Way back, when she was eager to move up to an electric typewriter for her incipient translation business, I told her "No, no, you want a computer." (see my reference to the Xerox Alto below). Our first was a 48K Apple II+, chosen over PET and the TRS-80. Cost for the computer was $1,095, plus $1,495 for 48K RAM. The current cost for 48K is one cent, closely following Moore's Law , which predicts that in 17 generations the cost would be $0.0114. We paid $595 for a 5-inch floppy disk drive, $240 for a 9 inch B/W monitor to display 40 characters per line, and $195 for a "High Speed Serial Interface Card" (RS232) that could be used as a port for a printer or a modem.

To prepare herself, Helge got up at 5 AM on several successive Saturdays, and watched a TV course on WXXI in Rochester, NY , that taught her the concepts of binary logic, random access disk drives, and simple programming commands.

We started the big hunt for a word processing program. This turned out to be the Word Processor by Charles Mann written in BASIC. We bought a $4.500 Spinwriter with keyboard and many font wheels, some even capable of bolding, to print for the half dozen people Helge did business with (and the gourmet club, of course). Helge wrote the first telephone dialer to use from our serial interface.

I am really a research chemist and Helge is a microbiologist who turned scientific-technical translator after a 14 year maternity leave that had her doing good deeds, like bringing up kids and serving on the Webster, NY School Board. We have two children, Rita and Bernard. Each of them has produced two grandchildren for us, total three boys, one girl.

We are both originally from Germany, but met in Leeds, England, on a British Council bus to a whist drive. We immigrated to the US in 1958, two weeks apart; me first, arriving on the Hanseatic with $29 in my pocket; Helge having to win at Bingo to pay her luggage charges off the Libert�. Jumping ahead, from post-doc positions at Yale, in New Haven, CT, to Xerox, in Webster, NY, where the index of a book I was editing required 20,000 IBM cards to be punched, and where the Alto infected me with instant addiction for a graphical User Interface. After Xerox was Kodak, then Kodak's Sterling health care venture, which brought us to Pennsylvania.

— Wolfgang and Helge Gunther