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Still Life in the Apple II Community
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?"
You shall not have died in vain!
I'm not quite dead yet, sir!
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.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
"What is it that keeps such an old platform going?"
Dateless Friday and Saturday nights, that's what.
Mostly because of games like "Carmen Sandiego" and "Miniature Golf" that made the Apple II so much fun.
The anti-salmon
The same thing that kept Grateful Dead fans going keeps these guys going.......electric Kool-Aid
WTF? Over?
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
What is it that keeps such an old platform going? i think its the logo. does "an apple a day keeps the doctor away" work for computers too?
How old is the Bible?
Boredom?
No girl friend?
No money?
417 5-1/4 floppies that would otherwise be useless?
A machine that was 'da bomb 20 years ago, but now makes a good paperweight.
I have a IIc and a green monitor, but I am not going somewhere to meet others with one... I mean come on, my palm pilot has more power than that thing...
Silly Rabbit: tricks are for kids.
From the title I thought that this was about paintings of old Apple computers.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
will they bring back the Commodore 64.
Cyberbite Networks - Web Hosting, Dedicated Servers & Colocati
The website is hosted on an Apple IIe... Now, get back on topic!
Of course the porn won't look nearly as good on those shitty Apple II screens as it does on modern monitors, but that is what your imagination is for.
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.
Come on, Tinkler, Tink!!
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.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Everybody knows that it's because Apple II runs on Energizer batteries.
Lots of guys who are not getting laid keeps old platforms going.
paintball
Someone needs to get a sense of humor, or perhaps a date...
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.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
At least for me. Whenever I want a good laugh I pop up some old game I used to play via an Apple IIe emulator and be amazed at how primitive the graphics are. The first Ultima, Bolo, or ... SuperQuest. I'd actually love to get an old IIe now that I have a huge amount of software (due to the internet) that I never had back then ... but the pain of transferring all this stuff onto floppies somehow keeps this task at bay. Don't have time for that nightmare.
... the apple is in the still life.
Doh!
Maybe the fact that many schools are (or have) throwing them out. Free machines are always welcome! How about a cluster of them running Linux?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Synergy, man, _synergy_!
Oh yeah, plus fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency!
Join us in Kansas this July!
But they won't be in Kansas, they'll be in Missouri. . .
There is both a Kansas City, Kansas and a Kansas City, Missouri (the one in Missouri is the "real" one). Avila University is in Kansas City, Missouri. Maybe they need to change it to MFest. . .
hippies
What is it that keeps such an old platform going?" Er...maybe the newer ones are expensive and slower? I'm joking i bought an ipod yesterday..oh shit!
Please stop promoting those horrible websites. Please.
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. :)
If it ain't broke don't fix it. I loved the learning software on the apple II's at my grade school. At home I had better computers a C64 and an Macintosh IIsi at the time and still liked playing Oregon Trail.
10 ? "Bryan loves Sheila";
20 goto 10
Hours of fun in elemtary school with that one.
or there was always the rocket ship blasting off
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
I used to live up the block from a coin op video game warehouse. One of the guys had a custom painted van with the graphics from the Fireball game on the sides. Looked pretty sharp. I think he was the creator or artist.
-"The early bird catches the worm, but the late bird sleeps the most"
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.
Exactly what is an 'asspussy' anyway? And what's sexual about it? Inquiring minds want to know!
Apple II the first Open Source liek Computer..Long LIVE APPLE II!
Don't Tread on OpenSource
These guys remind me of a professor I had in college a couple of years ago that kept two PDP-11's in his office and one at home. He worshipped them. Best hardware ever, he would say.
He was also the same guy that had 365 pairs of pants and 365 shirts and did laundry once a year so maybe that should have shed a little light on his mental state.
every once in a while I'll boot up my Apple ][e, plug in the joystick, and fire up Rescue Raiders. 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 coolest club on
What is it that keeps such an old platform going?
Maybe these people just Think Different.
I ran across this a while back, and it can be used on the old Apple II's, although it is somewhat limited, it is worth checking out.
The Apple II can function in cold environments. For instance if you want to control your telescope in an unheated environment the apple II will to the trick.
When I was at Clemson, the ceramic engineering department had a IIe controlling a piezoeletric thin-film coating furnace as well. It basically controlled the temp of the furnace and a motorized rig that dipped samples in precursor solutions, then lifted them in and out of the furnace at set rates and dwell times. I laughed out loud when I saw it.
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.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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!
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Judging by the easy slashdotting of KFest.org, I'd bet that it's hosted on an Apple IIe as well.
Apple computers will work untill the cows come home?
My favorite episode of Futurama is the one where Fry has to play Space Invaders against the aliens from the planet Nintendoo 64. He has a 2-liter of orange soda and an all-Rush mixtape. Ah, the memories.
I'm curious how many slashdotters still use one of this beasts, and how tricked out they are.
The Apple IIc runs Ninnle, don'tcha know!
lack of $$ to upgrade to a real machine.
Ho-hum.
(I appreciate the fact you're trolling. YHL. HAND.)
Has anybody noticed that whenever Apple is doing something new and getting some attention, the trolls come pouring out from under the rocks? Lately many different mac-sites on the web has experienced trouble with underaged trolls who have nothing better to do than posting anonymously and cowardly
That's always been a good sign...
Be like the twenty-second elephant with heated value in space-Bark!
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, learning to program in basic. Our basic programs were labs where we would run quick projectile motion models with varying height parameters (launching something off a cliff as an example) and by adding wind resistance. The labs showed that most of us were really bad at estimating how far objects would travel in non-perfect (ie non-vacuum) conditions. Last I heard the physics lab is still using those machines though the teacher is retiring at the end of the year. . . .
What is it that keeps such an old platform going?
Simple, pure, unadulterated, virginity. :)
*ducks*
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
Was I the only one who read that to mean "stillborn", or "no activity?"
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
Somebody mod this AC and his worthless sites into oblivion please.
. I love the sound of burning women and screaming rubber....
Visit the Asimov.net FTP archive. Emulators, games, practically everything. Fun stuff...
What is it that keeps such an old platform going?
I'd say spite. I'll never forgive Apple for completely dumping their entire Apple II user base with nary a thought to their loyalty. Hence I never bought another Apple product again.
I'd make it to this meeting if I could, just to stick it to Jobs.
if(!toilet_paper) roll.replace(new roll);
Parent post links goatse....
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
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Appleworks. (Macros!)
This looks cool. If I lived in missouri, I'd definitely be there. I'll have to consider taking a mini vacation.
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?
Nerd Powah! :D
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
It wasn't entirely the machine, it was also the community, the games, the BBS experience.
Anyone look at the price of a new Apple box lately? The Apple geeks can't afford new ones!
yep
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!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Wow so a handful out of the 600,000 registered slashdot users sent in their picture.
Of course the most self obsessed people with inflated egos send in their pictures while the fat ugly fucks do not.
You obviously have a pitiful understanding of basic arithmatic.
As 4 mediocre looking broads is not half of 600,000.
Oh well maybe you'll graduate 2nd grade math someday.
Of course we could get all fancy and discuss how only people with a positive feeling about their appearance will send in their picture to begin with but i'll wait till you grasp the advanced concept of half first.
People with no life, of course. Don't you ever read this site? ;-)
Edith Keeler Must Die
Yes, the word 'goat' IS in the url, but that has to do with the main content of the article (the reason i'm linking is because of the sidebar feature).
Just because a URL contains the world 'goat' in it, does NOT necessarily connotate goatse.
Sheeesh!! Ease off of the warm bawls, people!
We played it for a week once and still weren't able to achieve any significant rank. It sure
was fun selling Arms and Opium, though.
"Bad joss, Captain. 427,000 pirates are attacking."
"A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself."
And in all that time no one has tried to overclock the cows?
The secret is to use the Hong Kong warehouse. You can store 10,000 units of stuff there and wait until the prices go up in Hong Kong to sell it.
Shouldn't you be studying?
it just has to be....
Wake up and vote right.
The Movie Monster Game!
Yeah! Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!
I'm convinced--they should all be upgraded.
I bought a //e at a flea market a couple of years ago for $10. It has an 8MB ram card, superserial card, and 2 Disk ][ drives. No software though.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that there's a program available that would allow me to boot DOS through the serial card. (IN#2, then upload as text.)
Anyone know about this? Any suggestions?
Coming soon from id Software, "Where in The Hell is Carmen Sandiego"!
Shouldn't that be "American McGee's 'Where in Hell is Carmen Sandiego'", featuring Carmen Sandiego as a demented dominatrix with a harem of perverse petty criminals trying to rob the Prince of Theives blind?
0 1 - just my two bits
So was another game on i think the trs-80 where you were on a boat, and you bought/sold goods, and occasionally fell victim to pirates. I can't for the life of me remember that one. It was terrific.
The apple II will be around long after Slashdot is bankrupted and sold off to google for $500 (Canadian), which will be in 3 months.
I just want to make sure everyone here is aware of this band,
http://www.epitonic.com/artists/barcelona.html
whose songs include "social engineering", "i have the password to your shell account," and "c64" ("got a modem when I turned 13/But my dad doesn't know what telophony means/only 300 baud/Never leave my room -- isn't that odd.")
good music, too.
No doubt... and unlike the bible, the Apple ][ programmer's manual is actually consistent.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Was that Taipan?
:)
*flash* *flash* You are being attacked by pirates!!
That game had this hilarious flaw. You know how the moneylender charged you absurd amounts of interest? You could pay him back more than you borrowed, and it kept applying interest on the negative amount you owed him... So you could just use him as a high interest bank...
i don't read slashdot anymore.
...have they ported Linux to it yet?
As if this isn't enough publicity.
The apple 2 community is going pretty strong.
We have a news site a2central.com
We have a community at syndicomm.com
We have a quarterly magazine 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).
wayner@pobox.com -- Wayne A Arthurton -- www.pobox.com/~wayner
Now there's a question.
How long would it take an Apple ][ to compile the Linux kernel?
Thay's the exact thing I thought of when I first opened my Nintendo GameCube (especially after having opened my ps2 and an xBox).
Who is this "Poster" guy and why does he own all of my comments?!?
Went to a school auction last week and bought 3 Apple IIe's, 20 Mac LC III's, 2 Quadra 610's, and a bunch of matching monitors. Total cost: $27.07. Now I just need some ideas on what to do with them!
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
Boredom... sheer boredom.
Smeghead every day of the week.
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
Imagine all the people...
I thought *all* electronic devices enjoy cold temperatures?
put something more stroke-worthy in there, dammit
I was in 7th grade or so, I made the credits for a movie we were doing for class on my Apple ][, using PRINT and changing the vertical, put it in a loop and the credits scrolled! I then took the coax output (brilliant, no fancy VGA monitor needed, plug it into the TV!) and put it in the VCR, credits! I felt like Spielberg. :)
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.
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
... you insenstive clod! What's this Apple II you speak of?
Apple ][ Forever!
love
Wish the Chemistry department would get some sense about their hardware. When I took Chem 101/102 at Clemson (1998-99), they had bunch of Mac Quadras/Performas in the Chem labs. They ran a Hypercard stack program that told us everything we needed to know to complete our assignments. Web access was with Netscape 3.0. If you spilled hazardous chemicals on them - oh well, no great loss.
Unfortunately, this arrangement didn't last. The Chemistry labs now have (old style) iMacs. The hypercard program is now web based, and more inconvient than ever.
Did I mention that tuition DOUBLED in this time?
...man, I loved that game. I even wrote a fairly passable version of it for the C-64 one summer in the 80s when I was stuck taking care of a relative with a broken leg.
If you really want a trip down memory lane, grab a Palm (or a Palm OS emulator) and download this freeware version. It doesn't quite FEEL the same, but it comes close enough to get the nostalgia going.
I would have to say that explosives are the most abused technology in all of history.
If they went dateless in order to play with their computers.
My Ohio scientific 6502 ran
1 MHz. I remember I overclocked it to 2MHz
and it ran fine.
I completely agree about saving the taxpayer's money, and re-using these older systems in schools when possible.
/. before, I work for a company that refurbishes old Apple Macs, primarily for use in daycares and schools (but lately, we've sold more to individuals as first computers for their own kids).
//c system, but we don't really specialize in going back any further than the original Macs.
//c or //e is the general lack of a hard drive. Floppy disks can and do wear out, and I think it's more practical for schools to have a system that can power up and run all of its intended software without the user intervention of inserting/removing specific disks.
//e as a dedicated system is a great idea. The dairy example you gave is one such perfectly good use. I've also seen model railroad enthusiasts do similar things with old IBM XT's and Tandy computers. They rig them up so their printer/serial ports send control messages to switch the trains onto different sections of track, control lighting of the model homes and businesses on the layout, etc.
//e, and nearly as cheap to get ahold of nowdays.
As I've noted on
We get the occasional donated Apple
The only problem I've seen with the pre-Mac Apples like a
I think using a
For all around school use, though, I think systems like the Mac LC3 or LC575 are a better option than a
Seriously, I loved the Apple II - they say you never forget your first. The 6502 was a pleasure to learn on - not like the x86. When we got those I took one look at an assembler sample and said fsck that!
Shouldn't you be at work,
trying to accumulate enough
money to do something about
the negative balance on your
paycheck?
One of my fondest memories is when I upgraded from the //e to the //GS. I figured out that I could play all the old games that I had mastered at twice the clock speed. Rescue Raiders was never the same!
I should dig my GS out of the closet!
~$ telnet kfest.org 80
Trying 64.144.87.102...
Connected to kfest.org.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.0
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 08 May 2003 20:08:42 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux) mod_ssl/2.8.12 OpenSSL/0.9.6b DAV/1.0.3 PHP/4.1.2 mod_perl/1.26
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Nya nya nya Sqwawk sqwawk! Wipcha! Ahh.. Nya nya nya.. - shoots self in head.
Eat at Joe's.
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.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
That's so cool! It Was taipan. thanks to everone who reminded me what the name was. How awesome that game was. I don't know if I want to find it now and play it though. It sucking would ruin the sentimental enjoyment, kind of like when I resaw Buckaroo Banzai when I was 19. Talk about ruined.
I believe these people took the slogan Apple ][ Forever more seriously than Apple ever imagined.
"I tend to think of OS X as Linux with QA and Taste", James Gosling, creator of Java
The main problem with the Model T is that today's kids can't appreciate or relate to it. I'd suggest a couple Model T owners make minor efforts to get a new generation interested in the Model T.
Mainly, rice it up. Adding a big boat spoiler to a Model T would do wonders for appealing to a younger generation. And wouldn't we all like to see a lowered Model T, or some kick ass hydraulics -- you could call it a Model humpTee! Don't forget the boomin 18" woofers, or a fresh set of wide-ass wheels.
Not because we can't afford new one (private school buys computer by the tons to waste money and keep non-profit status) but because we still have some old software that still needs the apple][. No real reason to replace them and the software would have to be rewritten.
I first mis-interpreted the title as an art-intro: a painting of two children sitting in front of the screen, watching the wagon roll west....
I still have my Apple IIc, which I've had since early 1986, and it's still going. I still use it, mostly for nostalgic purposes. Ahhhh...the external 5.25 floppy drive...made it so easy to copy floppies! Oh, the 128K RAM...I was the RAM envy of my block, although my friend's C64 had all the cool games. The startup sounds....BEEP....DHDHDHDHDHDHDHDHDHD...the good 'ol days!
Who is moolah?
hmm.. i've read this story before.. euhm.. in the comments of just about every story on apple.slashdot.org get a life :p
Which is also how I play Apple II games, even though I have a IIe stuck away somewhere.
Wozniak designed this system not for software people, but for hardware hackers like himself. Hardly suprising that this aspect of the platform is still of interest, especially when you can buy a II for pocket change.
Not quite what you are talking about.. but here it is anyway.
yeah right! that's bullshit. jesus was a he bitch man whore.
Don't you ever read this site? ;-)
;-)
huh, am i supposed to?
Less is more !
Oh god.
Not just AppleSoft Basic but graphical ASB. GR. HGR. Anyone else remember the animated rainbow triangle? My second programming class in highschool had a final project that was a HGR program. Mine was a stick figure washing a car then a bird came and dumped on it. Most of it was a side view, but I showed one 5-second clip of the car from the back displaying my teacher's license plate number. I got an A and he never got the joke.
I remember really wanting a IIe for Christmas one year. Had scavanged a bunch of supposedly broken add-on's from school. Damn salesman talked the 'rents into the just-released IIc. Nice machine at the time to work on, but a real PITA to take apart and put back together again. That's probably why dissecting a laptop has never really scared me.
Now that I think about it, that machine is probably still up in their attic. Along with a whole bunch of add-ons: extra floppy drive, joystick, printer, modem, and about 1000 double-sided discs with pirated games. Gotta love Copy ][+ 8.1 for bit by bit disk dupes.
- If we aren't supposed to eat animals, then why are they made out of meat? - Steven Wright
And look what he caused us!
If you go to Kansas City, be sure to check out the World War I memorial!
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 !
Quality Goatse link. Would click through again. A++++
"What is it that keeps such an old platform going?"
Simple. It's really cool to get an old machine to do something new. Like internet for example, or 3D graphics.---- "Excuse me. Where's the children's gun section?"
with only 2 data registers (and 8 bit at that) i'm surprised you can write any code on the apple ii... but then again, brainfuck is even less... hmm... an assembly language brainfuck interpreter for the apple ii would be a good idea...
I mod down pyramid schemes in sigs.
I thought Linux needed a 32-bit processor!
--bhtooefr as an AC - I'm out of posts for today!
FUCKIN HELL YEAH! Nothing pleases me more than a Laker Loss. I'm so goddamn tired of hearing your world champion lakers every fucking time the damn news people blow their load of spooge over a stupid kobie ballhog dunk. Fuck that asshole and his cornholing big brother SHACK. Clippers in '04!!!!
How do you get through the day without putting a bullet in your head? Or is that too much work?
You're right about one thing: Print editors and writers are terrible at spelling and grammar. I don't think they put enough effort into it.
But this nonsense about, "If I can't get what I want, I won't get anything at all," is a load of crap. How do you expect to get anything? Get off your ass and get out in the world.
The geek culture (of which I am a part) has an unfortunately large subculture of people (of which I am not a part) who seem to think that if they wait long enough, whatever they want will come to them. It's unfair to say that life is passing them by while they wait, but more accurate to say that the life they have while waiting sucks. Maybe this stems from early childhood development where learning the trivia taught to them in school ("Washington was the first president of the U.S." or "2+2=4") came so easy to them that they determined that they probably didn't need to apply themselves to get anything they wanted. Then they get out in the real world and can't figure out why the inflow stopped.
The basic model of existence that can be applied to all life forms comes down to, "Ask yourself what you want, then what you're willing to do to get it." Payment usually outweighs the reward. So, why do we go on? Life is an integrated solution.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
It's the built in mini assembler! I wish my PC had one!
I did something similar for video-labeling my VHS tapes with my IIgs. However, some of my newer equipment doesn't like the result on the VHS tape: My Dazzle* Hollywood DV Bridge can't make sense of the signal on that part of the tape, treating it as if there were no video signal present.
But maybe that was just a quirk of the IIgs and the ][ worked better for this.
I had Apples in high school. One of them was an original ][ that got upgraded to a ][+, mainly because the people servicing it didn't know the machines were different. Practically every chip got replaced through their test and replace procedure.
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.
Blogging because I can...
What you say is true now. but at the time static ram was not cmos. It was bipolar transistor based and current did flow.
They will work until tax money taken, "for the children", is spent in schools rather than their administration, bussing, lunches and other nonsense.
Louisana is a showcase of shuch schemes. We spend more on education per capita and student than all but two or three states, and have the second or thrid lowest standardized test scores. The money does not go to teachers or equipment that matters.
He's wrong though. The average public school is a dumping ground of old computers, all of which would run just fine with free software. Baton Rouge had a lab with freeBSD where the students could do anything they wanted. I know one student who was told to help reduce inventory by removing computers they had so many.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Computers were a true joy back then. It was all new, a frontier to be explored. It was exciting to be there with the pioneers, and actually be one yourself. And best of all, you could actually understand how it all worked.
Duct tape, what else?
And the brethren went away edified.
wouldnt a cluster of apples be a tree?
think about it.
>What in god's green earth makes you think life was simpler and better than now?
How about room and board paid by someone else who even wipes your ass for you for a few years. Holy Nell... that's always was why it was better.
-pyrrho
All those Eamon text based RPG games, which, while were easy to cheat on (ok so charaters had +31 everything), it was fun to design my own levels and adventures. Endless fun with what was just lines of simple basic.
0- Eamonman Proud member of DNRC
I loved my //c back in those days. A pity my sisters threw it away because "you only look at it once in a month." They also flushed all of my floppies before I knew the machine had left the building.
--- Sigmentation Fault - Comments Dumped
If everyone is going to talk about old systems, you have to mention the Radio Shack Color Computer (CoCo.) At one point there were 4 or so magazines devoted to it, and many many of them around the world. Ah, I miss that machine. (6809!)
Cheers
Carlos
]CALL -151
*C600G
APPLE ][
(...being less powerful than a modern-day pocket calculator...)
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
No, THIS parent is lying.
A couple of years ago, at the Canberra Show, I saw a carnie booth selling Bioryhtms for about 5 bucks each. It was being driven by an Apple ][ plus ... I talked to the sideshow operators, and they had tried to replace it a couple of times with newer computers.
... but the Apple kept chugging away.
The newer computers kept breaking
Woz knew how to build a machine, thats for sure.
Seems to be your idea.
I used to feel this way until I knocked around the world a little bit and saw the way the other 2/3s live.
:)
Unfortunately, we're better off to educate the spawn a little bit than to have to live in the same city with the spawn's ill raised spawn's spawn and their 17 cousins. You can't keep moving to the suburbs forever. Then you just end up with something nasty, like the city of Houston, TX
Comprador means "buyer" in Portuguese.
Comparador means "comparer" (I believe it's a kind of basic circuit).
Donate money to the Sea Godess, pay the gangster and borrow money... even though you don't need... you will be less robbed.
Money in the bank is a safety net in case something real bad occurs to your warehouse.
I agree with all that.
.doc file with 2MB is a normal thing (and don't even start to argue, 2MB is way conservative...).
But you're preaching to the choir, in the case of people who care, like me.
And you're talking to deaf ears, in the case of "modern" people, who think a 2-page letter in a
*Sigh*
I still have several old Apple's ranging from //e's to several IIgs systems. The real shame is that I used to run a mirror of the Cabi, Asimov, and Ground Apple archives but was sent a nice nasty letter from my ISP to shut it down due to it's "illegal" content. Seems that some kind fellow on the comp.sys.apple2 news group felt a moral obligation to turn me in.
"The strong will do what they want, the weak will do what they must."
-Thucydides
Too bad that personal ambitions kill good ideas.
Less is more !
I had a Quadra 660Av Mac. It lasted from 1994, until I had a flood in my basement earlier this winter. That was the best computer I ever owned. I did all my papers for school on it because MS Word 7 > MS Office XP, and I had a laserwriter. Now that that is dead, I have to buy a new Mac, cause they last forever.
50% - Non-Apple II users
30% - Apple II users getting laid
20% - Apple II users not getting laid
paintball
it also manages gradual temperature changes (1/hr) for different stages of brewing
You should make that code available for free !! It would give a whole new sense to the expression "free as in..."
I am just curious to see how many /.ers will be coming to Kansas City for this meeting. I am lucky to be just 20 minutes away.
eh, this sucks, I am going back to bed....
Cause it is just so geek chic to have that oh so cool amber monitor!
:-( --- argh. Despair, I owe again.
I understand (I heard it on the radio, so who knows for sure) That Reunion tower's lighting system is controlled on an apple 2, and has been from the start.
Its showing its age, and likely needs a good looking into.
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?!
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I can hardly stand it!
I played this simplistic, but addictive game on my ][e. You flew around in this kind of high-tech balloon refueling and getting food, and then in the cities, buying things, and gambling.
I never finished the game, and when I think back on it now, I really feel like this game had no ending. The whole point was to fuel your imagination as to what that most amazing thing you were searching for was...Anyone know?
On another note, I used the ][e, and know most of the games, but never got beyond doing some very basic BASIC programming. Now I've only recently started learning C and Perl, and want to try programming on the ][e. Anyone have any advice? Also, I've tried to get an emulator running on my linux box, but found it not trivial.
hey weird.. I know you in, well not meatspace, but in a slightly smaller internet land...
i don't read slashdot anymore.
a beowulf cluster of these!
FUCK apple!
Apples are rare over here in the uk.
So give me a C64 or even better, a C65 Whehey!
ahh nostalgia.... it's not what it used to be
I don't own an Apple II but I know what keeps it going: love :-)
This has always been the strength of Apple: they create computers that their users love, something MS never accomplished (okay, they don't make computers... yet).
...just not quite as consistent as it should be if it were either divinely inspired, or based on eyewitness accounts of things which actually happened rather than verbal accounts of things which people merely claimed to have witnessed.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
...in those days you had an enormous manual to teach you how to program the mechanics of 3D rendering, etc.
"Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something" - Plato
...he said "crank"!
I was in hi skool at the time the //e came out. I didnt do very good in computer class due to making signs with print shop pro and playing castle wolfenstein but it started me on a life of computers. I didnt get my own apple until 1987 or so when I bought a //+ with no disk drive for $200 hard earned dollars and eventually got my controller card and disk drive from Jameco. That //+ which I still have had a Videx encoder board that allowed lowercase characters, keyboard macros, and other cool stuff. I also bought the AE 80column card for that computer too and could run Appleworks 1.3! Over the years I now have every apple // model except for the original non autostart ROM ][ and boxes of hardware and programs. It's always fun to play those old games and booting DOS 3.3 in seconds.
CATALOG,D1 , PRINT PEEK (-16336), INT, GR,TEXT,INIT HELLO, control+open apple+delete anyone?
-- After all is said and done, more is said than done.
Apple //s, C-64s... before the GUI and corporate operating system blues.
Yep, those were the days.
Nostalgia is a cancer.
Just say No.
How do you get through the day without putting a bullet in your head?
Just barely. I don't like the idea of the mess it would cause.
Or is that too much work?
That's the main reason I'm still alive. Shooting yourself is far from trivial (many screw it up and just get terribly injured) and getting the right pills takes a major effort too.
But this nonsense about, "If I can't get what I want, I won't get anything at all," is a load of crap. How do you expect to get anything?
Usually (aside of chicks) I get exactly what I want.
Get off your ass and get out in the world.
Whenever I do, I must conclude that it wasn't worth the effort. Usually I end up feeling up worse than before. Any sane person will avoid situations that make him feel worse than before. And don't tell me that only I can make a difference. While in theory true, it doesn't do any difference in practice so I can save the effort and spend the energy on something more rewarding.
It's unfair to say that life is passing them by while they wait, but more accurate to say that the life they have while waiting sucks.
Depends. Not getting laid kinda sucks at times but it also means you got your freedom. Taking school/job aside (currently ain't doing anything real at all), I can get up whenever I want (usually that would be about 12:00) and generally do whatever I want too. Looking at it objectively, it ain't too bad at all.
Maybe this stems from early childhood development where learning the trivia taught to them in school ("Washington was the first president of the U.S." or "2+2=4") came so easy to them that they determined that they probably didn't need to apply themselves to get anything they wanted.
Partly. But in many cases (mine included), life up until the late teens was entirely effortless, too.
The basic model of existence that can be applied to all life forms comes down to, "Ask yourself what you want, then what you're willing to do to get it." Payment usually outweighs the reward. So, why do we go on?
There's a crappy evolutionary left over along the lines of will to life that provides you with some very basic hope for a better future even if objectively, that's entirely wrong. In my case, it sure as hell ain't the fear of death (I simply lack it) but possibly the fear of pain until you're really dead. If I were diagnosed with HIV (not bloody likely) or cancer or got blind/whatever, rest assured that I would spend (on opiates, probably) whatever money I could get ahold off and then commit suicide.
On Topic, when I was still wasting my youth as a painter, I spent about 6 months writing a simple drawing package for the Apple IIe, complete with a simple vector font library so that I could place text at any size or orientation into my images. This was around 1985-86 and I was using an Apple Lisa 2, at home, to prototype my paintings before committing to canvas (much more expensive than fan-fold paper) but my high-school only had Apple IIes.
I'd already been programming for a number of years, but this was the first time I actually tried to write something big and of my own devising. I stumbled upon the concept of top-down design and step-wise refinement almost immediately, which could probably be taken as an indication that Art was not my real calling.
The IIe was a nice machine, but was awfully slow, even in '85. I remember that, even with a fairly well optimized circle drawing algorithm (a lookup table for sines and cosines and reflection along two axes), you actually had to wait for the figure to draw on screen.
Quadras work really well, especially for hypercard. It is stupid for them to upgrade to a low-end system and be running flash all over the place though.
Thats funny i dont remember posting this.
IE You're not alone in that.
I still jump when I think of of the sound those Nazis would make when they were coming after you.
Once again, I find that shiznit necessary write in defense of myself 'n my beliefs, know what I'm sayin'? First things first: Vsync's insults always follow da same pattern n' shit. Tha dude puts da desired twist on da actual facts, ignores inconvenient facts, 'n invents as many new "facts" as necessary convince us that that shiznit's perfectly safe drink 'n drive n' shit. Do yo' ass really think that university professors gots conform they theses 'n conclusions tha dude's patronizing prejudices if they want publish papers 'n advance they careers, as Vsync claims? Wake up! Vsync's claim that tha dude is merely trying make this world a better place in which live is factually unsupported 'n politically motivated n' shit.
I, hardheaded cynic that I am, like speak of tha dude's ass as "childish" n' shit. That's a reasonable term use, I claim, but let's now try understand that shiznit a little better, know what I'm sayin'? For starters, everybody is probably familiar wit da cliche that I am flat-out tired of Vsync's psychological bullying, know what I'm sayin'? Well, there's a lot of truth in that cliche n' shit. As that last sentence suggests, I has a tendency report da mo' sensational things that Vsync is up , da mo' shocking things, things like how tha dude wants defy da law of da land n' shit. And I realize da difficulty that da average person has in coming grips wit that, but tha dude's dissertations are not izzle only concern." To state da matter in a few words, tha dude's obiter dicta are continually evolving into mo' 'n mo' soulless incarnations." Here, I'm not just talking 'bout evolution in a simply Darwinist sense; I'm also talking 'bout how if Vsync would abandon tha dude's name-calling 'n false dichotomies, that shiznit would be much easier fo' me get da facts out in da hope that somebody will do something solve da problem." Do not let inflammatory rhetoric 'n misleading 'n inaccurate statements decide yo' position on this issue." Is that shiznit important that this is one letter that Vsync doesn't want yo' ass read? Of course that shiznit's important." But wass mo' important is that tha dude's indifference only adds da problem n' shit. Am I aware of how Vsync will react when tha dude reads that last sentence? Yes." Do I care? No, because tha dude extricates himself from difficulty by intrigue, by chicanery, by dissimulation, by trimming, by an untruth, by an injustice."
Having studied tha dude's charges 'n finding 'em groundless, I gots now tell da world that there is no place in this country where we are safe from Vsync's expositors, no place where we are not targeted fo' hatred 'n attack." Statements like, "Education without action creates frustration, while action without education leads unilateralism" accurately express da feelings of most of us here n' shit. I doubtlessly can't stress this 'nuff, but that shiznit would be wrong imply that Vsync is involved in some kind of conspiracy squander irreplaceable treasures." It would be wrong because tha dude's hatchet jobs are far beyond da conspiracy stage." Not only that, but one of tha dude's legates once be like, "Ethnocentrism 'n sexism are identical concepts n' shit. " Now that's pretty funny, of course, but I didn't include that quote just make yo' ass laugh n' shit. I included that shiznit convince yo' ass that Vsync believes that tha dude is a perpetual victim of injustice n' shit. Sorry, but I has call foul on that one." I do not propose a supernatural solution da problems we're having wit Vsync, know what I'm sayin'? Instead, I propose a practical, realistic, down--earth approach that requires only that I renew those institutions of civil society -- like families, schools, churches, 'n civic groups -- that warn da public against those harebrained gadflies whose positive accomplishments are always practically nil, but whose conceit can scarcely be excelled."
There are two classes of muthas in this world." There are those who make empty promises, 'n there are those who convince muddleheaded, detestable pettifoggers stop supporting V