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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.
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!!!!
How old is the Bible?
From the title I thought that this was about paintings of old Apple computers.
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
True...forgetting oregon trail was a big mistake. I played that game for speed. Let the rest of my family die...it will only make me faster! That's how I played...
The anti-salmon
Coming soon from id Software, "Where in The Hell is Carmen Sandiego"!
When it's done, real soon now.
grnbrg
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.
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
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. :)
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 */
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.
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.
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.
Apple computers will work untill the cows come home?
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. . . .
Visit the Asimov.net FTP archive. Emulators, games, practically everything. Fun stuff...
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!)
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?
Anyone look at the price of a new Apple box lately? The Apple geeks can't afford new ones!
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.
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."
Ah...lemonade stand....I lived for those "hot and dry" days...now I live for the sound of "three frags left.." *sigh*
but back to the topic at hand. IN SOVIET RUSSIA, DYING PLATFORM USES YOU!
OMG! Wau!
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.
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
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?!?
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...
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!
Imagine a Beow... *whack*
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
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
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 !
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
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...
There is also the Stack register and the Flags register, but those are both special purpose and cannot be used for just anything (in particular, the Stack register contains a pointer to the return address of the current subroutine in memory page 1, and the Flags register changes everytime a Load, Add, Subtract, Increment, Decrement, Logical And, Logical Or, Logical Xor, or BIT instruction is executed).
GNO/ME, like Linux, was a Unix work-a-like. As I recall, the system had a limit of 32 concurrent processes, but otherwise emulated a slow Unix machine rather well. We even had dmake for dependency-checking Makefiles.
And BTW, /. is not only for Linux. Don't be a bigot.
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.
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..."
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!