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?"

Comments

What keeps 'em going

[krog]

What is it that keeps such an old platform going?

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

Re:What keeps 'em going

[tweder]

Ah, sentiments like that make me want to dig up my old C-64.

Re:What keeps 'em going

[trailerparkcassanova]

Hmmm, I never considered machine language on anything a "joy".

Now assemblylanguage on a 6502 is a different story.

What keeps it going? Nostalgia

[stratjakt]

Theres a PET/V20/C64 comminity, an Amiga community, an Atari ST community.

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

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

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

Re:What keeps it going? Nostalgia

[gwernol]

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

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

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

Interestingly - and hopefully somewhat back on topic - where I do think nostalgia plays in is a harking back to my childhood, when I first saw live steam locomotives at work. I'm not trying to recreate the world of 100 years ago, but I am trying to recapture the awe and excitement I felt 30 years ago when I first saw one of these machines come alive. I suspect that many of the remaining Apple ][ enthusiasts are re-living to some extent their first computer experience. A lot of people in adult life try to recapture some of childhood's sense of wonder through collecting toys or pursuing interests that were first sparked when they were young.

What is it that keeps such an old platform going?

[SnakeEyes]

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. :)

Parent modded as troll?!?!

[ClippyHater]

Someone needs to get a sense of humor, or perhaps a date...

Usefullness & other reasons not to change a go

[adzoox]

Why change a good thing?

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

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

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

"What is it??"

[Blondie-Wan]

"What is it that keeps such an old platform going?" Well, I'm sure it varies from platform to platform, but in the case of the Apple II family, I'd imagine it's in part because it holds immense historical significance; this platform pretty much got the personal computer revolution off the ground. How different would things have been if not for the Apple II and, say, VisiCalc?

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

Old home computers are *understandable*

[Junks Jerzey]

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.

Apple II loads faster than todays machines

[tekrat]

As an owner of several Apple II machines, I'll tell you that the Apple II is light years faster than my windows machine.

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

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

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

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

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

So, yeah, basically I'm a loser!

Re:Easy

[Anonymous Coward]

The software infrequently crashed

I had an Apple IIc for years and years when I was a young-un. I'm having a hard time just this minute... but I can't seem to remember anything EVER crashing. I must have spent a thousand hours using AppleWorks and Print Shop and whatnot, but I can't remember a single failure of ANYTHING.

Sure, it wasn't that complex, really, but how many systems today can boast that they truly NEVER crash?

A lot of it is...

[Johnny318]

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

Appleworks. (Macros!)

Schools!

[burgburgburg]

My wife is a teacher for an advanced program at a grade school. Along with some donated old PCs (running Win95), they have two Apple IIes, and an old Apple printer. They still work, the programs still work, and since people don't like spending money on their childrens education that could go to SUVs instead, they'll keep going for a few years more, probably. Or was that bitter?

Re:Schools!

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't realize that kids were in school to learn how to use Windows computers.
I thought they were there to learn reading, writing, math, history, science, music, etc. The computer is simply a tool to help in the process.
If they are still using Apple //'s, then obviously they are still working and probably require little or no support.
Replace them with PC's and the school will have to hire a few dedicated support people.
Besides, by the time the kids are out "in the real world", Windows will bear no resemblance to it's current form. (How many "non-techie" people use DOS commands anymore, but that was all there was 15 years ago...)
Of course, if the school had Mac's 15 years ago, almost everything the kids learned about using a Mouse and a GUI interface would still be valid.

nostalgia

[Anonymous Coward]

In 10 years, will anyone be nostalgic for the dell optiplex 486? Maybe for Doom, but not for Dell.

It wasn't entirely the machine, it was also the community, the games, the BBS experience.

reminds me of GameCube

[deadfishhotmail.com]

o elegant. so few chips in side the damn machine.

Thay's the exact thing I thought of when I first opened my Nintendo GameCube (especially after having opened my ps2 and an xBox).

They actually CAME with manuals!!!

[SvnLyrBrto]

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

The present could learn from history

[catdevnull]

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.