Apple IIe Tattoo
It was Christmas morning 1991, I emerged eagerly from my bedroom to find a desk next to the Christmas tree. And atop that desk? A brand new computer, from Santa. It was an Apple IIe, and I was a 7 year old kid with a computer, which was very uncommon for young kids in the early 90s. Or in other words, “Back in my day, grade school kids didn’t have razor thin laptops, they had boxy, giant clunky desktops, if they had any computer at all.”
I loved that computer. I would get educational computer games on floppy disks from a surplus computer software store in town. Programs like Oregon Trail, Wheel of Fortune, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing, etc. I even belonged to the Orange Apple Computer Club in Orange County (get it?). I like to think that my first computer cemented in me a love for Apple computers and fueled a very computer-centric career. Even though I’m technically a millennial, I enjoy having been on the cusp of analog technology turning into digital technology. I’ve taken pictures with film (un-ironically), faxed notes to friends in High School, owned a cassette player, called someone on a house phone and got their answering machine, and so on.
Some years later I discovered that this “brand new” computer came out the year before I was born, and that Santa didn’t deliver it on his sleigh but that it was a very generous hand-me down from my Aunt and Uncle. I’ll be forever grateful for that fateful computer, and even more grateful that it wasn’t a PC. Heyo!
The design
I had been wanting to do a design that paid homage to the Apple IIe for a while. After I did an isometric design of my tiny house for fun, I wanted to attempt that style again. So I decided what better format to do a design of a computer than something technical and mathematical like Isometric.
I used images online for reference and looked up every dimension so I could get the proportions right. (I actually cheated a bit and shortened the reported height of the screen because it didn’t look quite right.) On top of being isometrically designed I thought it be cool to give it a tattoo vibe by adding a ribbon and an 8-bit spin on the traditional stars and dots “filler” and throwing some binary in there as well. And how about that ribbon, did you catch that it’s dot matrix printer paper?
