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As well as the photographs of the flash-stunned teenager in the family den, there were snapshots of Apples in libraries and class-rooms, banks and laboratories, mobile homes and airplanes, houseboats and music studios, and there were even a couple bracketed to electric guitars. Reports of these California curiosities slipped into papers like the East Aurora Advertiser, the Geneva (Neb.) Signal and the Bristol Herald Courier. The Chaska (Minn.) Herald marveled as BOY HANDLES COMPUTER PROGRAMS while the Columbia Independent in Ohio resorted to an apocalyptic tone: EUCLID JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL ENTERS COMPUTER AGE. When an Apple arrived in Southern California, the La Jolla Light announced COMPUTER AGE COMES TO COUNTRY DAY and the Star Press in Blairstown, Iowa, told of a farmer learning to program an Apple and finding the experience “not nearly as tough as it is to teach a computer person how to feed cattle.” Apples helped a belly dancer keep track of her Jezebel brassieres and monitored the temperature of mud around a semisubmersible oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. A University of Virginia coach used an Apple to calculate the velocity of a football and a Boeing engineer programmed his to forecast four out of five winners at a Washington State racetrack—but admitted, “The more I refine this handicapping program, the worse the results.” In Buffalo Grove, Illinois, a high-school senior organized a tennis tournament with an Apple and in Sarasota, Florida, a cerebal-palsy victim could communicate more easily after an Apple was connected to a speech synthesizer.

In Manhattan, a vice-president at W. R. Grace and Company programmed an Apple II to estimate how many sides of beef his company’s restaurant chain should order, while the poet laureate of Florida wrote paeans with an Apple hooked to a large-screen television. His words sparkled, rotated, and grew on the screen in line with their importance and he took to calling himself “a solid-state balladeer.” The Sunnyvale Police Department, working from physical descriptions, used an Apple to help search for the names of suspects. And in Santa Ana, California, a man was arrested for running a major prostitution ring with the help of an Apple that kept track of his four thousand clients, their credit history, and proclivities.

Overseas, Apples analyzed census data in North Africa, measured factors affecting crop yields in Nigeria, provided diagnostic assistance for eye disorders in Nepal, improved irrigation planning in the Sahara, monitored developing bank activities in Latin America, assisted a schoolteacher in Botswana, and in the darker reaches of the world like Cardiff, Wales, The South Wales Echo reported that for a university lecturer an Apple provided “a hobby that became a way of life” though his teenage daughter complained the new arrival meant “we don’t really talk to one another anymore.”

The users groups that sprang up all over the world added further testimony to the reach of Apple. The envelopes that arrived in Cupertino might have been addressed to a collector of exotic postage stamps. There were letters from Grupo Usarios Apple de Columbia, Brazil Apple Clube, Jakarta Apple, Apple Club Zagreb, Hong Kong Apple Dragon, Apple Gebruikers Groep Nederland, Catalunya Apple Club and others from Sweden and the Philippines, New Zealand and Israel, Tasmania and Guam.

In the United States new clubs in different cities invented names with the gusto that editors of cookbooks reserve for fresh concoctions. There were Apple Peelers and Crab Apples, Green Apples and Applebutter, Applesiders and Apple Tart, Applepickers and Apple Jacks, Apple Pi and Apple PIE, Appleseed and Applesac, Appleworms and Apple Cart, but two with the nicest ring were Appleholics Anonymous and Little Rock Apple Addicts. Magazines with names like inCider, Apple Orchard, Call Apple and Apple Source were published to reach customers and dealers. Exhibition halls were rented to stage Appleexpos and Applefests that were undisguised celebrations of