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Apple Businesses

Still Life in the Apple II Community 561

Posted by pudge from the that-wasn't-meant-to-be-a-pun dept.
a2fan writes "A bunch of retro-computing Apple II enthusiasts are decending on Kansas City, MO July 22-27 for the 15th annual KFest. Apple co-founder and Apple I, II designer Steve Wozniak will be there. The Apple II keeps on kicking with Ethernet, TCP/IP, and PCMCIA RAM cards used as hard disks. What is it that keeps such an old platform going?"
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Still Life in the Apple II Community More

Still Life in the Apple II Community

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  • Oh, Apple II noble Apple II (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:05PM (#5911831)
    You shall not have died in vain!

    I'm not quite dead yet, sir!

  • What keeps 'em going (Score:4, Insightful)

    by krog ( 25663 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:05PM (#5911835) Homepage
    What is it that keeps such an old platform going?

    Anyone who knows the joy of programming machine language for the 6502 knows the answer.

    • Re:What keeps 'em going (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tweder ( 22759 ) <stwede AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:07PM (#5911855) Homepage
      Ah, sentiments like that make me want to dig up my old C-64.
    • Nonsense! The Z80 was the finest 8-bit architecture ever! ;-)

    • Re:What keeps 'em going (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mykepredko ( 40154 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:20PM (#5912005) Homepage
      I don't know if I would call it "joy"...

      I would use the term "satisfaction"; I remember being very pleased with myself for coming up with a sixteen bit by sixteen bit shifting multiplication algorithm in just 24 instructions or realizing that self-modifying code is needed to perform an indirect jump or data access anywhere in the 16 bit address space.

      If you can competently program the 6502 in assembler, then you will be able to tackle any other 8 bit processor architecture with ease - a very satisfying accomplishment.

      myke

      • Re:What keeps 'em going (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ncc74656 ( 45571 ) <scott@alfter.us> on Thursday May 08, 2003 @02:09PM (#5912443) Homepage Journal
        I would use the term "satisfaction"; I remember being very pleased with myself for coming up with a sixteen bit by sixteen bit shifting multiplication algorithm in just 24 instructions or realizing that self-modifying code is needed to perform an indirect jump or data access anywhere in the 16 bit address space.

        The 65C02 added indirect and indexed indirect addressing to JMP (previously, only absolute addressing was available).

        What I think was my most clever hack was a routine to play WAVs (11.025 kHz 8-bit mono) on an Apple II with no additional hardware. 73 bytes on page 3 was all it took to play sounds through the speaker with a resolution of 4 bits per sample. Source code is here [alfter.us].

        More recently (just a few months ago), I wrote some code to communicate with Dallas Semiconductor's 1-Wire [maxim-ic.com] devices through the joystick port. I used a temperature sensor and a clock chip to turn a II into a programmable temperature controller for my beer fridge. In addition to maintaining a set temperature anywhere from the 70s down to the 30s, it also manages gradual temperature changes (1/hr) for different stages of brewing--primary fermentation, diacetyl rest, lagering, etc. The code to do all this is GPL'd; I just haven't gotten around to putting up a page on my website for all of it yet (though the 1-Wire primitives are available through this page [alfter.us]).

    • Schools! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by burgburgburg ( 574866 ) <splisken06@nospAm.email.com> on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:36PM (#5912153)
      My wife is a teacher for an advanced program at a grade school. Along with some donated old PCs (running Win95), they have two Apple IIes, and an old Apple printer. They still work, the programs still work, and since people don't like spending money on their childrens education that could go to SUVs instead, they'll keep going for a few years more, probably. Or was that bitter?

      • Re:Schools! (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Thavius ( 640045 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @03:11PM (#5913156)
        Aaah, educational PC's. I remember learning to type and program on apple IIe's. The setup was amazing, they were all networked to a macintosh which shared a printer.

        I recently learned a consultant had convinced my school district to spend a lot of money moving to microsoft .net stuff. I thought, "that money could be well spent elsewhere - educators!" But I digress, I'm not a highly paid consultant.

        Bitter? I share your sentiments. My girlfriend is looking for a teaching position, but there's no funding, wonder why (see above)....

    • What is it that keeps such an old platform going?

      Actually, it is electricity that keeps it going.
    • >Anyone who knows the joy of programming machine
      >language for the 6502 knows the answer.

      Well, the X86 chip wasn't coded for out of love, piece of shit that it is/was. The Apple didn't fail for technical reasons, and the IBM PC standard sure as hell didn't succeed because of them!

    • Re:What keeps 'em going (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Mark_in_Brazil ( 537925 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @02:28PM (#5912663)
      What is it that keeps such an old platform going?

      krog suggested:
      Anyone who knows the joy of programming machine language for the 6502 knows the answer.

      I'm not sure if krog was joking, but I actually had some fond memories of my teen years when I read this. And I could be mistaken, but I think I still remember how many of my chunks of 6502 code began... "A9 00..."

      (For those who only speak Assembler and not ML, that's "LDA #$00")

      Aaaahhhhhh... and now I'm remembering my endless tinkering with the little 16-pin joystick socket. I made joysticks, a device to let me use the cheap Atari-compatible joysticks on my Apple, and a cheap substitute for a graphics tablet (using a couple of variable resistors to measure what the pen was doing and let the computer know).

      I remember when my mom first took me to a computer store to look at some machines. I was of course looking at various games and things (I was in 6th grade-- would you expect something different from a boy that age?) and my mother asked one of the people at the computer store directly: "is this just going to be an expensive Atari?"
      (Note: Mom was referring to the Atari 2600)
      The response was cool, and more truthful than I thought at the time, and probably more truthful than my mom thought: "there are games for the computer, and he WILL want them and WILL play them, but the difference is that he won't learn how to program and use computers playing games on the Atari."
      Thinking back, I can now see that the employee was right. I did play a lot of games on the computer, but I also did learn a couple of programming languages and started doing something I still do: when I had some kind of problem that would be a pain in the ass to figure out in my head or even with pencil and paper, but relatively easy for the computer to figure out for me, I would write simple programs to do just that. I also got the basic notions of hardware architecture and the confidence of knowing that I am capable of figuring out how seemingly complex devices work and even making my own extensions. I am very glad to have been the owner of an Apple ][. And I also have fond recollections of Commodore machines (VIC-20 and C64) because of a couple of friends who had them and learned 6502-ese with me.

      Great days. Thanks for reminding me, krog!

      --Mark

    • Re:What keeps 'em going (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Attila ( 23211 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @03:13PM (#5913174)
      The coolest hack I ever saw was the "VaporLock" on the Apple II+, which allowed you to sync your programs to the video refresh (before this feature was added on the Apple IIe).

      If you attempted to read the cassette-out port on the Apple II+, no (tri-state) devices would actually attach to the bus. As a result, the data lines on the bus acted like a DRAM cache and momentarily "stored" the last value read from RAM (the "vapor"). Since the CPU and video refresh circuitry alternated RAM access every half cycle, the last value read was always one from the current video page.

      A few bytes of each hi-res graphics page were read by the video refresh circuits but not displayed (during horizontal blanking, if I recall correctly). By storing "unlikely" values in these bytes, and then waiting for them with a read loop, you could determine where the video trace was in the graphics page and calculate when the vertical blanking would start.

      You could flip graphics pages during the vertical blanking interval to get smooth animation, or calculate times to switch modes and mix text and graphics anywhere on the screen (a big deal, in those days).

      PS. I realize this dates me, but really, who else would?

  • I know! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Wireless Joe ( 604314 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:05PM (#5911838) Homepage
    "What is it that keeps such an old platform going?"


    Dateless Friday and Saturday nights, that's what.

  • Do you remember when... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by L0stb0Y ( 108220 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:06PM (#5911840) Journal
    I remember going to an AZappletree meeting where the IIGS was introduced. It was god-like...

    And speaking of platforms that keep going, I remember well after their time, many local BBSes were run on rotting, wilting apples...

    I think loadrunner is responsible ;)

    LosT
    • You mean Lode Runner [entropymine.com], not Loadrunner [mercuryinteractive.com]. I think.
    • I remember waiting for the IIgs to come out, and when it did, being ultra-disappointed that it sucked so bad compared to the Amiga.

      I sold my Apple //e and got an Amiga 500.
    • Try Bard's Tale and the Ultima series (I remember being amazed at seeing my reflection when I stepped in front of a mirror in Ultima IV). I have no idea how much time we wasted with all of the olympic games. The diving competitions in Summer Games were turned into heated conversations on hot Sunday evenings at the Dairy Queen over Blizzards.

      Don't leave out Skyfox (which I still think is better than F-15 Strike Eagle- I don't care what any Atari or C-64 zealot has to say) or Castle Wolfenstein (what was t

  • Front page text, safe from slashdot effect (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:06PM (#5911843)
    Welcome to KansasFest!

    .

    Join us in Kansas this July!

    STEVE WOZNIAK TO KEYNOTE KANSASFEST 2003

    April 19, 2003--Ryan Suenaga, editor-in-chief of Juiced.GS magazine, announced today that Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, Inc. and inventor of the Apple II computer, will attend KansasFest 2003 and will give the keynote address. Woz will share with KansasFest attendees stories of his experiences in the computer industry. Register before May 15 and pay only $265 including a bed in a double room and most meals. Space is limited, so be sure to register soon if you would like to attend.

    KansasFest started in 1989 as the A2-Central Summer Developer Conference, it has evolved over the years, known as the Resource Central Summer Conference and with the final year that Resource Central, then ICON, it was the ICONference. The year Resource Central/ICON collapsed there nearly was not a KFest but the KFest Committee was formed and has handled KFest ever since. This will be Number 15. A gathering of Apple II users from now and then, but the Apple II just does not describe it. KansasFest is not your ordinary computer conference - but rather a 24 hour experiment in sleep deprivation and a chance for attendees to showcase their knowledge with one and other in a very relaxed laid back environment that is just downright FUN and nothing less. Come to Kansas City in July and see what we mean! It's a deal that can't be beat!

    You wont belive what we have in store for you!



    These sponsors
    help make KFest possible.



    Avila from Above, a picture taken on A2-Airlines approach to OJC. Wornall Rd. is on the lower edge heading south, to the right is Santa Fe Trail, an east-west route. Ridgway Hall is the building closest to the top, where KFest has traditionally taken place most of the last few years. To the left of Ridgway Hall is Carondelet Hall where KFest has taken place a few years too. KFest has been home to many groundbreaking announcements for the Apple II. In the early years Apple Computer, Inc. participated by sending most of the Apple II development team and putting on Apple IIgs College, an event separate but held directly preceding KFest.

  • Mostly because of games like "Carmen Sandiego" and "Miniature Golf" that made the Apple II so much fun.

  • What keeps it going? Nostalgia (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:07PM (#5911857) Journal
    Theres a PET/V20/C64 comminity, an Amiga community, an Atari ST community.

    There's a community for every past console, from Atari 2600 to the Dreamcast.

    There are communities for Model T Fords. I once drove to a theme park (Canada's Wonderland) and my jaw dropped when I saw hundred upon hundreds of restored Model T's in the parking lot - the Model T association was having an outing.

    Model T's dont compare with today's cars, yet some people still cherish 'em.

    • Re:What keeps it going? Nostalgia (Score:5, Insightful)

      by gwernol ( 167574 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:26PM (#5912064)
      There are communities for Model T Fords. I once drove to a theme park (Canada's Wonderland) and my jaw dropped when I saw hundred upon hundreds of restored Model T's in the parking lot - the Model T association was having an outing.

      Model T's dont compare with today's cars, yet some people still cherish 'em.

      I think its a little more complex than just nostalgia, though that certainly plays a part. For example one of my hobbies is the restoration and running of old steam locomotives and railways. This doesn't mean I want to return to this antiquated form of transport or the Victorian world in which they existed. It has a lot to do with the sights, sounds and smells and also the opportunity to do something physical and completely different from my day job in front of a computer.

      Interestingly - and hopefully somewhat back on topic - where I do think nostalgia plays in is a harking back to my childhood, when I first saw live steam locomotives at work. I'm not trying to recreate the world of 100 years ago, but I am trying to recapture the awe and excitement I felt 30 years ago when I first saw one of these machines come alive. I suspect that many of the remaining Apple ][ enthusiasts are re-living to some extent their first computer experience. A lot of people in adult life try to recapture some of childhood's sense of wonder through collecting toys or pursuing interests that were first sparked when they were young.
    • What, no Windows 3.1 community ;-)

  • What is it that keeps such an old platform going? (Score:5, Funny)

    by dirtmerchant ( 162306 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:09PM (#5911871) Homepage
    What is it that keeps such an old platform going?


    How old is the Bible?

  • Still life (Score:5, Funny)

    by DrWhizBang ( 5333 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:09PM (#5911880) Homepage Journal
    From the title I thought that this was about paintings of old Apple computers.

  • Easy (Score:5, Informative)

    by seangw ( 454819 ) <seangw@@@seangw...com> on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:12PM (#5911923) Homepage
    It does what people need it to do.

    My IIGS in the 80's ran paint software, card making software, word processor and never needed an update.

    The software infrequently crashed, and hasn't had any changes in the past 20 years (same apple commands work, no learning curve).

    Doesn't that sound nice?

    OR - you can pay (lets be optimistic) $500 for a relatively nice Dell computer nowadays that requires hours of setup time (just entering in personal information), most likely months to get as used to the original software, and the issue of having to update windows on a regular basis.

    I'm not advocating old computers (trust me, when my computer is over a year old, I rebuild it), but there has to be a segment of end users who would think it's the perfect computing environment.
  • While Apples aren't personally my thing, I'm willing to wager that a hefty portion is nostalgia. People like to remember a time when things were simpler and life was better than it is now.

    Pretty much everybody has *something* that gives them that feeling of nostalgia. For some its old cars, or classic arcade games.

    For me, its pinball. There is nothing better, in my opinion, than beating on an old Fireball or Gorgar machines from the late 70's.

    But hey, to each their own. :)

    • Man, talk about getting a wave of nostalgia. I won a bunch of contests on the fireball. Man those where the days. Go surfing, go to the arcade by the beach, win a prize, go surfing.

    • life was -what-? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by dAzED1 ( 33635 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:44PM (#5912212) Journal
      "People like to remember a time when things were simpler and life was better than it is now"

      Ok, listen - yes, people like old things. They like old cars, old houses, old paintings. Sure. They can even like old computers. But you know what? Its not because life was better back then.

      Apple ][ came out in 1976. The next year, Gerald Ford ended his term (you know, the guy that took over for Nixon...). The economy was in terrible shape, much worse than now. We had just left vietnam a couple years before (1974). The Cold War was HUGE. A radioacive leak occured at 3 Mile Island in Penn in 1979.

      Also in 1976, we had Gregg vrs Georgia, in which the Supreme Court of the US decided that the death penalty did not violate the constitutions protection against "cruel and unusual punishment," thereby keeping us in that sad, barbaric state of affairs.

      Shall I go on? What in god's green earth makes you think life was simpler and better than now? What, precisely, was better? What was more simple? Was it just because you were a kid, or at least much younger, then? Because nothing about life during that time was something to long for.

      Grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, if you're a cow. Personally, I like climate control inside of my car. I like to be able to listen to great sound from a little peice of plastic I slip in a slot casually, without having to fumble with some 8-track or cassette. I like the little things we have now, that we didn't then. Call me odd.

    • Yeah, I miss MS-DOS on my old 8088!

  • keeps it going (Score:3, Funny)

    by chunkwhite86 ( 593696 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:13PM (#5911937)
    What is it that keeps such an old platform going?

    What, you've never opened one up before? It's a hampster running in a little wheel. ;-)

    • Re:keeps it going (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Wolfier ( 94144 )
      Actually, if you opens it up, the simplicity will simply amaze you. It's HACKABILITY that matters. The Apple II was infinitely and easily hackable. That alone keeps it going.
  • Lots of guys who are not getting laid keeps old platforms going.

  • Usefullness & other reasons not to change a go (Score:5, Insightful)

    by adzoox ( 615327 ) * on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:14PM (#5911949) Journal
    Why change a good thing?

    I have been servicing an Apple IIe that is used at the Lamaster Dairy at Clemson University's Ag Department for 5 years now. (They have had it since 1983) - It is tied in to a bell that rings twice a day. Cows will come in to get milked, it controls a gate to close in behind them when 10 cows have walked over a pressure plate at the front of the building. It then measures the volume of the milk production. All, created by students long ago and uses a super serial card. It's been the same reliable system for almost 20 years. It does it's job and is STILL more modern the majority of milking places I have seen (Ummm.. haven't seen but 3 and that's more than 90% of you I'm sure)

    I have serviced this system twice, but only cleaning and optimizing (as much as I could, and transferring the programs to new disks) - At one point, I was going to switch the whole system to an LCIII with an Apple IIe emulation card - the professor in charge said, "Why upgrade for such degrading work?"

    I am also an advocate for schools keeping their IIe's to use for teaching. The Apple IIe had GREAT learning software, especially for Math like the Addison Wesley How To series. Again, why spend Taxpayer money when kids will enjoy it. Kids should be tought in an enriching environment not in a rich environment.

  • Synergy, man, _synergy_!

    Oh yeah, plus fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency!

  • "What is it??" (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Blondie-Wan ( 559212 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:19PM (#5911993) Homepage
    "What is it that keeps such an old platform going?" Well, I'm sure it varies from platform to platform, but in the case of the Apple II family, I'd imagine it's in part because it holds immense historical significance; this platform pretty much got the personal computer revolution off the ground. How different would things have been if not for the Apple II and, say, VisiCalc?

    Off-topic: I wish that just for this one story, the Slashdot topic icon of the Apple logo could show the old one with the rainbow stripes. :)

  • Old home computers are *understandable* (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Junks Jerzey ( 54586 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:22PM (#5912016)
    That's the key. Remember that thick manual that came with the C64? That wasn't just a manual, it was the documentation for how to program the hardware. Just the documentation for DirectSound, let alone any significant part of the Windows API, is larger than that.

    And there's also a simplicity that we've completely been unable to achieve, even though processors are much faster. Jef Raskin gave the example of being able to boot up an Apple II in seconds, and use BASIC as a snazzy, programmable calculator. You don't have to launch any applications. You don't have to futz about with GUI gadgets. Heck, you can also just type "CALL -151" and bang, you're in a machine language monitor that lets you explore the entire machine. Nasir Gebelli, among others, used to write commercial games entirely via that monitor.
    • I remember my old Apple II's had a schematic for the motherboard, as well, in the back of one of the manuals... I think it was the II+, although I also had a IIe. Never bought a IIgs or Mac... went straight to IBM's after that one burned up when something shorted in the power supply ;)
    • Apple II was friendlier than the other systems for this kind of play I think. A real hacker's machine. I suspect I missed out by having an Atari 800XL and C=64...though the games were a bit better.

    • Re:Old home computers are *understandable* (Score:5, Interesting)

      by call -151 ( 230520 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:49PM (#5912248) Homepage
      That old Apple II machine-language monitor was
      amazing and the overall simplicity and sensability
      of the 6502 was great. I taught myself machine
      language by using the mini-disassembler and
      puzzling out other people's code. Can you imagine
      doing that these days?

    • They actually CAME with manuals!!! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SvnLyrBrto ( 62138 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @02:40PM (#5912796)
      And that was half the beauty of the things itself. Not only were computers of that day simple enough to be easily documented. They actually CAME with that documentation! When you bought an Apple ][, you got EVERYTHING. Just the floppy drive came with a pair of manuals that was about an inch and a half thick between the two. In those manuals was everything you needed to know to: write programs that read/wrote data to conventional files, write directly to specific sectors if you were inclined, how the thing interfaced with the Apple ][, even how to diagnose, repair, and damn near REBUILD THE DRIVE, if it were to break.

      My dad still has the documentation for our first Apple ][. Said documentation is just as, if not more, extensive as that I described for the floppy drive. Most notably, it includes commented assembley code for the boot ROMS; HAND-signed by the Woz himself!!!

      Have you noticed the state of documentation for a pc now, in the gates era? If you're LUCKY, a peripherial might include a single sheet that amounts to: "insert tab A into slot B, run driver on floppy, reboot, prey". And forget about having enough information to repair anything or develop for it. (Not without forking over LOADS of cash to be an "authorized service tech" or an "authorized developer". And just where the HELL is my autographed-by-bill-gates copy of the code for the BIOS of my windows box, eh?

      cya,
      john
  • Apple II the first Open Source liek Computer..Long LIVE APPLE II!

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:23PM (#5912030)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • I love my ][e (Score:5, Interesting)

    by X_Bones ( 93097 ) <danorz13NO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:24PM (#5912045) Homepage Journal
    every once in a while I'll boot up my Apple ][e, plug in the joystick, and fire up Rescue Raiders [angelfire.com]. The game was fun in and of itself, but I think the real reason I enjoyed it was because it belonged to my dad and he wouldn't let me play it...
    The other games I played were this series of text adventure games, written by Scott Adams (maybe of Dilbert fame, we could never find out). There were nine of em, 3 to a disk, and arranged from easiest to hardest. Couldn't beat any of em. heh. They were fun though, especially the second (treasure island) and the third (some mission impossible-type thing where you had a limited number of turns before a bomb went off).
    We had em in elementary school, where the teachers let us play games like Oregon Trail; this one where you're a fish and have to eat other fish, and avoid the otter or something; and there was one where you were a geologist and had to identify rare gems by their color, hardness, etc. Anyone remember this game? Everyone I ask about em just kind of look at me.
    But besides games, I learned to program on that computer; there were BASIC programs in the back of some kids' magazine I subscribed to, 3-2-1-Contact or something, that taught you about control flow, strings, stuff like that. I remember this one where you ran a zoo with panda bears that kept dying every time you looked at em the wrong way.

    man, thanks for the trip back in time there...
    • The "Adventure" Scott Adams and the "Dilbert" Scott Adams are two different people. The Adventure one posts on the official EQ message boards quite often, and his sig tells people that he's not the Dilbert one.

  • I know! (Score:5, Funny)

    by blackmonday ( 607916 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:24PM (#5912050) Homepage
    What is it that keeps such an old platform going?

    Maybe these people just Think Different.

  • Apple II loads faster than todays machines (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tekrat ( 242117 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:28PM (#5912082) Homepage Journal
    As an owner of several Apple II machines, I'll tell you that the Apple II is light years faster than my windows machine.

    For example, boot time of OS:
    Windows == about a minute
    Apple II == about 2 seconds after power on

    Boot time of "integrated software suite"
    MS Office == an eternity
    AppleWorks == about 16 seconds

    Now, it should be noted that the Apple II is way faster because the apps to load are usually in the area of 16k, while the current generation of software is in the hundreds of megabytes.

    And it should also be noted that my IIE has a SCSI card and is hooked to a 30Meg (wow!) HD, which holds nearly everything I'd ever want to run on a IIe and still leave me plenty of data-file room.

    But, even by 8-bit clunker standards, the IIE was pretty damn fast. Woz built one heck of a machine, and I worship his genius every time I power the damn thing on.

    So, yeah, basically I'm a loser!

    • Re:Apple II loads faster than todays machines (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I could never understand why nobody produced a PDA based on the Apple ][. I bet you could compress one down to the size of a Palm, power on an AA battery, stick AppleWorks in ROM and satisfy 99% of what people use computers for.

      - Laird "I can't remember my Slashdot ID" Popkin
  • Back in my day (which wasn't that long ago) Apple IIes were the way to go. In elementary school we were introduced to basic programming using Logo and Logo Writer in which commands could be written in a programming buffer which could draw cool designs and play little songs when you compiled your mini-code on the Logo command line.

    In high school ('96), we had a networked set of Apple IIe's (which I re-networked the next year) that were mainly used for labs- both for plotting data and in some cases, learn

  • heh (Score:2, Funny)

    by revmoo ( 652952 )

    What is it that keeps such an old platform going?

    Simple, pure, unadulterated, virginity.
    *ducks* :)

  • You can still experience the fun (Score:3, Informative)

    by fudgefactor7 ( 581449 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:35PM (#5912133)
    Visit the Asimov.net FTP archive. [asimov.net] Emulators, games, practically everything. Fun stuff...

  • I loved apple II (Score:5, Informative)

    by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @01:35PM (#5912139)
    I used to sell INtel and Z-80 S-100 buss computers when the apple came out. I assumed it was just another comodore/trs-80/amiga toy. then one day i had to take one apart. Boy those machines were way ahead of their time. they just looked like toys cause they were so simple inside.

    notable things compared to the "big iron" s-100 systems

    1) mixing text and graphics on screen, not to mention sprites
    2) memory mapped video (s-100 systems were buss and I/O based)
    3) switching power supplies. Altair, imsai, cromenco, were all tranformer/rectifier/capacitor systems and you could barely lift them. a few of the game-sytems may have had swithcing power supplies, but none of the serious computers did.
    4) pre-decoded memory mapped buss with pre-regulated voltages, made making plug in cards a snap. half the circuits on the lod s-100 bus cards were for decoding the bus handshaking signals (here were no single asic chips designed to do that back then) and another chunk of board area went for regulating the voltages.
    5) soft sectored floppies. every one else was hard sectored leading to incompatible drive, proliferation of formats, and incompatible software for accessing them. the apples could reprogram themselves as drive technology improved rapidly.

    But the really big deal with the apples was something few people appreciate. the first truly robust use of dynamic memory, that allowed all modern computing platforms. most of the big iron systems used static ram which needs something like 18 transistors per bit and consummed orders of magnitude more power and board area. an entire s-100 card, slightly bigger than a modern pci bus card, might hold 8K. yes you hear that right 8K not meg or 8 gig, of static ram chips. and thats why you needed those huge power supplies (and on board regulation).

    if static memeory were still in use, a 1 gig memory card would be about ten times larger than todays dynamic memory and consume about 1 mega watt of power!!!!
    in static memeory current is flowing the whole time. in dynamic memory current only flows when the bit swithces state, the rest of the time it just stores charge. storing charge does not disspate any power.
    thus the future of computing hinged on dynamic memory.

    Now lots of folks tried to build dynamic memory systems but refreshing these things over the s-100 bus was problematic. It was made worse because intel 80-80s used variable numbers of clock cycles to do an instruction so when the memory could be accessed was indeterminant. you might not reach the memory in time. and on board refresh systems were comlicated too. basically it was pretty unreliable stuff. I know, I sold and repaired it.

    but woz pulled two great tricks. first he used the 6502 cpu which on every clock cycle the down beat is always gaurentted to never access memory. thus refreshes could hum along at 1 Mhz gaurenteed. the other clever things was that there was NO refresh circuitry at all! he beat this by letting the video memory be in main memory. the video was accessed on the back side of the clock, and its row-address signal was enogh to refresh all of the memory.

    I fell in love with apple when I figure this out. so elegant. so few chips in side the damn machine. such tiny litte car slots. so cute.

    of course even back then the MHZ myth was strong. the 6502 ran a 1Mhz while the 8080b ran at upt to 2. (Z80 went to 4) but instructions on an 8080 took 3 to 11 clock cycles with most about 4 or 5. and because the clock was so fast, much of the mmeory was too slow (typically about 500Ns response time was possible) to respond and had to inject wait states. this made it even slower. the 6502 ran a 1Mhz but most instructions took 1 clock cycle. some took up to 3. the slower rate was matched to the 500ns memory speed, (not to mention the second fetch on the back side for the video) so there were no waits. and the kicker was that on those three-clock cycle instructions the 6502 would pipe-line the next memeory fet

    • Re:I loved apple II (Score:4, Informative)

      by Winter ( 87716 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @02:40PM (#5912807)
      Some small nitpicking

      systems used static ram which needs something like 18 transistors per bit and consummed orders of magnitude more power and board area

      A normal SRAM bit takes 6 tansistors (FET's), while DRAM takes 2 (one of which is used as a capacitor and stores the bit)

      if static memeory were still in use, a 1 gig memory card would be about ten times larger than todays dynamic memory and consume about 1 mega watt of power!!!!
      in static memeory current is flowing the whole time. in dynamic memory current only flows when the bit swithces state, the rest of the time it just stores charge. storing charge does not disspate any power.
      thus the future of computing hinged on dynamic memory.

      Current doesn't flow all the time in SRAM... (At least not in CMOS based SRAM, might in TTL based)
      Each bit consists of 6 transistors aranged as a flip-flop. This does not consume _ANY_ power (except for leakage current, which is very low) except when it is changing state.
      DRAM on the other hand has to be continually refreshed, and thus consume quite a bit more power.

      Only reason that DRAM is user more is because it takes a third of the space of SRAM. Anything that needs ultra-fast RAM uses SRAM (Some videocards and all L1 & L2 CPU caches uses SRAM)

    • Re:I loved apple II (Score:5, Interesting)

      by bored ( 40072 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @03:17PM (#5913208)

      You forgot two of the most elegant things the II had going for it.



      The graphics system has incredibly simplistic hardware that simply set the composite color burst timings based on the a single bit shift of the video memory. This removed the complicated timing and DA conversions that other early color systems required. Of course it made it a pain to set any given pixel to a specified color, or even draw a line (the video memory wasn't mapped line for line to the screen for timing reasons). It also had some interesting side effects like leaving a couple of unused bytes at the beginning and end of each line which were scanned during the horizontal refresh allowed the programmer to 'hide' information in the video buffer. Eventually with the release of the 80 column card, the graphics system was increased to 16 colors and the horizontal resolution was doubled. My undestanding was that this was completly accidental and discovered only after the card had been on the market for a couple of months.



      The other cool thing you sort of touched on was the soft sectored disks. Most disk drives of the time cost a lot of money because they also had complicated timing and encoding logic built onto them as well as sensors for detecting head location and where in the spin the disk was. Some history:The problem with magnetic media (and some communications mechanisms etc.) is you cannot tell were the bits start and stop so you need tight timing, or an encoding scheme which guarantees that no more than a certain number of off or on bits are adjacent. The disk drives for the II didn't have any head or disk position sensors, nor did they have encoding or timing logic. This was all offloaded to the software in the ROM's which encoded the bytes (using 4 by 6 encoding if I remember correctly) wrote the sectoring information (some series of bit patterns guaranteed to be unique with the encoding scheme and guaranteed to allow the software to detect where a byte started) and everything else related to managing the disk drives. This allowed the II disks to have some seriously ugly copy protection schemes (writing data between the tracks, because a track was actually 4 pulses of the stepper motor, spiral tracks, tracks with funny sectoring, funny encoding schemes the list goes on.) Not only that but since you couldn't tell where on the disk you were until you read the sector information, and not all the disks were sectored the same the ROM would basically pulse a full stroke to the stepper motor to locate the first track to boot the machine. This is what that really bad clunky / grinding noise is when the machine is first powered on. Another little trick was that the amount of data you could fit on the disk was related to how fast the disk was spinning (actually this is true of any disk to a certain extent). The software could correct for small imperfections in the rotational speed, but since the on/off timing of the head was directly controlled you needed to adjust the speed the disks spun at for optimum data consistency. Hence those little screw drivers that came with some models, and the disk tune utilities which would show you how fast the disk was spinning while you turned the adjustment on the drive. In the long run it turned out to be an advantage to have such low level control of the disk drive since various pieces of software were written to read other computers disk formats.

  • A lot of it is... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Johnny318 ( 669822 )
    "What is it that keeps such an old platform going?"

    Appleworks. (Macros!)

  • Anyone look at the price of a new Apple box lately? The Apple geeks can't afford new ones!
  • People with no life, of course. Don't you ever read this site? ;-)

  • Ease of Programming (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tony ( 765 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @02:16PM (#5912524) Journal
    I learned to program on the Apple ][, back in 1978. I learned BASIC in about a month, then insisted the school buy Pascal. Then I moved on to assembly (ahh, Sweet 16 mini-assembler, built right in!).

    I learned how to program within a month, and within a year was using the built-in mini assembler to write programs that controlled the video directly (for games, of course). I *knew* that machine, inside and out. I could look at a JSR opcode and know exactly which system call was being made.

    Today, even programming the most trivial program can take a month. Learning a new system? My nephew (who is the age I was when I started programming, and he's lived with computers almost his whole life) is having troubles learning how to write the simplest program.

    Why? Because it's all too damned complex.

    People learn using building blocks. Learn the simple concepts first, then build on that knowlege to learn more and more complex things.

    Problem is, it's tough to do that with modern computers. I think that is the primary appeal of Linux, to me. It's not as hard to start simply, because the simple stuff is exposed. Overly-complex systems designed to hide the fundamentals will never lead to a generation of people truly *good* with computers. Good with a particular system? Perhaps. But good with *computers*?

    Not likely.

    That's where the love of the old machines comes from.

  • Apple // community is strong (Score:4, Informative)

    by w_arthurton ( 53211 ) <thewayner&gmail,com> on Thursday May 08, 2003 @02:18PM (#5912547) Homepage
    As if this isn't enough publicity.
    The apple 2 community is going pretty strong.
    We have a news site a2central.com [a2central.com]
    We have a community at syndicomm.com [syndicomm.com]
    We have a quarterly magazine juiced.gs [juiced.gs]
    We have a compact flash reader, ethernet boards, and hard drive controllers are still being manufacuted.
    There is still software being released and old products for sale (see a2central.com).

  • The present could learn from history (Score:5, Insightful)

    by catdevnull ( 531283 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @02:42PM (#5912825)
    One slashdotter wrote that his Apple II is much faster than his Windows box comapring a 2 second boot to the 2 minute boot.

    I'll tell ya, today our computers could be so much faster if our code was as clean as it was when every bit was like gold. We take it for granted that RAM is so cheap and drive space will never get used unless we upgrade to the next big(ger) OS. C'mon--why should a new computer (Mac or PC) take 10 to 20 times longer to boot than a 20-25 year old computer?
    Today's programming tools will add a ton of libraries but only need a fraction of the functionality.

    Just think how elegant the programming was back then--it was genius because it had to be. I think Apple ][ users appreciate the art of minimalistic functionality of the old days.

    If our OS and software today were as stream-lined and artful as it were in the days of the bit shortage, our boxes would truly be impressive. Instead, we settle for mediocre bloat-ware. There's no reason a freakin' office suite should take 4 or 5 hundred MB of disk space. There's no reason my shiney new computer should take so much longer to boot than a C-64 or Apple ][ given the quantum leap in speed. It's like using bad gas in a Ferrari.

  • It's Apple ][, //e, or //c ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @02:44PM (#5912847)
    ... you insenstive clod! What's this Apple II you speak of?

    Apple ][ Forever!
  • What is it that keeps such an old platform going?

    The Dot-Com bust. Everyone had to hock there SUN E10000's for lunch money. All they had left were the Apple ]['s.

    True story. I read it on Slashdot.

  • Completely open - that's why (Score:5, Informative)

    by dinog ( 582015 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @04:29PM (#5913953)
    The Apple ][+ I had was as completely open as a computer system could be. The system came with a manual that included the 6502 instruction set and a complete listing of the rom. Many of the components were socketed. There were several general purpose slots. The system came with built in BASIC and an assembler. The docs included a complete schematic of the entire system.

    There, the system was completely documented, fairly complete, and seemed designed to be messed with. While the initial configurations were limited to 48k, the slots allowed as much memory to be added as you could power. Granted, it only had a 16 bit address bus to the memory, but bank switching wasn't nearly the huge overhead it is on a XEON PAE setup since the whole system ran on one clock. The slots, the video, the processor, the memory all ran at the same speed, no "wait states" or other bull crap.

    Because both the software and hardware were completely open, many peripherals quickly became available. No one seemed to have exactly the same setup, yet rarely were there any hardware conflicts and the such that are so common today.

    The software, in addition to being open, was very high quality. Though limited, the DOS worked great. Very fast compared to many other computers of similar vintage. The built in assembler may not have been that great, but it was ALWAYS there. If you did hit an error, the most important tools were built into the ROM. The assembler, the dissasembler, and BASIC were always there when you needed them. Tape access was always there as well. I used a giant reel-to-reel until I could afford a floppy drive (US $600 *cough*).

    The system always seemed to attract high quality weirdos. The Beagle Brothers had some great software (with the best ascii animations I can recall), many languages were available for it including PASCAL, FORTRAN, FORTH, C, and god only knows what else. If you wanted to do something different with a computer, this was the plaform for you.

    Despite being only an 8 bit machine, it ran almost as fast as the early 16 bit machines. Some things it even did faster. When you needed to do 16 bit math, optomized routines were built into the ROM. Also, many of the early 16 bit machines lacked the open architecture and expandability the Apple had.

    I'm sure I'm forgetting things, but the point is it was completely open and very well documented. Sure they enforced their patents against the cloners (Franklin Computers anyone ?), but they didn't prevent the computer's owner (that's you !) from using it how they wanted. It has been down hill from there folks. Now we're happy if just the software is open.

    Dean G.
    Send my regards to Trebor and Werdna !

  • The Apple ][ was (Score:3, Interesting)

    by PotatoHead ( 12771 ) <doug@NoSpAM.opengeek.org> on Thursday May 08, 2003 @05:16PM (#5914378) Homepage Journal
    open!

    Simple as that. There was nothing you could not know about the machine simply by looking at it actually.

    Because the system is easily understood, making it do what you want (provided that task is within the limits of the hardware) is easy.

    Someone needs to make computers like this today, only with slightly better video. Kids who want to "get good at computers" would be well served learning said machine inside and out.

  • Good reason it's not dead yet (Score:5, Informative)

    by zakezuke ( 229119 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @06:06PM (#5914771)
    The apple really hit the educational market. I remember a mass of applications schools at back when they were still somewhat new (1985 or so) that I have yet to see replaced. Mostly science applications, like real time how do go dig for oil, or how long it would take you to right a bicycle between the sun and pluto vs a car and light speed. Most of it was really simple stuff, but never the less, has yet to really be replicated under the PC platform.

    Aside from that, to be honest, I was never a big apple fan, damn bizzaro video and using a tape drive controler for disk storage, which while may have been cost saving in 1978, it was just being damn cheep by 1985.

    Plus you have logo, while not exclusivly a apple standard, is something that I feel should still be taught in the schools. Not because it's a good programing language, but teaches children to be logical.

    Actually I was a Texas Instruments fan, it also had a plethra of educational programs, but alas the project went bust.

  • My dad still uses one for his business! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Equuleus42 ( 723 ) on Thursday May 08, 2003 @11:19PM (#5916406) Homepage
    Believe it or not, my dad still uses an Apple //c for his business -- he uses it for writing business proposals and keeping inventory on carpentry items. He says that it just works... Even though there is a newer PC in the house, with MS Office on it, he still uses the //c instead. His ImageWriter II dot matrix printer still prints fine, his 180k and 360k floppies still work fine (mainly because the magnetic density is so low that they don't degrade as much with time), and AppleWorks boots up in the time it takes our PC to check its RAM. About the only problem he's had is with finding 5.25" DD floppies (though I've heard that some places sell them by the thousands for cheap nowadays). Anyway, he's been perfectly content using the Apple //c for the last 15 years! How's that for a switcher story?!

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