and so I become the first person, along with Marty Goldensohn, who had a TRS-80, with a computer at WNET.
Who knew what was coming?
….Katzman, I think…
