Visitors to the Geneva History Museum can interact with an exhibit that will take them back 40 years when personal computers were just coming onto the scene.
Last year, an Apple IIe computer – complete with a collection of home-grown software – became a live, hands-on exhibit at the museum, thanks to former Geneva resident Mark Pelczarski, whose claim-to-fame includes being the creator of some early Apple graphics software.
Launched in his home, Pelczarski created the Penguin Software company which became the creators of some of the earliest gaming software including a game that can currently be played on the computer at the museum – Transylvania, which was first released in 1982.
Now living full-time in Sarasota, Florida, Pelczarski, 68, said there are still fans of the old technology that continue to share their knowledge with one another.
“Back in the 1980s, I was teaching programming at a high school in Sycamore and then I went on to teach computer science at NIU,” he said. “As far as people knowing who I am and what I did there are a core group of people who know who I am. There’s a surprisingly enthusiastic group of Apple IIe fans out there on Facebook and they really helped me with setting up some of the museum display. It’s been about 40 years since I messed around with the Apple stuff.”
The museum rolled out the display late last year after the computer was discovered in the basement.
Markie Striegel, curator of collections and exhibitions for the museum, said “one of our volunteers had known the guy (Pelczarski). They had kids together in Scouts. I wanted to reach out to see if he could help us. We reached out to him on Facebook. He was amazing. He came out a few times as he has family in the area and he really helped us.”
Pelczarski said he actually donated the computer “back in 2013 or 2014 and they had a lot of stuff that was downstairs in their archives.”
“I wanted to donate this because we lived in Geneva for 30-some-odd years and we were selling our house and had a closet just packed with old Penguin software stuff,” he said. “We were downsizing, and I had to do something with the stuff in the closet. I donated some of it to a museum of electronic games in New York but I also wanted to donate something here in Geneva where our company was located.”
Now nearly a decade later, Pelczarski said the museum reached out with the idea of offering the exhibit and hoping he could help.
“About a year ago Markie contacted me and said she was looking at stuff in the archives and that it would be cool to do a large exhibit and something hands-on,” Pelczarski said. “That was around last May, and it took four or five months to get all the pieces together to get something hands-on that would work for the museum where they wouldn’t have to constantly fiddle with it. “
Before the exhibit went live last November, Pelczarski had to go and find another Apple IIe on Ebay and set it up from home “so I didn’t have to run over there and use their machine.”
Striegel confirmed the exhibit was available late last year.
“The kids thought it was really cool since this technology is so ancient to them,” she said. “Mark also gave us a lot of old company T-shirts, a sign they used during conventions, and a lot of his games – about 20 games. Having them put on a drive rather than a disc, it blows my mind how they were able to do it.”
Pelczarski said the group of Apple enthusiasts he connected with through Facebook proved helpful in terms of transforming the software from the original floppy disc format to where it resides today on a tiny modern SD card.
“I didn’t want them swapping floppy discs. We were using an LG monitor and there is actually a whole bunch of new stuff out there that you can still connect the Apple to and it kind of amazes me,” he said. “A fun fact about the SD cards – you can fit most everything of note published on the Apple II on just one SD card that costs less than $20.”
Looking at gaming and technology today, Pelczarski said “there is no comparison. Today, it’s like a feature film production.”
“You have hundreds of people working on these projects whereas back in the day it was one or two people,” he said. “To put it in perspective, if you were comparing the old movies that you’d watch on a rotary viewer that you’d spin by hand with today’s major cineplex films, the difference is more than that.”
David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.
