The Apple II Turns 35 Today 173
harrymcc writes "35 years ago this week, at San Francisco's first West Coast Computer Faire, a tiny startup named Apple demonstrated its new personal computer, the Apple II. It was the company's first blockbuster product — the most important PC of its time, and, just maybe, the most important PC ever released, period."
I started on one of those (Score:2)
The parents bought it for their business and for us kids.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Begone ye hippie!
Re:I started on one of those (Score:5, Informative)
Apple II was released in 1977.
Macintosh in 1984.
IBM PS/2 in 1987.
Remove you presence from our lawn, n00b.
Re:I started on one of those (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>sixteen colors
You poor souls. My PC had 4096 colors, near-CD-quality sound, and true multitasking (preemptive). In 1985. My PC was a Commodore. ;-)
Re:I started on one of those (Score:4, Informative)
And don't forget the GPU. In 1987, Gerald Hull even used it to perform simple additions for an Amiga version of Conway's Life, making it an early example of more general purpose programming with a GPU!
Unfortunately the Amiga wasn't that important, though it should have been.
Re:I started on one of those (Score:5, Interesting)
OTOH, I had little to no interest whatsoever in the internet at first, I couldn't see what was so fasinating about 'diplaying a formatted document on a remote computer'.
Re: (Score:3)
>>>Unfortunately the Amiga wasn't that important, though it should have been.
I don't know about that. When PC gamers saw the graphics & sound on Amiga, it created a demand for better video and sound card to satisfy them. Also you can still see Amiga graphics if you watch old episodes of Babylon 5, seaQuest, Hypernauts, or Star Trek Voyager (3rd and 4th season). They were using Amiga 2000s and 3000s with early versions of Photoshop/animation software.
Re: (Score:2)
It's a bit dishonest to say that 'you can still see Amiga graphics' when they were using Video Toasters for those special effects.
Video Toasters came with the still poplar and still supported LightWave 3D, not early versions of Photoshop.
Re:I started on one of those (Score:4, Informative)
>>>they were using Video Toasters for those special effects
False. I've used the Video Toaster in a television studio. It creates the various sweeps between scenes, but the actual graphics are generated by the Amiga's GPU. When you look at ships in B5 or Voyager, or subs in seaQuest, or CGI-generated people in Hypernauts, you're looking at actual polygon graphics produced by the Commodore Amiga at 704x480 resolution. It took the computer days-and-days of rendering to produce just a few minutes of CGI. (If you still have doubt, just watch the Star Wars Walker demo... all of which was produced without the video toaster.)
BTW thanks for fixing the name of the software (Lightwave). Over 20 years one forgets names. Even now I don't remember the software I used to get online, even though I used it daily. JXterm or something like that.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
False. I've used the Video Toaster in a television studio. It creates the various sweeps between scenes, but the actual graphics are generated by the Amiga's GPU. When you look at ships in B5 or Voyager, or subs in seaQuest, or CGI-generated people in Hypernauts, you're looking at actual polygon graphics produced by the Commodore Amiga at 704x480 resolution.
None of those graphics were generated by an Amiga "GPU", because the Amiga didn't actually have one.
It had a blitter, which is a fancy DMA memory copy engine, and it had "copper programs", which were an old and primitive tech (as in, not Turing complete) descended from Jay Miner's previous personal computer design (the Atari 8-bit). Neither is a recognizable relative of a modern GPU.
Programs like Lightwave 3D did everything with software rendering engines. The only function of the Amiga's graphics hardwar
Re: (Score:2)
>>>Amiga didn't actually have a GPU
Funny that. I could have sworn the Amiga came with not just 1 but *4* processing units. One for sound (SPU). Two for graphics (GPU). And of course the central processor (CPU). And they multitasked the execution of programs, such that one could be playing music code, another manipulating graphics, and the CPU crunching algorithms.
To imply the chipset was nothing more the dumb slave chips with no intelligence is a falsehood worthy of a politician. It was beca
Re: (Score:2)
The GA in the amiga could not be re-programmed in any way, so it coul
Re: (Score:3)
My PC was a Commodore. ;-)
This. When I started shopping for a PC in 1978, the choices were: Apple ][+, TRS-80, and Commodore PET. After playing with all three for several weeks ("Kid, if I see you come in my store again without buying anything I'm gonna call the police!") I picked the PET because it was so cool to be able to do "graphics" simply as printable extended ASCII characters, and animate them with PEEK and POKE directly into video RAM. I couldn't understand why people thought that stupid Apple was such hot stuff.
Of cours
Re: (Score:3)
Bah. Kids these days.
First computer: Processor Technology SOL-20. Intel 8080 processor, Northstar BASIC and a screamin' 143k floppy drive. 1975.
You kids and your square keyboards.
Re: (Score:2)
Bah. You kids.
Pre-built computers.
and I thought I wimped out on my first machine by using ICs and wire wrap . . . :)
hawk
Re: (Score:2)
This. When I started shopping for a PC in 1978, the choices were: Apple ][+, TRS-80, and Commodore PET...I picked the PET because it was so cool to be able to do "graphics" simply as printable extended ASCII characters, and animate them with PEEK and POKE directly into video RAM...
You could do that with the TRS-80, too. (I am not sure about the Apple.) Unfortunately the TRS-80 "graphics" were blocky monochrome things... I was attracted to the TRS-80 because I thought it was neat that it came with its own monitor, and I liked the crisp 64 x 16 screen full of text. It was *not* good for most graphic games, but some creative types did great things with it (witness Leo Christopherson's [leochristopherson.com] Dancing Demon [dnull.com]).
Re:I started on one of those (Score:5, Interesting)
I was able to get a standing pass out of art class as a sophomore in high school to go work on art projects in the Apple II lab for a couple of months. Our art teacher was on maternity leave. I decided I did not like the substitute teacher, and luckily for me she had been given the explicit instruction to let me do whatever the heck I wanted to. So I elected to spend my time elsewhere.
The graphics available from BASIC on the Apple ][+ were crude, but better IMHO than the programmable-character "graphics" available on the early Commodore and TI machines. I wrote code for all of them -- including a program that let you use a joystick or paddle for an on-screen "Etch-A-Sketch" style drawing program that would let you save and restore your drawings. Doing that by re-defining characters on the fly in BASIC was not much fun. It did have an advantage over the "real" Etch-A-Sketch in that you had to hold down a joystick button in order to draw, otherwise the single-pixel cursor would just be moved around. I wrote that same program in Commodore Basic for my best friend's PET (at his house while he spent the time playing Intellivision), TI-Basic, and AppleSoft Basic.
That was the level I was at when I started trying to do "art" on the computer. While playing with things and reading magazines from the stack in the corner of the lab, I learned about how the Apple colors were actually pulled off, and realized that White 1/White 2 and Black 1/Black 2 were a half-pixel offset from each other. This allowed you to draw a white line and then draw a pixel-shifted black line on top of it to get thinner lines, which worked great for crosshatching and other fill effects. That got me interested in the fact that the fonts exploited this feature to get smoother curves on-screen, and I began exploring writing my own fonts and doing graphics from inside the assembler/monitor. As a result, I taught myself 6502 assembler and wrote fast "vector" graphics routines that I could call from BASIC, as well as routines that let me draw my own text on-screen as well, not constrained to the rectangular grid of normal characters.
I had to demo how I had been spending my time to my real art teacher when she returned. She appreciated what I had accomplished artistically (including various "vector" animations), but understood little of it. Her eyes glazed over when I began explaining assembly language routines. I got an "A" for my self-directed art study though, which consisted mostly of learning 6502 assembler :-)
Re: (Score:2)
The Apple II was actually a very simple/primitive machine in terms of hardware - Wozniak managed to have most stuff done by the CPU and so reduce the number of supporting chips.
Re:I started on one of those (Score:4, Informative)
> true multitasking (preemptive)
Well... yes, and no.
The Amiga's UI was preemptively-multitasked (and interrupt-driven). To a large extent, Intuition was indifferent to the state of running applications. If an application crashed, the mouse pointer still moved, you could still drag screens, and you could still move and uncover windows. It SEEMED like preemptive multitasking compared to Windows, because Windows has always made applications responsible for managing their own window contents. If you obscure a window in Windows, Windows leaves it up to the application to re-draw it. In contrast, when you obscured a Window under AmigaDOS2.x (for instance), it just set a 'dirty' bit that didn't get cleared until the application did something to change the screen. As long as the dirty bit didn't get cleared, Intuition itself would save the contents of whatever got obscured, and put it back when you revealed the underlying window again. Under Windows, if the app crashed, covering the crashed app's window with another one just smeared it away into junk.
Likewise, Amiga's dialog boxes were completely indifferent to the state of the running application. This occasionally caused problems, because if your application threw up a dialog, then took a long time to do something before bothering to check its message queue, you could end up with absurd situations, like "User clicked BOTH 'ok' AND 'cancel' at least once".
In a real sense, Windows 2000 (maybe even NT) had better preemptive multitasking than the Amiga... but it didn't feel like it, because a badly-running (or crashed app) made the UI itself appear to be partly crashed. If you think about what Windows 2000 was really doing when it ran DOS apps, it was basically the equivalent of multitasking crack screens and megademos.
Put another way, the Amiga's multitasking was more sizzle than steak, but it pulled off the illusion well, and basically pulled off multitasking better than everything else in its era (Mac, PC, ST). Win32 multitasking (at least, NT and beyond) was technically superior in more and more ways with each new version, but because Windows apps themselves sucked so badly UI-wise when things didn't go well, the illusion of multitasking was prematurely shattered, and the user felt like it was inferior. If you really want to see true preemptive multitasking in a vintage OS, get Windows 2000 and run DOOM, WordPerfect for DOS, AutoCAD, and a bunch of other DOS apps in windowed mode. That was where Windows could really shine... it's just that by the late 90s, nobody really cared about multitasking DOS apps any more, and Windows did such a shitty job of multitasking the UI for actual Windows apps.
Re: (Score:2)
OK, let me put it another way.
On the Amiga, when your app was launched, you could "halfway humor" intuition, open a screen for your app, then operate within that screen with complete indifference to the rest of the system. By doing that, other apps could be allowed to run simultaneously on screens of their own. HOWEVER, your own app had to be somewhat well-behaved for that to work. If your app never checked its message queue, hijacked the interrupt vectors, rewrote the copper display list, or basically acte
Re: (Score:2)
I understand what you're saying, but I think it's more like the other tricks are _blurring_ the line that otherwise is a hard line.
In other words, it's preemptive if there is nothing an app can do to prevent the other apps from running. They may b
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, I think you're right. I guess my memory got a little fuzzy after 20 years (omg, has it *really* been that long? I feel old...). After reflecting on it for a while (and skimming a few ancient articles online), I think the years I spent writing PalmOS stuff kind of mangled my Amiga memories a bit. Thinking back harder, I think AmigaDOS multitasking worked through the video interrupt. From what I can remember, there was an official place to put your own jump vector (or maybe it was an official call t
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
>>>sixteen colors
You poor souls. My PC had 4096 colors, near-CD-quality sound, and true multitasking (preemptive). In 1985. My PC was a Commodore. ;-)
My NeXTCube with a NeXTDimension board crapped all over your Commodore. Not to mention the OS was lightyears ahead.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My 48K Apple ][ was my first major purchase (in 1981); it cost more than the nonrunning car I bought in 1980, and more than the total of the car and the repair costs to get it running. Saved every penny, used a used color TV for a monitor, hacked a gameport print driver cable, and with later purchases played marathon sessions of Wizardry 1 and 2. It took a year to save up enough for the floppy drive (a Lobo, not an Apple Disk ][ which I could not afford for another year) and a better monitor.
I still have
Re: (Score:2)
My dad's factory used networked apple ][s for production QC for YEARS, it was really the only cost effective data acquisition at the time. Worked just fine!
Re: (Score:2)
I started as a kid with a pretty sweet Apple IIe with dual disk drive, extended memory, and 80 column card. I learned basic on it, typing, and general computer knowledge. I loved that thing. I was absolutely heart broken when I found out that my dad sold it at a garage sale after I was in college for not much money. If I would have known he was going to sell it, I'd have bought it from him. It still worked great and meant more to me for nostalgia value than whatever pittance he got for it. Oh well.
Re: (Score:2)
I had an Apple //c for gaming, edutainment, LOGO, BASIC, AppleWorks (love those ASCII art works like multiple folders), etc. Fun times. :)
Re: (Score:2)
Then... After a few years, a new one came into the house.... Tandy 1000 with it's fancy pants 10 meg hard drive. Well now, aren't YOU special?
Sigh.
I remember occasionally it would glitch out and I would solve the problem by lifting up the front of the chassis by maybe 2 or 3 inches and let it fall down onto the desk. Worked like a charm. My dad disagreed, he prefe
Props to Eric the Half a Byte! (Score:3)
My old Apple ][+
Damn I'm old.
Re:Props to Eric the Half a Byte! (Score:4, Funny)
Are /all/ your computers called Eric?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
>>>By the time the Mac SE came out [1987], PCs had 386 CPUs, high colour SVGA, inexpensive digital audio
In 1987? That's a stretch. Maybe by 1990, but the PCs were still pretty expensive to purchase. And they were stuck with crappy Windows 3 or 3.1. (Yeah I remember.... I remember how much I hated it.) The PC gaming graphics still didn't look that great. So I stuck with the Macintosh and Commodore Amigas until 1998, then upgraded to a cheap PC with Win98 (because it had the same look-and-feel
Hooray! (Score:2, Funny)
35 years ago one could play games on their Apple computer, like Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Dragon Wars, Wasteland, among others.
Today Apple creates consoles that run Photoshop with one button to avoid confusion by 'savvy' users.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
35 years ago one could play games on their Apple computer, like Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Dragon Wars, Wasteland, among others.
Today Apple distributes the first and third most popular single Unix distributions in the world.
Re: (Score:2)
Apple distributes Android? :)
Re:Hooray! (Score:4)
You can still play [sourceforge.net] Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Dragon Wars, Wasteland, and others [asimov.net] on your Apple computer, even if it isn't 35 years old.
Re: (Score:2)
How would things go if you submitted an iOS version of that? Things have changed.
It's fun to ask people if they played the original Castle Wolfenstein, with most thinking of the much later Wolfenstein 3D. It was a pretty cool trick to get 'voice' out of an Apple ][ in the early 80's.
Re: (Score:2)
Look up Best of FTA [google.com]. Used to be you could get it to drop to a BASIC prompt, but I think the current version reboots on Ctrl-Reset. I tried changing the startup slot in the Control Panel, but got nowhere with that. I think you could still transfer ProDOS filesystem images over to it and use it as a more general-purpose Apple IIGS emulator, but I've not tried doing that yet.
Also celebrating 35 (this year not today) (Score:3)
- Commodore PET (same CPU as Apple II)
- TRS-80 with Zilog-80 processor (best selling computer of 1978, 79, and 80).
Source: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/12/total-share.ars/3 [arstechnica.com]
One Of The Most Expensive As Well (Score:5, Interesting)
Although not strictly the Apple II, the IIe was the first real computer brought into my house growing up. Now that I'm a professional working adult, looking back on that box with the green monitor, the one floppy drive, and other details I wondered how in the world my parents were able to justify and afford the thing! As the article correctly points out, at $1200~ 1980 dollars that is around $5000 today! That was probably the most expensive piece of technology in the house at the time and I never realized it at the time where instead I was simply happy to mess around with Applesoft Basic and various games.
Re: (Score:2)
As the article correctly points out, at $1200~ 1980 dollars that is around $5000 today!.
Close, but about $1000 [tomshardware.com] short
Re: (Score:2)
As the article correctly points out, at $1200~ 1980 dollars that is around $5000 today!.
Close, but about $1000 [tomshardware.com] short
How is an eBay auction today relevant to the adjusted price of a [computer] in 1977?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Although not strictly the Apple II, the IIe was the first real computer brought into my house growing up. Now that I'm a professional working adult, looking back on that box with the green monitor, the one floppy drive, and other details I wondered how in the world my parents were able to justify and afford the thing! As the article correctly points out, at $1200~ 1980 dollars that is around $5000 today! That was probably the most expensive piece of technology in the house at the time and I never realized it at the time where instead I was simply happy to mess around with Applesoft Basic and various games.
A couple of years ago people were spending more than that on big screen TVs. They've come down in price since. It all depends on whether you have a disposable income. TVs can be educational but are usually used to watch junk and a bigger TV adds nothing to the quality of the content (though bigger may impact learning/attention for younger children). Your parents through wisdom or accident chose to spend money on something that contributed to your education and your ability to compete. Then and now there are
Re: (Score:2)
I spend about eighteen hours a day with a computer on in my presence, and eight-plus hours interacting with one. I'd hazard to say that I'm computer literate.
I also happen to be one of those luddites who thinks people should learn to do math on paper first, only I prefer to think that it's important for a person to be flexible and capable of doing math without a calculator. You might never do long division again, but then again, you might; wouldn't it be a lot easier to have it already exist in your mental
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's funny; the basic argument that I hear for "more computers" and "more calculators" is that the calculator frees you from drudgery and allows you to spend more time on the big picture, or the important concept.
I'm not going to deny that this is true sometimes. But having been a teacher I also think that it's warning that the lesson isn't being done as well as it could be. There's so much in math and physics that can be done without pages of arithmetic or with just a limited amount of algebra or calculu
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
$1200??? Wow. My first computer was only $400 (the C64). For a CRT, we just plugged the thing into the TV.
Re: (Score:2)
Being able to be plugged into a tv was one of the outstanding features of the Apple II from very early on. You'd need a Sup 'R' Mod if you didn't have a composite input on your tv, but this was no obstacle.
IIRC the guy who made the things (per an agreement with Apple, who didn't want to bother with the FCC certification for it) sold a few hundred thousand of them.
Re: (Score:2)
It wasn't so much "didn't want to bother," but a deliberately distancing.
My understanding is that that circuitry had been meant to be part of the ][, but it would have crated FCC issues for all of the machines, not just the ones going into homes.
Sending it to another compay made it just plain not an apple product, and completely distance the real product from FCC rules, which were changing rapidly at the time.
Gee, if someone wanted to sell an adaptor for it, wow, that was cool, and it just happened that tha
Time to boot Oregon Trail (Score:5, Insightful)
Toast to evenings once upon with that soft green monochrome glow... and me dying of dysentery.
Re: (Score:2)
Wonder if I can get the apple ][ version of that game running under emulation or maybe it's off written in javascript or flash somewhere...
Re: (Score:3)
M.U.L.E.
Enough said. "Archon" was also a cool game. And Spindizzy. And Silent Service. And Red Storm Rising. And Pirates. And.....
Re: (Score:2)
Weird... I didn't play any of those on the Apple ][, and I played nearly everything on the Apple ][. Oregon Trail is the exception, because I was living in the state that created and funded it. I played a bit of M.U.L.E. on a trash-80 I think (youch!). Silent Service was definitely on a colorless mac, and Archon and Pirates definitely on an IBM PC. Spindizzy I've never heard of until now, but looking it up I see it was similar to Marble Madness, and I played the actual Marble Madness port, so I probably did
Re: (Score:2)
Collusion was great!
Re: (Score:2)
You can play it in colors AND online: http://www.virtualapple.org/oregontraildisk.html [virtualapple.org] ... ;)
was my first, too. (Score:2)
The Apple-][ was my first as well. I had to move beyond Integer Basic to asm in order to figure out the increasingly complex copy protection that was evolving as fast as we could figure it out ... Did my first BBS'ing with a Hayes MicroModem...
good times ...
iWoz (Score:2)
Started with a used ][+. Strangely, to this day, I've never owned another Apple product. In the early years, it was a matter of cost and availability to me. These days, I just prefer to stroll around outside the walled garden. But, man, I loved that computer.
Re: (Score:2)
Hah, ok, yeah, it did sound pretty pretentious. It's all true, though. I remember looking at some Apple system that had 128k or so in a glossy magazine thinking of all the stuff I could do with it. I have no idea what that was, but apparently it was some killer stuff. And then I went to work for a guy who gave me a used 286, and I was in the IBM PC world for good, trading up for better parts whenever I could.
And, seriously, I've never owned any iAnything. The walled garden thing is spot-on. I'd rather do wi
The domino that knocked all the others down. (Score:2)
The Apple ][+ (please, people, use the right characters for it) on which I learned to code back in 1980 in school, thanks to the incredible forward vision of a man I only knew as "Mr. McAniff." All good things in my life...and there are so, so many of them...came from that. Rest in peace, Mr. McAniff, I bow to you now and for all time.
Re: (Score:2)
characters depend on model, II appeared on the IIe platinum, I usually type // cause that is what my //e enhanced that we had for half my life, and the //c that I have today
Also 35 today (Score:2)
Maybe the most important PC ever released (Score:2)
Maybe not. The IBM PC was way more important.
There is a //e Enhanced sitting on my desk right.. (Score:3)
. now!
I've got a project going to put a modern micro-controller into it. There are times when I will write on it too. The keyboard just brings back a wonderful state of mind and many memories of happy times.
Like another contributor up thread mentions, I owe a lot to a Mr. Krouse, who put a few of us on the machines and encouraged us to "go boldly forth", and we did! Figuring out binary math on the blackboard, typing in 6502 assembly language into the monitor to make fast little subroutines, and sounds. Shape tables. Then there was Copy II+ Yeah baby! We had some of everything floating around the school.
Text adventures were the best. I still enjoy playing them. Heh, I've not looked, but those need to be on the smartphones yesterday. Hook 'em early.
LOGO, PASCAL, CP/M...
Artifacting. When I was a kid, the Apple graphics fascinated me. Other computers had a different look to them, well generally. It turns out Woz exploited NTSC to get color. The 3.58 Mhz color carrier present on composite video signals limits overall luma resolution. Small pixels end up getting translated into both luma and color because of their high frequency content. The phase between them and the reference color signal dictates which color will be seen.
Pixel position on the screen equates to color, in other words. Additionally, on all but the very first revision Apple ][ computers, the 7th bit in the high-res graphics screen would trigger a 1/2 pixel phase shift, creating the first "color cell" type graphics to be seen. Of course, that also introduced color clashing...
My first Apple experience was on the monochrome green or amber screen monitor. They had a fairly high image persistence too. I want one for some stuff today, for that exact reason. Man! We are tossing the CRT's at an amazing rate, driving up the cost considerably. I regret getting rid of my old one now, but I digress.
Simple on or off pixels made a lot of sense, until that Apple was connected to a TV where the color fringing on text could be seen, and a whole lot of it could be seen on the 80 column text! That triggered a lot of learning about TV signals, and artifacting on just about every machine I've been on since. If it outputs to TV, I've tried artifacting on it. Lots of fun.
Some of us in high school proposed making up a character set to provide for moderate resolution color graphics. Non user definable characters was seen as a clear disadvantage after we saw what the Atari, Commodore, and other machines could do. My CoCo also had a fix character set, BTW.
The number of variations on artifacted pixels ended up being quite high, with some impressive images possible. Before the Beagle Brothers software came out, we had written a simple painter program in Applesoft and were creating some fairly nice images, though many of those ONE DOT AT A TIME. When displayed on an 80's era TV, colors were seen all over the place, creating pretty solid pixel artists out of some of us.
(not me, I kind of sucked)
When double-high resolution graphics hit the scene, it became apparent that the 1Mhz 6502 wasn't really enough to fully exploit the machine capability. Until that time though, I was stunned at what people managed to do with the Apple. The other machines had faster CPU's, or better graphics chips, not just some hard-wired TTL thing, and that made for more appealing visuals in most cases, but... The Apple was a well rounded experience, and the funny thing about them was most owners had a good setup. Games saw good ports, and the experience, even the wierd audio from clicking the speaker was very good.
So much software for the Apple...
The best though? The machine was laid bare. It shipped with ROM listings, and the slots and pins inside just screamed, "hack me!", and the built in monitor said, "program me!"
Those years spent learning how to get an Apple to do stuff were responsible for my professional work today. We learned so much!
Some days, I'm crappy, bur
Appleworks Paid for Development of the Mac (Score:2)
At $250/copy, this was not a cash cow; it was a cash stampede. I got far more than my money's worth from it--used it hours a days for years.
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, same here. Great value, and everybody knew it. If they didn't, it only took a quick, "hey look at this!" demo to seal the deal. Notably, Apple still leverages software in tandem with hardware today. It's a compelling model. Not the cheapest, but very high value overall.
The only other company, I can think of right away, that did this was SGI. IRIX came with a nice set of basic multimedia tools.
Apple ][ trivia: 1-bit Stencil Buffer & Cutsce (Score:3)
Some cool Apple ][ trivia ...
- Karateka was one of the first games to have cut-scenes. Here is the end-game music in MIDI format =)
http://michael.peopleofhonoronly.com/dev/applewin/karateka/karateka_end.mid [peopleofhonoronly.com]
- Conan: Hall of Volta by Datasoft (*) was the one of the first games to use a 1-bit stencil buffer!
http://michael.peopleofhonoronly.com/dev/applewin/conan/conan_stencil_buffer.bmp [peopleofhonoronly.com]
- Broderbund games (Drol, Spare Change, Captain Goodnight, Choplighter, etc.) offered smooth animation because they used the (initially) undocumented V-SYNC: (Vertical Blanking) ! ;not VBL (VBL signal low)
RDVBLBAR = $C019
I highly recommend AppleWin for finding out old Easter Eggs =)
http://applewin.berlios.de/ [berlios.de]
* To see the stencil buffer you need
a) disk image
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II//images/disk_utils/cracking/the_saltine/Conan%20A.dsk [asimov.net]
b) Mount disk A in the first drive in AppleWin
c) press F2 to boot
d) at the intro. screen press F7 to enter the debugger
e) in the debugger type the following commands to view the HI-RES pages 1 or 2 respectively
HGR1
HGR2
The Apple II is no longer manufactured (Score:2)
Don't you actually have to be alive at 35 to reach the age of 35?
Apples have been obsolete and out of production for a long time. We don't normally talk about those who are dead, transformed into aquariums, and buried, as reaching a certain age -- corpses are ageless.
Re: (Score:2)
Don't you actually have to be alive at 35 to reach the age of 35?
Apples have been obsolete and out of production for a long time.
We don't normally talk about those who are dead,
transformed into aquariums, and buried, as reaching a certain age -- corpses are ageless.
My Apple II is still going strong.
I still have it. Yay. Best Apple product ever. (Score:2)
Don't like the mac, the iphone, the ipod, the ipad, or the isoul. woz++
First West Coast Computer Faire (Score:2)
I was there and stopped by the Apple booth to pick up one of their brochures after hearing about the company from a friend. Still think it is stashed away somewhere in my collection. I was a bit more impressed by the Compucolor, but that machine unfortunately never took off.
One amusing note was finding out five years later that Trip Hawkins had also attended the Faire that year and that's what led him to join Apple.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
anyway, AppleTrek is the one I found unique--the computer set its move before you made yours, and the Klingons had photon torpedos, too.
You could maneuver between two of them, the move. One would oft shoot the other--who, if he survived, w likely to return fire.
I learned to program cheating at that game
hawk
Ah, Integer Basic and Pascal (Score:2)
I was lucky enough to get an Apple ][ when I was a kid. Not the ][+ so it had Integer Basic not Applesoft floating point basic. So you could only use integers..
I remember many, many hours spent making an animation for my middle school art class project (everyone else was drawing stuff). It was a drive through the desert looking through a dashboard, with cacti going by and I think engine sound.
I remember getting a Language Card (a 16KB memory expansion I think) so I could use Pascal which was very cool thoug
Still in use (Score:2)
Prince of Persia (Score:2)
Re:"News" for nerds? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lemme guess. You are in the 18-24 demo?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Not fair. I'm still in the 18-24 demo and this is great to read. It helps me to learn more about the experiences of computer evolution. I still go on and on about the NES to the kids and they can't figure out the excitement I have. This puts it into perspective I suppose.
Re: (Score:2)
Computer evolution is a liberal myth! It's time intelligent computer design theories be properly covered in our educative system!
So, it all started with a forbidden apple...
Re: (Score:3)
Your assertion is provably false.
The submitter cared enough to submit it. The submitter is someone, and therefore not nobody.
It got approved to be an actual headline story. Those that approved it are also not nobody.
Your statement is better qualified as *YOU* do not care... and perhaps are incapable of imagining how anybody else could care.
Short of having some possible religious reasons to not recognize birthdays and anniversaries, I'm unsure why the fact that some other people might care about t
Re: (Score:2)
He must care some. After all, he clicked on the story to read it.
Re: (Score:2)
Imma fire up my C64 and play some jumpman.
Even the AppleFanBoy I am can agree with this! Jumpman > Breakout.
marketing (Score:3)
While i'm an Atari guy, i admit we lost and they won. Marketing is what made the difference.
And i disagree that it was a complete shoe-in for the average guy to want to buy a computer just because it was "affordable" ( a relative term ) as you more importantly had to convince them they wanted this strange new device.
Re: (Score:2)
I think VisiCalc sold more Apple II's than any marketing effort on Apples part at the time.
They did well in primary education as well -- I don't remember what they did to get Apple II's in seemingly every K-6 school (or classroom!) in the 1980's -- clever, though.
Schools (Score:2)
That was part of the marketing plan. Get the kids used to them so they will ask for them as adults.
To get them in there they got huge discounts, and sales guys bugging them to death.
Re: (Score:2)
>>>While i'm an Atari guy, i admit we lost and they won.
Only just barely. Apple in 1996 was deep, deep in debt. It was headed to the same black hole as Atari and Commodore fell into (bankruptcy). As Steve Jobs himself said, "We were only 60 days away...... I called Bill and told him to deal directly with me from now on." -- That's when Bill Gates gave Apple some cash, which allowed them to pay their bills, rather than defaulting.
Re: (Score:2)
Does it matter how you lost? I could go into how Tramiel's sons ( and illegal business practices from Nintendo ) killed Atari, or why commodore died out of the business market.. But its all academic, while we weren't watching, Apple beat us while we were all bickering about who was better than whom, and then IBM/MS almost beat Apple later..
End result is only 2 were left standing,and ultimately that is all that really matters in the business world.
Re: (Score:2)
>>>Does it matter how you lost?
Yes. History matters because you can learn from it. --- Apple didn't beat Atari and Commodore. The Intel/Microsoft dominance with ~99% of the market led them all to the slaughter. Commodore died in 94, Atari in 95, and Apple in 96 (almost).
Apple's saving grace was Bill Gates and Steve Jobs being friends, so that Bill helped-out Steve with some cash. Otherwise Apple would have disappeared too.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Agreed.
If it wasn't for the anti-trust lawsuit, Gates probably would have waited 60 days for Apple to declare bankruptcy and disappear as a competitor (as he did with Commodore, Atari, Netscape, ...). Today when he looks-on at Apple's dominance in the MP3 and smartphone markets, he probably wishes he had done exactly that. ;-)
Re: (Score:2)
Apple weren't in debt in 1996, they still had a considerable amount of cash on hand. However, what they were doing was not exactly growing as a business, to say the least.
Woz Floppy Drive (Score:5, Informative)
I'm sorry but there was something more: The Floppy drive, namely, Woz floppy drive... Did you ever use floppies with the other machines? Then you know what i mean, several minutes vs few seconds to boot the very same program, and hell nothing would crash if you accidentaly pushed a button when the drive was reading, unlike certain other brand...
Marketing pushed Macs later.
Re: (Score:2)
The (Woz) floppy drive probably saved me from never caring about computers. I used the Apple ][ with a tape drive one year in elementary school and the unreliable 7-8 minute load time was more than my attention span could handle. I probably spent an hour total in the lab that year. The next year (1978 I think, may have been 1979) they got disk ][s and I learned BASIC. By the next year, I learned assembly. Then came the Sneakers and Sabotage... I had been an Atari 2600 gamer before then, but 1981 was the yea
Re:marketing (Score:5, Insightful)
While i'm an Atari guy, i admit we lost and they won. Marketing is what made the difference.
Steve Wozniak's hardware, Steve Wozniak's software and Steve Jobs vision made the difference.
Okay, you win. (Score:2, Funny)
You're absolutely correct. You are the man. Enjoy your victory. Now, please excuse me while I go have sex with a woman.
Re:Most important PC released? Please (Score:4, Interesting)
Commodore, Atari, Coleco, Tandy, IBM - all were there to eat Apples lunch.
And every one of them is out of the PC business today.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
dad bought ours for his biz
Re: (Score:3)
I loved the disk care warnings on the Beagle Bros. floppy disk envelopes. I always took care to not put the disk in the toaster, but I unfortunately didn't heed the warning about feeding disks to an alligator. Who knew that would ruin them? ;-)
I also loved the "ragtime" graphics and fonts on all of their products.