LelandLong

Wonderful to find this site of like-minded Macintosh enthusiasts!
I have found my people
My Apple & Macintosh history:
• first computer course in middle school on Apple ][e's, making fun things in BASIC and Logo
• teacher invited me to stay longer after school to "play" and the first thing I did was hand-type the game "Air-Attack" from the book he brought into class titled "Games Apples Play". When ran I immediately had errors and the teacher was thrilled because he knew I would learn a lot on my own while trying to get it to work, which I eventually did
• he asked and received permission from the principle to allow me to stay after school, in the computer classroom, with the door locked, after he had to leave to go to his other job in the evenings, and I was allowed to stay until the Janitors went home. So from 3:30-7:00 every school day for months I had a room full of Apple ][e's all to myself, and I spent it creating things, experimenting, and learning at my own pace
• still have my floppies and last time I tried them (around year 2000) they still worked
• parents bought me a VIC-20 with 3K of user memory and no storage. I hand-wrote out my code on paper to re-type-in and use
• I saved up $$ and bought a Commodore Tape Recorder. Now I could store on tape!! Wrote catalog of what programs began at which "counter" number to rewind and fast forward to the program I wanted on several cassette tapes
• I got hired to work at my ex-middle-school-teacher's Real Estate office (he was a Broker along side being a teacher) and was introduced to Mac 512Ke
• next computer course was Sophomore in high school using TRS-80s
• the next year they replaced all the TRS-80s with Macintosh and I took a Lightspeed Pascal course
• for my Final Project I made a mostly-workable Pac-Man and blew the mind of the teacher. No one else came close to complexity in their projects
• I used THINK Pascal at work to learn and play in my off-hours, making a couple of games using the Mac Toolbox (after getting my hands on Inside Macintosh Vol I, II, & III)
• I still have all the Pascal source code from my 2 games, both digitally and printed out: Yahtzee and Air-Attack
• When I finally left the Real Estate job after approx 7 years (around 1992), I had lots of experience using Mac 512Ke, SE, Classic, Classic II, LCII, ImageWriter, LaserWriter, Scanners, PhotoShop, PageMaker, Word, & FileMaker Pro, to name all the things that come to mind.

Since 2007 I have focused on FileMaker Pro development, along with dabbling in PHP, Objective-C, and some Swift.
I am a published author for 1 book, titled "Learn Sprite Kit for iOS Game Development" published by Apress.
https://www.amazon.com/Learn-Sprite-Kit-Game-Development/dp/143026439X
Currently I spend most of my time writing JavaScript for making specific, proprietary business React & React Native Applications, all on my M1 MacBook Pro.