Celebrating 26 Years of the Apple ][

jgoeres writes "June 5th is the 26th Anniversary of my first favorite fruit-flavored computer. In honor of this, the Baltimore Sun is running Part One of a two-part interview with Steve Wozniak. When The Woz speaks, I listen. Perhaps it's blind hero-worship, but he seem to embody everything good & stable that his partner lacks. Don't forget to give the man props for his mad Tetris sk1llz, too."

Comments

fp!!

[Anonymous Coward]

fp for teh lunix fagz!!! kill more blacks!!1111..

FastMap Software

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

Has anyne got some ancient PLD programming software called FastMap? It has an 'fm.exe' and is used for generating JEDEC fusemaps

If you know anything about this software, please reply.

Thanks,

Ted

Woz is a good man

[CptChipJew]

He gave us the original Apple, the Blue Box, and spends his free time teaching computers to children.

By the way, Apple-History.com has tons of data on every computer Apple ever built, including the Apple ][. Definitely an awesome place to get the specs.

Ah the good old days:

CPU: MOStek 6502

CPU Speed: 1 Mhz

FPU: none

Bus Speed: 1 Mhz

Data Path: 8 bit

ROM: 12 k

Re:Woz is a good man

[Anonymous Coward]

1mhz. wow! image the speed a program would run on todays computers. 2400mhz - if we were running programs from those day's it'd be 2000 times faster at least... but we're not, we're using bloated sloppy programs that are coded inneficiently.

Re:Woz is a good man

[CausticWindow]

Woz was blue boxing (a felony btw), but he did not invent it.

Here's the real story of the blue box.

Re:Woz is a good man

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah --- how awful of us, running graphic design and photo editing software rather than 2000-times overspeed Horace Goes Skiing. How dumb we are.

Re:Woz is a good man

[bhtooefr]

Think 1000 times faster. I've used Apple II Oasis, and combined with Windows (XP) bloat and Windows (any version) bloat, it's not 2000 times faster.

Re:Woz is a good man

[Anonymous Coward]

2000-times overspeed Horace Goes Skiing.

That would be like playing Super Street Fighter II on the SNES in stupidly fast mode. Always a winner on a lung full of Amyl and a phat spliff.

Re:Woz is a good man

[BWJones]

Ah the good old days:

CPU: MOStek 6502

CPU Speed: 1 Mhz

FPU: none

Bus Speed: 1 Mhz

Data Path: 8 bit

ROM: 12 k

Those look like the Apple][+ specs. The ][+ was my very first computer I purchased as a ten year old in 1980 with funds from mowing lawns around our neighborhood for a year. I got it with the disc drive and that funky green Apple monitor III with a 16k language card, a modem card and that Apple dot matrix printer. It's funny but I actually used that computer as my home computer up until 1989 when I purchased my IIci making the ][+ the longest lived computer in constant use in my history of computer ownership. Nine years of hacking, programming, writing papers for college classes, and the first forays into the ethernet makes for some fond memories of a computer system that was remarkably flexible, extensible, powerful and elegant.

Thanks Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. Your vision of computers transforming the lives of average citizens has indeed happened.

Re:Woz is a good man

[EricHsu]

Yeah, 1 MHz, but an efficient megahertz. It felt as fast as a 8 MHz 8088 PC.

Remember when the 8MHz Zip Chip and 10 MHz Rocket Chip came out? Man, that computer FLEW. My senior year in college, my roommate used to play Prince of Persia at top (10x) speed. Then for a further challenge he'd flip it on this weird mirror mode we found and play (and win) with the monitor upside down. Brilliant, but weird.

I threw out my souped-up Apple IIe three years ago before moving cross-country and I've had pangs of regret ever since. How are my kids going to learn computers and programming? Not on Win 2010 with C++; I'd rather give them an Apple II, a machine you can understand completely from hardware to ROM to RAM.

Eyes glazed with nostalgia, Eric

PS. Don't even get me started on The Beagle Brothers....

Re:Woz is a good man

[mgs1000]

Dont forget that your Pentium or Athlon has probably a better design than that old 6502. In such that there ever was a 2400 mhz 6502, it would probably be quite a bit slower than any modern processor.

Re:Woz is a good man

[jeremycec]

Some other memories of my Apple ][+

• Evolution - a great game
• PrintShop - indispensable for making dumb banners and cards
• 64 KB of memory - who could ever use that much?
• Dual 5.25 floppies - yes, we were rich
• Logo/Turtle - a fun programming language
• My first program (can't recall if this is correct Applesoft BASIC syntax):

10 REM A PROGRAM TO PRINT RANDOM LINES OF STARS
20 X = RND (1000)
30 Y = RND (80)
40 FOR A = 1 TO X
50 FOR B = 1 to Y
60 S$ = S$ + "*"
70 NEXT B
80 PRINT S$
90 PRINT
100 NEXT A

Note no GOTO's and even copious commenting! I was a natural at age 8!!! :-)
(I see an unitialized variable in there though, oh well)...

Cheers,

Jeremy

Re:Woz is a good man

[jwilcox154]

Imagine a Beow.. *Whack*

Re:Woz is a good man

[HTH NE1]

No, that's not correct for AppleSoft BASIC. RND takes a seed value as a parameter and returns a floating point number from 0.0 to 1.0. Some changes:

20 X = RND(1) * 1000
30 Y = RND(1) * 80
60 PRINT "*";
DEL 80

The last two changes avoid running into the garbage collection routines for dealing with strings.

I think you also need a:

15 TEXT : PRINT CHR$(4); "PR#3"

to disable any graphics mode and activate 80 column mode, if a card to enable it is installed or part of the firmware. Assuming you have DOS or ProDOS loaded, otherwise:

15 TEXT : PR# 3

Nice that you didn't even need a disk operating system to program, though saving to cassette tape was difficult (the IIgs didn't even have a cassette output port).

Uninitialized variables weren't a problem in AppleSoft BASIC. And the LET statement was generally useless.

Re:Woz is a good man

[ncc74656]

All those string operations might cause the garbage collector to kick in...and the one in ROM is dog-slow. (ProDOS's BASIC.SYSTEM added faster garbage collection.) Try this instead:

10 REM A PROGRAM TO PRINT RANDOM LINES OF STARS
20 X = RND (1000)
30 Y = RND (80)
40 FOR A = 1 TO X
50 FOR B = 1 TO Y
60 PRINT "*";
70 NEXT B
80 PRINT
90 NEXT A

Of course, you could just make it a one-liner:

10 X = RND (1000): Y = RND (80): FOR A = 1 TO X: FOR B = 1 TO Y: PRINT "*";: NEXT B: PRINT: NEXT A

Re:Woz is a good man

[bluethundr]

Just for shits and giggles, I installed win 3.11 on my 1.6 Ghz K7 and figured I would just watch it fly! The speed increase? Unimpressive! I love playing with old hardware...right now I have an Amiga A2000 that is my current fascination! 7Mhz 68000 CPU with 8088 bridgeboard and AMAX cartridge with mac 128k Roms...Runs Mac 6.0.8 baby!

At any rate, it's amazing to me how stuff written in DOS just isn't that much quicker on the modern CPUs. But then, I was just playing with interfaces, and haven't yet tried any games under DOS.

I still like playing with my Apple ][ collection as well. One day I hope to code a tcp/ip stack in 6502 assembler for the ][c.

Re:Woz is a good man

[bhtooefr]

Most old games have speed throttling to work on future computers. Some won't work on anything faster than a 200MHz box, but can be hacked with debug to work anyway. If you have problems, there's something called MoSlo that is crippleware (for the free version) that works wonders.

Re:Woz is a good man

[jeremycec]

Beautiful. Thanks!

I vaguely recall about RND returning between 0.0 to 1.0. I was thinking though, that if you seeded it with 1 [RND(1)], you would get from 0.0 to 1.0, and if you seeded with a larger value, you would get a whole number up to that value. I must be gettingthat confused with other BASIC's.

J

Re:Woz is a good man

[malfunct]

The reason those look like the Apple ][+ specs is that the Apple ][ and the Apple ][+ were exactly the same except for which rom they came with and the base amount of memory shipped. There was nearly no architectural change until the Apple ][gs was shipped. The IIc+ had a 4mhz processor (65c02 I think, or however they labeled that one) and the IIe got an 80 column card and extra memory by defaut. (btw this was all out of my head so excuse any slight inaccuracies).

My favorite computer growing up was an Apple ][+, a few years later I got an Apple ][c+ which ran appleworks and word perfect much better :) I used the ][c+ until I was a senior in high school to publish all of my papers for school.

Re:Woz is a good man

[usotsuki]

(Correction - the original ][ only had 8K ROM, not 12. The ][+ had 12K, because M$ BASIC was bigger than Woz's.)

Don't forget Wolfenstein 3-D and Gno Multitasking Environment for the IIgs!

And GS/OS is "TEH BEST GUI EVAR", LOL

I have an Apple //e Platinum at home (GTE 65SC02-2 CPU, throttled down to about 1.2 MHz; 128 KB RAM, 16 KB ROM). I still use it, although more often I use Dapple ][ (see link), which is a pretty good approximation of it.

BTW anyone want to write an unencumbered version of the Apple ][+ Monitor?

-uso

Re:Woz is a good man

[usotsuki]

Oh yeah, Beagle Bros. *g* Lots of stuff my foster brother pirated off 'em, and I pirated off him :)

The ROM isn't that hard to grok anyway. The ][+ has 12K of ROM - 2K monitor and 10K M$ (!) BASIC. I'm trying to replace the monitor with some C code, which is called by special illegal opcodes stuffed into the monitor ROM, and allow the use of the emulator with only a 10K chunk of code from SimSystem IIe's free distro (again, M$ BASIC).

-uso.

Re:Woz is a good man

[Anonymous Coward]

FYI:

It wasn't a MOSTEK chip. It was built by MOS Technology, a different company, which was in turn founded by Chuck Peddle, an ex-Motorola employee. Woz originally used the 6501 chip, which was pin-compatible with the Moto 6800 -- but Moto threatened to sue them for selling a near-copy of their chip, yada yada. So they changed the pinout and made it the 6502.

Re:Woz is a good man

[Jackson]

I feel more admiration for Woz (and Jobs) than I do for Bill Gates.

Obviously Bill G _______ (fill-in-the-blank: made greater impact - fostered more technical innovation - blah,blah) but early stories, which may or may not be accurate, were of Woz sharing out the neatness of what he discovered with others, and Bill retaining and selling his, and getting so angry at his BASIC leaking out to the community, etc.

It's harder to assess Woz's impact on the world, as the things he came up with, don't have his name legally stamped on them, and what they lead to.

If I factored out the technical impact of their actions, etc. and just viewed which guy I would rather go over to his house tonight and drink beer with, and shoot the breeze, it's Woz. So that's why I second that Woz is a good man.

Jackson

Re:Woz is a good man

[klui]

I recall my first BASIC program... 10 PRINT "I AM A STUPID COMPUTER" 20 GOTO 10

Re:Woz is a good man

[Anonymous Coward]

"Nine years of hacking, programming, writing papers for college classes, and the first forays into the ethernet makes for some fond memories of a computer system that was remarkably flexible, extensible, powerful and elegant."

Excuse me, but ethernet for the Apple IIs were never available then. I know, because I had wanted the ethernet card they made for the //gs. Yes, they have it now, but it's not by Apple Computer Inc, and no, it does not work on the ][+

I used my //gs until 1996.

-- "proud owner of TWO Woz machines"

Re:Woz is a good man

[gfody]

don't forget the bottleneck on most things has nothing to do with cpu speed. it will most usually be fsb and memory latency which has not increased as much as the cpu clock.

old 386, 33mhz fsb.. new P4 2.4ghz 133mhz fsb

Re:Woz is a good man

[Anonymous Coward]

Prince of Persia...

surely you are having a hallucination induced no doubt by all the endogenous euphoric chemistry that occurs in your body when discussing Apple ][.

I feel certain the program you mention was Karateka, I mean, how many games had the flipped over version thing. BTW: it was on the back of the disk, if you put the disk in upside down the game came up upside down (assuming you did a double sided copy when you pirated it as I assume)

It's a great game to play in emulation still... a bit easy, but very zen like in it's timing requirements.

{passes out from nostalgia}

Re:Woz is a good man

[BWJones]

Excuse me, but ethernet for the Apple IIs were never available then. I know, because I had wanted the ethernet card they made for the //gs. Yes, they have it now, but it's not by Apple Computer Inc, and no, it does not work on the ][+

Ahem, modems were available then and all one had to do was dial into a university network. Yeah it was slow, but then there were no graphics to load either.

Re:Woz is a good man

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I love my Amigas even more than the IIc. Currently, I'm using arcnet cards for the amigas, but with that bridgeboard you should be able to use a cheap 8bit isa ethernet card (not as good as a proper ZorroII nic, but $1 instead of $100).

A real geek would also have an Atari ST, however. ;)

My Apple IIe though, is getting more decked out every day. Trying to get the localtalk card in it working right, and I soon hope to have an omninet network to plug it into. Even making an effort to really learn VHDL, so I can finally design the glue logic for an ethernet card (cs8900 based). That, and the super serial card with uIP and some custom apple2 slip software....

Still, from time to time I'll dig up an old magazine that claims there was arcnet for the apple II, or even more bizarre, token ring (at 4mps). Can anyone confirm or deny this?

Re:Woz is a good man

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Yeh, the x86 has at least 1 more general purpose register.

Re:Woz is a good man

[EricHsu]

I feel certain the program you mention was Karateka, I mean, how many games had the flipped over version thing.

Hee hee! Karateka was a classic. That blasted bird.

Actually, both Karateka and Prince of Persia were written by Jordan Mechner, so it must have been a weird quirk of his. It was definitely Prince of Persia, because when he played in mirror mode, we always called it "Bruce of Bepzig" (approximately "Prince of Persia" in backwards funky font).

I actually bought PoP, weirdly enough. :)

It's a great game to play in emulation still.

The existence of emulators was what convinced me to trash my //e, but again I regret it now as having the actual hardware really would be different for a child learning. Not to mention my hundreds of now-unreadable 800k 3.5" disks in ProDOS format.

- Eric

Re:Woz is a good man

[Anonymous Coward]

LocalTalk cards for the ][ series were available, however.

Re:Woz is a good man

[scm]

Woz (and Jobs?) built the first *digital* blue box (built from specs obtailed at the library at SLAC (Stanfor Linear Accelerator Center)).

Re:Woz is a good man

[shfted!]

Actually, the CPU/Bus speed wasn't 1 Mhz -- it was 1.023 Mhz. It's right there in the technical manual. :)

Re:Woz is a good man

[CodemonkeyUK]

'A real geek would also have an Atari ST, however. ;)'??? Its a piece of sh*t! The Amiga p*ssed all over it!

Re:Woz is a good man

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Oh my god. A flamewar from the mid 80s has just been ressurected! ;)

Moderators, don't mod parent as troll/flamebait, you don't understand the joke.

Re:Woz is a good man

[nr]

Today we are using higher level languages to remove the underlying complexity to make it simpler and more easy to develop programs.

machine code -> assembler -> C -> C++ -> C#
or
machine code -> assembler -> C -> C++ -> Java

The bad thing is that the price you pay for abstraction is performance. As you say, if we wrote our programs like back in the ol' days in pure assembler it would be blitzing fast.

But I doubt anyone would like to go back to assembler programming, so I think the path we should go is to create more efficient high-level languages so we can squeze out more performance from the underlying hardware.

PacMan

[traskjd]

I'm not sure if the Apple2E counts here but...

Am I the only person who still finds himself humming the tune to pacman on the Apple even though it's been like 12 years since I last played it? :-) Ah, the memories!

Re:PacMan

[xpurple]

You are not alone. Sitting beside my new iBook is my trusty IIgs :)

Re:PacMan

[Obfiscator]

I was more of a Lemonade Stand guy on the Apple IIC, myself.

I can barely remember the "music" to it, but you can't complain about the graphics. The sun only had ten pixels, max, and you could see them plain as day.

Re:PacMan

[Anonymous Coward]

Now there's an unforgettable tune.

Re:PacMan

[Flabby Boohoo]

Wizardy and Castle Wolfenstein brings back fond memories of using my Apple IIe...

Re:PacMan

[roe1352]

the IIgs rocked! You could go into the control panel and change the speed from 1 Mhz to a whopping 2.4Mhz! Now that was fast!

Re:PacMan

[Jad LaFields]

Ah lemonade stand... that was good stuff. I remember my school had all these old Apple IIes and we would 'computer class' every two weeks because someone thought it was important for 7th graders to be learning how to use these new-fangled 'computer-thingies', and all we'd do during class was play games. I think the rationale behind letting us play Lemonade Stand was that it taught us "economics"...

Re:PacMan

[Zathras11]

Those are great! I also enjoyed Rescue Raiders,
which was like Choplifter on steroids. Too many
others to mention. I'm lucky, as I still own my
original Apple II+, and over 40 other video game
and computer systems. :^)

Re:PacMan

[nyseal]

Ahhhh....the ol' castle; I remember it well.....it stole many an hour of my pre-teen days! I still have my IIe and the castle disk....I think I'll spend my Friday night powering it up....(with a few beers of course!)...thanks for reminding me!

I hate the Apple ][...

[Ziviyr]

Mainly because I think its inferiorness clogged up the market for the Commodore 64.

I may be wrong, But I feel that the Apple ][ was fairly useless in comparison.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[windows]

Not really. The Commodore 64 was the best selling personal computer ever. Commodore died because they produced a better product (the Amiga) but didn't market it well. It's unfortunate, but marketing gives an edge of an inferior product over one that is superior. I'm not referring so much to the Apple ][ so much as to the early Macintosh and the IBM PCs of the time. IBM has always been successful because of their marketing, even before PCs. They won out in the 1960s for the same reason. The Commodore 64 had superior graphics and it cost less than the Apple ][. That was the height of Commodore. You can't blame Apple for Commodore's marketing failures, though.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[mirko]

Well, even the first Acorn BBC computer was quicker, despite its use of the same chips . :)

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[Ziviyr]

I just tend to see more Apples than Commodores, thats why I figured that. Also, sorry I have to reiterate, but bleh. Apple ][ was horrible!

I recall the slow agonizing death of the Amiga, I think it may still be languishing. THAT was a sweet system until OS3.5 blew it to heck. Commodore's implosively misguided development and greedy people up top was only the beginning of that ride...

Reminds me, I have a battery that needs cutting out of an Amiga 2000. I wonder if I could get a toaster for it at throwaway pricing...

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[Ziviyr]

I've heard murmurs of Acorn. Why not have a slashdot story on that. It'd be interesting at least.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[Anonymous Coward]

Open letter to the linux community,

Dear LInux Peoples, I know the only reason for linux advocacy is to spite and harm microsoft financially. A secondary reason is to intentionally harm the old-school Unix vendors such as Sun and SCO. This behavior can and will be prosecuted under RICO laws as well as the PATRIOT II act(s). You Un-American, Pro-Commie, Anti-Israel non-combatants will burn in legal hell. Your assets will be forfeited. Your families will be humiliated. Cease and Desist now linux fags or lose everything.

Sincerly,
Coaltion to Stop Flag-Burning

P.S. See you in Camp X-ray, Gitmo.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[mirko]

Well, we, former Acorn users, would not like being given the impression we are as much cursed as our Amiga fellows. :-/
Acorn is dead, RiscOS is not that well : seeing the most recent RiscOS computers can be emulated at full speed on a Celeron is just another evidence I had to switch to OSX...

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[JohnsonWax]

That's fair. Most Mac people have the same sentiment about Wintel boxes these days.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[Jonathan]

Mainly because I think its inferiorness clogged up the market for the Commodore 64.

Yes -- you're right. Having a disk drive that was actualy reasonably quick was really inferior. The glacial speed of the C64's disk drive was a design feature. It let you do Zen or something while things were loading.

In all seriousness, the only real advantage of the C64 was that it did have superior sound to the Apple ][. But think about it -- it came out *five years* after the Apple ][. (1982 vs 1977).

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[Malfourmed]

You can't blame Apple for Commodore's marketing failures, though.

But you can blame Microsoft for Linux's marketing failures! ;-)

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[Ziviyr]

Having a disk drive that was actualy reasonably quick was really inferior.

The disk subsystem did lack refinement. But it could act as a second audio channel. ;-)

In all seriousness, the only real advantage of the C64 was that it did have superior sound to the Apple ][.

It could speak English with the right software!!

It also had graphics that didn't look like some bizarre hack, and it had a number of somewhat useful interfacing ports.

But think about it -- it came out *five years* after the Apple ][. (1982 vs 1977).

That was the detail I was missing.

The Apple ][ must break down less or something though, because the Apple:Commodore ratio I see seems to tilt towards Apple over time.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[zakezuke]

Actually I rather thought that commodore's failure was an attempt to produce PC clones in a market already flooded with cheeper asian varities. I guess this is subject to some debate.

Also, I believe the Amiga corp produced the Amiga, that had some designers in common with Atari, and the Commodore. I'd have to pull out an amiga 1000 case, inside the cover are the signatures of all the people who worked on the project. a little history is on this site [http://commodore.ca/history/company/chronology_po rtcommodore.htm] I personly prefer to remember the Amgia as being a spliter project by rebels who wanted to defy the industry and actually come out with something inovative.

I *agree* though on the lack of marketing, with the exception of the guru meditation crashes my local cable provider sometimes shows. {newtek video toaster no doubt)

Commodore 64 I NEVER was personaly a fan of. I guess I was somewhat prejusticed tward the Atari. ICD's MIO board with SCSI, 15meg HD, and Sparta dos was where it was at. Ok fine, the commodore had better 80column support and everything supported 64k unlike, superior game library. You just had to put up with disk drives from hell. I've been recently doing a compair and contrast with emulation, and ya know I still hate the "load "$",8" followed by "list". Both atari and apples at the very least offered boot disk support.

The Apple though, another system i'm not very much a fan of, is worthy of note because of it's early entry in the market place. Freaky graphics, tape drive controler for the floppy, but this was one of the first systems you saw in schools, that and TI-99/4a but no one could afford the software fore. But it had a massive following in education applications that I really remember, that whole comes equiped with a floppy drive and authors who permited open license for education really helped out.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[dipipanone]

Well, even the first Acorn BBC computer was quicker

And cost around a fifth of the price. An Apple II sold for about a grand, whereas my BBC model A cost me £200.

I'd rather have had the Apple though.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[Jonathan]

It could speak English with the right software!!
I assume you are talking about SAM (Software Automated Mouth). There was an Apple ][ version as well, but I agree that the C64 version sounded better.

It also had graphics that didn't look like some bizarre hack, and it had a number of somewhat useful interfacing ports.

Well, the graphics literally were a hack. Woz basically invented color computer graphics. I rather liked them though. As for ports, the Apple ][ actually had slots, just like a modern PC -- it was much more expandable than the C64.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[mirko]

I'd rather have had the Apple though.
Well, I bought mine when I saw that iBook had become as functional as NeXT computers...
It was in December 2002: when Jaguar came.
So, the unobvious choice has become the right one.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[Surak]

Also, I believe the Amiga corp produced the Amiga, that had some designers in common with Atari, and the Commodore.

Ermmm...it was the Commodore Amiga. It had a Commie logo on it. Amiga Corp. came later after Commodore went under.

And I can't remember if it was that Atari ripped off Commodore or Commodore ripped off Atari, but SOMEONE ripped off SOMEONE. ;)

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the Amiga 1000 was designed by a company originally called Hi-Toro, that became Amiga Inc. in 1984-ish. Hi-Toro approached Atari for funding, and got some, but Atari just wanted a games console and wanted to eat Amiga wholesale, dissolving it.

Commodore swooped in and bought Amiga from under Atari's nose, and Amiga became a division of CBM (that was profit-making right until the end - CBM kept funnelling the profits into their solid, but overpriced and unsuccessful IBM-PC clones).

The Amiga, which by then was a general-purpose computer outclassing both the contemporary Macintosh and PC (this was 1985, remember - the Amiga had incredibly powerful hardware for the time). Commodore/Amiga took another 6 months to "finish" the Amiga OS (itself a dramatic tale- the core kernel, exec.library was written by one man (Carl Sassenrath) locked in a darkened room, and the entire disk subsystem (AmigaDOS) was lifted over a period of weeks from a completely different OS (TriPOS) when the developers of the intended disk subsystem (CAOS) failed to deliver).

During that 6 months, Atari took a load of off-the-shelf chips, and flung together the inferior Atari ST to try to beat amiga to market (which they did).

And thus, the 16-bit wars began, with the Amiga emerging a pyrrhic victor as the no-longer-so-sucky PC started to take off in the 90s.

Then CBM died, but not before spinning off Amiga (UK) Inc. as a separate company.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[evilviper]

Well, frankly, yes you can.

Microsoft has published ads belittle Linux, continually spread FUD about Linux, an more recently, sent a boat-load of money to SCO, which is currently in the process of constanly, and repeatedly slandering Linux.

If Apple published ads that said "The Commodore will eat your childern", then they would bare the blame...

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[runderwo]

Just a correction, no offense:

Ok fine, the commodore had better 80column support and everything supported 64k unlike

The C64? You may be thinking of the C128. The C64 needed a special program which I can't recall the name to do 80 column mode; C128 had it in hardware (and required a RGB monitor to display it on).

and ya know I still hate the "load "$",8" followed by "list". Both atari and apples at the very least offered boot disk support.

You're right that the C64 didn't boot, but a C128 would seek for a disk when powered on, and you could also boot the disk by entering "BOOT" in basic.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[zakezuke]

Ah ok, I stand corrected... my memory is kinda fuzzy. The atari-8 bit had one program that i'm aware that supported 80col mode, and that was a vt-100 terminal emulator. Actually it wasn't all that bad, but a touch hard to read.

Actually come to think about it, the commodore did have that spiffy color text support, something that atari didn't really have. While I prefered the graphics on the atari, the commodore did have a couple of spiffy features.

I just enjoyed 3rd party hardware support on the atari.

I'm not honestly sure if you needed an RGB monitor to display the commodore in 80 column mode. Chroma/luma video aka svhs should have been more then adquate. I don't remember the model numbers of the sparticular monitors off the top of my head, but something like an amiga monitor i'd imagine would do quite nicely.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[dipipanone]

Oh I bought one a little bit earlier than that.

My first was a MacIIgi, and I've had one ever since - right up to my current 667 TiBook.

I bet if my first machine had been a Sinclair rather than a BBC, I'd have been a PC person though.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[Scholasticus]

"Inferiorness?" I think the word you want is "inferiority."

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[bhtooefr]

I don't know about the Cxxx series, but the Apple II can display 80-cols on a TV (the monitors for the IIs ARE TVs).

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[Zixia]

Commodore 64 I NEVER was personaly a fan of.

No, but Yoda a fan of are you.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[zakezuke]

I don't know about the Cxxx series, but the Apple II can display 80-cols on a TV (the monitors for the IIs ARE TVs).

I don't know enough about the apple to know if they used an RF modulator or not, but according to the artical, Woz wasn't a fan of using them because of his prior ham experence, it was just not something you did, protecting the air waves and all that. It makes a fair amount of sence. Besides, RF modulators are subject to external interfearance.

Now... I did own and give away one green screen apple monitor that took composite video input, same as a television would use. This *could* be what you are talking about, but that was the norm actually. In fact, I gave it to someone in the 1990's, basicly saying it was the perfect thing to put on your VCR to watch Erasure videos.

Commodore, among one of the more popular systems, released a monitor for their computers. It took composite video input on the front, and chroma / luma video on the back. These monitors were very popular because of their crisp clear quality, and a number of people continued to use them on their TVrs, nintendos, whatever what have you. They also supported SVHS, as SVHS's cable standard is just seperate Chroma [color] and Luma [black /white].

A few RGB monitors like that used on the Amiga had a much better dotpitch, and quite a few supported the older standards in video as well. It made a fair amount of sence, make this product useful as many people as possible. Commodores, ataris were still popular, and hell they made kick ass video editing monitors at a fraction of the cost of studeo monitors.

You'll have to get in an apple geek in there to differ with me on the subject. While I think there were color monitors for the apple, I think they were monitors rather then TVs, lacking the under. I know atleast one monochrome monitor I saw took standard composite video, no need for seperate chroma luma lines with monochrome after all.

Now... this is something i've always thought about. why the hell did it become out of fasion for computer monitors to support the sync rates of telivision? Why do we have to put up with lame scan line converters when at one time it was the norm for computer monitors to support video. This is one feature that blew away people about ye old amiga though technicaly not an amiga specific feature, flipping the switch on the back can watching telivision.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[bhtooefr]

I'm talking about modern TVs here... They have the A/V inputs that are 100% compatible with the old style computers (esp. Apple IIs). Older TVs need an RF modulator. The old version is the Sup-r-Mod.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[zakezuke]

I'm talking about modern TVs here... They have the A/V inputs that are 100% compatible with the old style computers (esp. Apple IIs). Older TVs need an RF modulator. The old version is the Sup-r-Mod.

Hmmmm, this was the norm, not the exception. The TI/99-4a monitor had A/V inputs, Atari used A/v inputs Tandy monochrome monitors I also remember as having a V input as well. There is not an early 8-bit or 16bit system i'm aware, with the notable exception of the Mac and the typical PC that didn't use A/V inputs, oh and AtariST no clue what the hell it used. The only exception I can think of in the PC world were come CGA cards had a composite video output, though it was pretty piss poor for color, not so bad for monochrome monitors.

But yea, you can hook up an apple to a modern TV or VCR no worries. Same with the TI 99/4a if you had the right cable. Atari and Commodores "might" actually hook up to the svideo port with the right cable, though i'm unsure which models supported that. CGA card no problem if you still have one laying about in case you want to use a dos based mp3 player and have it display track info in your TV.

But they were not TVs, they were monitors. Monitors don't have RF turning ability, TVs do.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

The Apple ][ must break down less or something though, because the Apple:Commodore ratio I see seems to tilt towards Apple over time.

I think a big part of this would be the Apple II's switching power supply in contrast to the C64's marginal, cheap, non-repairable, transformer-based power supply. And Commodore's drive access speed did suck ass. But that could be fixed with an accellerator cartridge or ROM upgrade. Remember that the Apple II cost about 8 times more than the C64.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, I still use my 1701 monitor for video games. Wish I had another one.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[bedouin]

My father bought me a c64 because it was cheaper, but I still would make a trip to my public library just to use their Apple ][e. I can't really explain it, but there were little things about it I just appreciated more, like turing on the computer and it booting automatically. I wrote better BASIC programs for the Apple than I did my own computer. Just like Macs compared to PC's today, the Apples then just felt so much cleaner than the competitors. Little things like being able to sit the monitor on top of the computer, or the dual 5.25 drives you could place under the monitor to save desk space. You can see how those little design techniques made their way into Macs today.

Anyway, you can imagine my excitement last year when I finally got a Powermac G4 :)

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple II -- 1977
Commodore 64 -- 1982

Nuff said.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[ncc74656]

but the Apple II can display 80-cols on a TV

It's very fuzzy if you use a TV, though. You need ~14-15 MHz bandwidth for a sharp 80-column display, but your average TV offers only a fraction of that (maybe 4 or 5 MHz). A monochrome monitor (or RGB, if you're using a IIGS) is very much preferred over a TV. Apple also had some color monitors that could be kicked into monochrome mode.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[usotsuki]

Well, I'm an Apple ][ geek and a Slashbot, so I'll bite.

The Apple //e I had came with a color CVS monitor (AppleColor //e). For a long time, it was my TV (together with an amp and speaker set). Now I use either my Linux box, or another CVS monitor with a built-in speaker.

Composite was the order of the day for Apple ][ computers.

Also, TVs were common on the old ][ and ][+ but they couldn't do 80-columns normally. The //e had an option card. The //c came standard with 80-column support.

-uso

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[usotsuki]

It could speak English with the right software!!

So can the ][ - look for a program called SAM: Software Automated Mouth.

Also, ever hear of the Mockingboard? Gave the ][ two AY-8912 (?) sound chips. And the //e had graphics that could stand up to the C64. 560x192x2 or 140x192x16.

-uso.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[rjung2k]

The atari-8 bit had one program that i'm aware that supported 80col mode, and that was a vt-100 terminal emulator. Actually it wasn't all that bad, but a touch hard to read.

I used that program in my freshman year of college to access the campus computers via dial-up. Squinty, 80-column terminal display crawling at 300 baud... Wheeee!

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[Anonymous Coward]

On the C128 you could use the CATALOG command to get a disk listing.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[zakezuke]

For a time you could get 1701 monitors from goodwill for cheep, as well as other NTSC compatable monitors like magnavox. Basicly people didn't realize or understand they were indeed useful. I never tried svideo input on it, but hey.

I must admit, I had one of those. It was pretty spiffy for the time. I eventually picked up an Amiga 1080 some years later though. Quality was so good you could see the wires on "kung fu the legond continues". These are, or rather *were* more often reccomended for editing then the 1701s. I believe the 1701 had something like a .41mm dot pitch.

My last monitor of this vintage was a magnavox actually. Stereo, which while all monitor speakers are lame, it what I used when I wanted to pop in a tape at night. .31 dot pitch, while that's nothing to scream home about, it was a 14inch and the best resolution it saw was 640*400. 8CM536 I believe was it's model number, but don't quote me, it died a horrible death.

These days, these shops are refusing donations of TVs and monitors due to the high cost of disposal. Major pitty. I understand where they are comming from though. Someone comes in with a big ass monitor and they thing someone will buy it. Alas, not nessicarly useful on your typical PC.

But since you wish you had another one, hit e-bay. while you can't find them for sub $10 at goodwill anymore, it looks like they are fetching $50.00/$60.00. Personaly i'd go for something with lower then .41mm dot pitch my self, but that's just me.

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[mingot]

The disk subsystem did lack refinement. But it could act as a second audio channel. ;-)

I actually had a program that would play mary had a little lamb on the 1541 by "knocking the head". I was hard on my equipment :)

Re:I hate the Apple ][...

[Anonymous Coward]

> Only wankers respond to sigs

Hey, fuckface! Why don't you go jerk off onto some other community? We're sick of mopping up your spooge!

apple

[Anonymous Coward]

apple is still in the black apple is worming its way into corporate it
apple is the leader in k apple is 'undisputed leader in multimedia field'
apple is global brand of the year apple is back
apple is nifty apple is terug
apple is better place to go apple is better
apple is reclaiming the education market apple is a "good guy
apple is the leader in the apple is stalking its way
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apple is sweeter apple is worming its
apple is delicious apple is big on rizzi
apple is working apple is the no
apple is looking for a few good writers and apple is looking for a
apple is officially #2 in education market apple is reclaiming the classroom
apple is on the ball apple is a cull
apple is back in the saddle at seybold apple is gross
apple is showing good business sense apple is related to its
apple is an apple apple is set to unveil apple is now a free download
apple is good for the pear apple is letting the cat out of the bag at 10
apple is begonnen met verzending entreekaarten expo apple is no
apple is the apple is a nice target
apple is polished again apple is called "nature's toothbrush" because it helps clean
apple is a screenarts work of art apple is their
apple is number one in us & worldwide education apple is that? riverbank cottages
apple is on to something apple is one of only two major pc companies that's still making money during this slump
apple is good for the industry apple is hoping that the technology will find its way into other peripherals and devices
apple is 'undisputed leader in multimedia field' by dennis sellers apple is global brand of the year by dennis sellers
apple is alleging that video encoding firm sorenson broke its contract with pple by licensing quicktime technology to macromedia
apple is now promising that unlike the pc apple is back #98124 http
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apple is now listing a 5 apple is nice
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apple is stalking its way into corporate it by stephan somogyi apple is not your friend
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apple is looking for a few good writers and programmers
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apple is reclaiming the classroom jobs & co
apple is on the ball this afternoon apple came out with a security update for apache
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apple is
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apple is focusing too much on gee
apple is set to unveil apple is set to unveil
apple is its name
apple is now the big cheese
apple is good for the pear thursday
apple is begonnen met verzending entreekaarten expo 13
apple is sweet for the rest of us by jackai
apple is the fourth head coach in the 23
apple is lovely
apple is polished again wall street wasn't terribly impressed with apple's latest earnings
apple is doing a lot of things right
apple is streamlining
apple is called "nature's toothbrush" because it helps clean the teeth and massage the gums
apple is a home daycare located in columbus
apple is stolen
apple is their oyster
apple is in great shape
apple is number one in us & worldwide education markets
apple is that? abas
apple is pulling
apple is a huge company
apple is a lousy lover
apple is #1
apple is a company

Re:apple

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple carries a tune.

Woz was a drop out?

[ProfessionalCookie]

Wozniak, who had dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley to get a job

Sweet!! Looks like I'm on my way to fame and fortune!!

Re:Woz was a drop out?

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't most of the current US billionaires drop out of college to start their own companies?

Re:Woz was a drop out?

[ProfessionalCookie]

Well it's a start anyway.

Re:Woz was a drop out?

[tbone1]

Some of the wealthiest and the biggest names: Gates, Allen, Ellison, Dell, ... There was also a guy named Micheal Jordan who seems to have done alright financially.

Re:Woz was a drop out?

[bhtooefr]

Not a great idea... You don't want to be like Bill Gates, who also dropped out of college, right?

Re:Woz was a drop out?

[Anonymous Coward]

At the risk of beating a dead joke to death...

1) DROP OUT
2) ???
3) PROFIT

I'm still on step two!

Re:Woz was a drop out?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funnily enough there's a professor at Berkeley called Michael Jordan, he's short and white though.

Re:Woz was a drop out?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, why would I want to be worth billions of dollars? That would suck.

Wait a second, you mean a couple percent of the computer users in the world might not like me? I think I could manage.

Re:Woz was a drop out?

[TopShelf]

It's amazing how many successful people are dropouts - VP Cheney flunked out of Yale twice, as I recall...

Re:Woz was a drop out?

[operagost]

Woz did go back and finish- there's a pic of him getting "pied" at a graduation party of some sort in the article.

Re:Woz was a drop out?

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe he did this under an assumed name too.

Re:Woz was a drop out?

[TomGroves]

He returned to school years after he 'made it' and earned his engineering degree.

Re:Woz was a drop out?

[bhtooefr]

I think it was something like Rocky Black.

Re:Woz was a drop out?

[nycroft]

There was also a guy named Micheal Jordan who seems to have done alright financially.

Shoe salesmen don't count here...We're talking about computer guys, even though the very mention of the name Gates is enough to make me puke...Oh crap, there it is again! Blerrrgch!

Re:Woz was a drop out?

[Capt. DrunkenBum]

I wouldn't mind haveing his money... Or his wife.

Re:Woz was a drop out?

[JJahn]

Yeah and its amazing how many completely unsuccessful people are dropouts too. An vastly larger number. But still, some people have different ideas of "success"

my first comp

[ciroknight]

Still have on in my room :-D

Re:my first comp

[JUSTONEMORELATTE]

I've got Zork II running in the vacant desk at my office, though it's not my original computer. (This is an Enhanced //e from the neighbors moving-day trash)
I was one of those Franklin scum, since my folks didn't know the shame it would bring on my head.

--

Re:my first comp

[pyrrho]

Franklin, Orange, Apple was the scum to take them out.

By killing that competition, Apple won the right to let PC's take over the world. Do not feel shame, it was still the Woz's design in there, and the Dao is in Woz's designs.

PS: this story has driven me insane.

but most importantly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple is dying. OS X is based on *BSD, so there can no longer be any doubt. Expect Netcraft to confirm it any day now. For all practical purposes, Apple is dead.

Fact: Apple is dying.

Re:but most importantly..

[stull]

I think if I had a nickel for every time I read that I could be playing golf with Bill Gates instead of spending 10 hours a day dealing with issues on his stupid little OS.

Re:but most importantly..

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not switch to Linux and spend 16 hours a day dealing with issues?

Yin - Yang.

[marcsiry]

Perhaps it's blind hero-worship, but he seem to embody everything good & stable that his partner [Steve Jobs] lacks.

Some would say that it's precisely this personality contrast that allowed Apple to succeed, and jumpstart the personal computer industry with the Apple II and its descendants.

Based on published accounts, Woz likely would have been happy tinkering away on his projects to satisfy his own personal curiousity- it took Jobs' prodding to convince him to leave his comfortable job at Hewlett-Packard and commercialize his brilliance.

I'm sure most engineers would be loathe to admit that some marketing or sales sleaze provided them with the inspiration- or desperation- to create something novel or elegant, but Jobs apparently played that role in the genesis of Apple- Woz alludes to his constant questions about extending his technology in this very article.

Re:Yin - Yang.

[jericho4.0]

The juxtaposition of Woz and Jobs embigend the synergy that was Apple.

Seriously, you are so right. The perfect geek and the perfect suit.

Re:Yin - Yang.

[Surak]

Calling Jobs a suit isn't exactly correct. As I stated elsewhere, Woz had all the engineering talent, but Jobs was more than a suit. First off, Jobs was quite tech savvy in his own right. And his business accumen was sharp. But Jobs was a *visionary* not a suit. He was never a "buttoned down" guy. One thing Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews point out in their unauthorized biography of Bill Gates is the stark contrast that the Microsoft people noticed between IBM, which was all button-down pinstripe suits, and Apple, which was a bunch of Berkley grads with long hair and Birkenstocks.

Microsoft was *never* very innovative (they acquired everything they have achieved either through outright purchasing it or through theft), but Apple was quite the innovator. And a lot of that innovation can be directly attributed to Jobs and his 'reality distortion field' that would make people honestly believe they could do things that were impossible -- and they did.

Re:Yin - Yang.

[evilviper]

I'm sure most engineers would be loathe to admit that some marketing or sales sleaze provided them with the inspiration- or desperation- to create something novel or elegant

I don't think so. At best, marketing is a necessary evil, that can provide a means to do more fun stuff...

Marketing seems to be what makes it possible to play full-time, without having to go flip burgers 40-hours/week. Marketing also helps provide for much better toys to play with!

However, I don't mean to make it sound tolerable. Marketing is like the waste disposal industry. It may be necessary, but that's the only positive thing to be said about it. ;-)

Re:Yin - Yang.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just look at Microsoft -- all sales types.
No wonder they don't use the term "insanely great".

Re:Yin - Yang.

[Anonymous Coward]

embigend?

I don't even get a single hit. I guess I'm just not clued in enough to figure out what you mean.

Re:Yin - Yang.

[cygnus]

The juxtaposition of Woz and Jobs embigend the synergy that was Apple.

Seriously, you are so right. The perfect geek and the perfect suit.

you're calling jobs a suit??? the guy wears jeans with so many holes in them you can almost see his wee wee!

Re:Yin - Yang.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a perfectly cromulent word.

Re:Yin - Yang.

[Drakonian]

Hahaha, the insightful moderation amuses me. I thought you were joking, and setting up the obvious joke - embiggen is a perfectly cromulent word!

Re:Yin - Yang.

[WileyWiggins]

Super Break out:
http://www.thelogbook.com/phosphor/fall01/s.htm
The sequel to Atari's original Breakout coin-op, which actually enjoyed greater success at home on the Atari VCS than in the arcades, Super Breakout added some minor innovations to the original game, including the cavities (and their rogue balls) and the double-paddle (and the paddle length shortening by half when you knock a ball into the top of the playing field). Still fundamentally a black & white game, Super Breakout's colorful bricks were achieved the old Odyssey 1 way: colored overlays on the screen itself. A little note about the original Breakout - that game was designed by Nolan Bushnell, but he had an early Atari employee named Steve Jobs implement the actual code. Jobs brought in a friend of his, one Steve Wozniak, to do most of the work, but of the $7,000 Bushnell paid him to "program" Breakout, Jobs only shared $350 with Wozniak. This apparently didn't deter them from later forming Apple Computer together, though.

Hmm... what's this game on my ipod... hey, it's...

Re:Yin - Yang.

[Surak]

That's great. It proves that Steve Jobs was a programmer (software hacker), not an electronics engineer (hardware hacker).

Re:Yin - Yang.

[Zathras11]

They played to their strengths, and each did what
he did best. For Woz (who I knew) it was inventing
and for Jobs (who I never knew) it was marketing
and refining ideas. They were each in the right
place, at the right time, with the right partner
to succeed. It was truly a golden era.

Re:Yin - Yang.

[Zathras11]

One of my favorite Woz quotes, aside from saying
he was going to kill the man who invented Defender
because of some kind of game bug (and I have that
on tape), was a comment he made to my phreak group
about Mr. Jobs on a conference call Mr. Jobs. He
quoted Jobs as saying, "Eew, (as in yuck)
analog!" Tech savvy? Whatver you say pal. :^)
But give the guy credit. Jobs was VERY skilled
at refining ideas and marketing products to people
who didn't even know they needed something (like
the home computer). He convinced me!

Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[nurightshu]

It was 1983, we'd just moved to Hawaii, and my father had bought $2,000 worth of off-white plastic called the Apple //c.

"Dad," I said, as I walked into the living room, "what's that?"

"It's called Captain Goodnight," he said without turning away from the 12" color monitor. "It's like Pitfall on the Atari, but funnier. You want to play when I'm done?"

The last 20 years have been a blur -- Star Control II, Wolf3D, X-Wing, Quake II, Uplink, and lately UT2K3. All because Woz and Jobs decided to slap together an affordable home computing system. Damn them both for all the time I've wasted. :-)

Disclaimer: I know, if I'd stuck with Apple exclusively these past 20 years, I wouldn't have to worry about a gaming addiction at all! Except maybe to that slide-puzzle-world-map-thingie...

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[haggar]

It's obvious that those are fond memories from your childhood - the monitor of the Apple IIc is 9", not 12" :o)

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[nurightshu]

Maybe the monochrome was 9", but I'm fairly sure that the color monitor we had was 12". That's why it was $2000 -- Dad sprang for the big ol' color monitor (and the guy at the BX threw in our ImageWriter ][ for free).

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

//c is still my fav computer. It was the first portable, and you had to carry the small screen around, or get the LCD.

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[Lord_Slepnir]

Hey, Macintosh has a lot of good games! Like Warcraft 3 and umm.....photoshop!

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[bhtooefr]

I have the monochrome, and it is a 9". I think you're right on the color, but I have a 15" third party color that I use for the //c and the SNES. (Amdek Color I+

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[cactopus]

Blizzard games...

Diablo 2 Lord of Destruction... Epic in its own right.

and I am also a Star Control II addict (which apparently was available for the Mac at one time as well as the 3DO -- the version currently being ported back to many platforms as The Urquan Masters)

Return to Castle Wolfenstein is good on the Mac as well.

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[Bull999999]

Can you tell me how to beat the lost level boss in photoshop?

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

you install all the 3rd party plugins without photoshop devolving into a pile of crap.

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Escape Velocity!

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[stankyho]

Mac Games = Aspyr

4X4 Evolution 2
Alice
Alien Crossfire
BloodRayne
Bugdom
Colins Classic Cards
Cro-Mag Rally
Deus Ex
Escape Monkey Island
GR: Desert Siege
HP Chamber / Secrets
HP Sorcerer's Stone
Jedi Knight II
Kelly Slater Surfer
Law & Order
MH: Allied Assault
MH: Spearhead
Madden 2000
NASCAR 2002
NASCAR 2003
Otto Matic
Return 2 Wolfenstein
STV EliteForce Combo
SWGB
SWGB Clone Campaigns
SimCity 4
Spider-Man
Spy Hunter
TR Chronicles
TR Last Revalation
The Sims
The Sims Hot Date
The Sims House Party
The Sims Livin Large
The Sims Unleashed
The Sims Vacation
Tiger Woods 2003
Tony Hawk 2
Tony Hawk 3
Tony Hawk 4
Undying
Zoo Tycoon

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

What have you done for me lately, bitches?

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[MsGeek]

Next week, Unreal Tournament 2K3 is supposed to be coming out for MacOS X. This is several months ahead of schedule. At Mac Gathering a couple of months ago, the best guesstimate for UT2K3 coming out for Mac was Christmas.

My G3 Blue-And-White doesn't have the cojones for it, alas...

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[Capt. DrunkenBum]

Maybe I am crazy, but I love "Cro-Mag Rally".

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[HTH NE1]

I picked up a //c cheaply a couple of years ago. It's monitor is a 5" monochrome. Matching color, apple logo, stand. Still works, too.

Of course, I'd rather have the LCD panel Heywood Floyd had on it when working on the beach in 2010.

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[FurryFeet]

Photoshop was really easy. I actually finished it in a couple of hours, and the final boss was a cinch if you used the right filter. No replay value, either.
Quark Xpress, now, there's a challenge...

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[usotsuki]

I'd kill for an Amdek monitor. Had the speaker, right? Plenty at school when I was a kid.

-uso.

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[Surlyboi]

Can you tell me how to beat the lost level boss in photoshop?

10% Guassian blur followed by a watercolor and
mezzotint artistic filter combo. Works every time.

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[haggar]

While I know of the 9" monochrome monitor, and can accept that there may have been a 12" color monitor, I can't even start imagining that there was a 5" model for the Apple IIc! Any chance you could point me to a picture on the 'net? How about you taking a picture of your setup yourself, and put it somewhere in cyberspace?

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[bhtooefr]

The speaker jack doesn't appear to be a normal A/V cable speaker jack. It appears to be a headphone or stereo jack. The fabric glare filter isn't in mine (it was torn, and it was driving me nuts), but the monitor works fairly well. Being an old monitor, brighter areas on the screen are wider. I also have an Amdek B&G monitor with no speaker.

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[Dinosaur Jr.]

Buddy you can still get star control 2 free.

It's called Ur Quan Masters.

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/sc2/uqm-0.2-m ac osx.dmg?download

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget to use the lasso tool to 'capture' the head of the boss, and collapse all layers to make sure he won't come back to life...

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[petard]

It was an LCD. That whole page is good and brings back memories.

Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[haggar]

Yes, the very yellowish-off-white plastic and the 8-bit tech inside, that's yummy in a weird, geeky yet nostalgic way.

I had a look at the link in your sig. Interesting story. Are you into chemistry? It used to be my preferite subject when I was a kid.

Great interwiew.

[jericho4.0]

This is a really interesting interview, but the interviewer doesn't seem to have his early Apple history down, suggesting that Jobs help build the first Apple, Bah!

Woz always gives an interesting interview, the (read more) links in the story get to the interesting stuff. It's too bad this is linked to something so banal as the 26th aniversary of the Apple, 'cause core /. readers would probably find it informative.

Re:Great interwiew.

[echucker]

Wait a sec, you think they won't read the article because of the story it's linked to? What makes you think people even read the articles? ;-)

Celebrating

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah right you Apple weenies. Commodore 64 ownz ya.

Doh

[exspecto]

I tried giving my teacher a 26 year old apple to celebrate and she flunked me...

Comparing Woz and Steve

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps it's blind hero-worship, but he seem to embody everything good & stable that his partner lacks.

Jobs and Woz are good in different ways. I don't understand why you have to give a comment like that. It's just like saying that Bill Gates seems to lack everything Linus Torvalds has. The fact is that people are different. Thanks to Jobs Apple is still going strong. Sorry to say but IMHO the comparsion is totally irrelevant to this story.

Re:Comparing Woz and Steve

[Surak]

Exactly. Apple couldn't have ever existed without both of them. Woz lacked the vision and business saavy that Jobs had, and Jobs lacked the patience and engineering skills that Woz had. But put the two together and you have a company that went from some guys garage to multibillion dollar international corporation. That's pretty impressive in and of itself, really. ;)

Re:Comparing Woz and Steve

[jgoeres]

I might've phrased it a bit poorly, since I didn't at all mean to imply that one is better than the other. I strongly believe (as do many others) that it was their combination that made Apple what it was (and always has been).

Because of that, though, the comparison is relevant. Apple these days is all about Jobs, Jobs, Jobs. He's a driven, dynamic, visionary leader. But that's not really where Apple came from, and that needs to be kept in mind.

And it's not like comparing Linus to Bill. It would be like comparing Linus to Bill if they started a company together 30 years ago in their garage.

Re:Comparing Woz and Steve

[pyrrho]

>Bill Gates seems to lack everything Linus Torvalds has.

but this is true.

*sigh* memories...

[blackcoot]

i remember helping to maintain a lab of these things in 8th grade... first machine i started to cut my teeth on programming... basic no less. the irony is that the brains in the robotics projects i've been toying with has about the same computing power as a ][e and i can barely fit a serial communications library and a virtual machine in that much memory (the vm acts as a dispatch for commands recieved over the serial line via radio modem from a pc, where i'm not constrained to 32k of RAM)... i have to wonder to what degree the power of the machines available to young protogeeks affects their coding skills later in life... i suspect that the less harsh the initial computational conditions in a programmers life, the less inclined those programmers are to be artful and elegant in their solutions. pure speculation, but still something i wonder about...

Re:*sigh* memories...

[irix]

I wrote by first BASIC program on a ][e in the 6th grade. That being said...

the brains in the robotics projects i've been toying with has about the same computing power as a ][e and i can barely fit a serial communications library and a virtual machine in that much memory

I did a robotics project based on the handyboard (I still have a couple of them at home) and we did all of our work in Interactive C and 6811 assembly. The 32k of RAM was enough for several different control programs.

I can't say it had much to do with writing BASIC on a ][e. Maybe more like understanding how the underlying hardware works.

Re:*sigh* memories...

[UnassumingLocalGuy]

From the Jargon Dictionary at http://info.astrian.net/jargon/:

BASIC /bay'-sic/ n. A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which for many years was the leading cause of brain damage in proto-hackers. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in "Selected Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" that "It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration." This is another case (like Pascal) of the cascading lossage that happens when a language deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10-20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer (a) is very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful languages well. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros in the 1980s. As it is, it probably ruined tens of thousands of potential wizards.

[1995: Some languages called `BASIC' aren't quite this nasty any more, having acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and control structures and shed their line numbers. --ESR]

Note: the name is commonly parsed as Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, but this is a backronym. BASIC was originally named Basic, simply because it was a simple and basic programming language. Because most programming language names were in fact acronyms, BASIC was often capitalized just out of habit or to be silly. No acronym for BASIC originally existed or was intended (as one can verify by reading texts through the early 1970s). Later, around the mid-1970s, people began to make up backronyms for BASIC because they weren't sure. Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code is the one that caught on.

I can definately attest to this... it's been somewhat difficult learning C++ after spending years doing GOTOs and working with line numbers.
GOSUB 15 is so much different compared to the functions that I'm getting used to now... and for some reason, I keep putting a return; statement at the end of all void() functions. :)

Re:*sigh* memories...

[Anonymous Coward]

You may have something there.

Some of the guys I work with got into programming kind of late (during the boom, I guess) and their code is some of the most inefficient, unmaintainable crud I've ever seen.

Maybe Basic forced those of us who grew up on it to be clear and concise about what we were doing -- I certainly recall keeping mental notes of the line numbers parts of my programs started and ended on, not to mention crushing the lines down as much as possible.

(Oh, and then there was always that threat of the power going out when you least expected it -- nothing like that for improving efficiency.)

Re:*sigh* memories...

[blackcoot]

i used some ic... the problem is that what i wanted to implement was significantly more complicated than dead reckoning. there was all kinds of interesting stuff like minkowski sums to help with path planning, neural networks to help figure out where the (*#@ the robot really was, etc. the ram for the neural nets alone was more than could fit on the handyboard ;-) that said, robot side, there were also a bunch of relatively sophisticated behaviors programmed in -- things like scanning for a flame and then reorienting the robot and such like.

Re:*sigh* memories...

[blackcoot]

hrm... maybe what's true for how we learn human languages is true for how we learn computer languages, that is the earlier on we start to learn multiple languages, the easier it is to fully master them... maybe i should have started lisp a couple years ago so that it wouldn't seem like such a bitch now ;-)

Re:*sigh* memories...

[blackcoot]

yeah... i've been thinking a lot about this as a future professional sadist (i.e. comp. sci. prof). i've come to the conclusion that i don't want my students touching a compiler until they've had at least one semester of being forced to program (and debug) on pencil and paper. when they do get a chance to use a compiler, i want it to be the most pedantic, strict compiler ever (kinda like having to go through lint on steroids as the front end to gcc). that or find a machine on the other side of town that uses punchcards and make them target that (nothing quite like it to force people to be diligent from the beginning)...

Re:*sigh* memories...

[Anonymous Coward]

i want it to be the most pedantic, strict compiler ever

For situations like this, Ada is here to help...

Re:*sigh* memories...

[blackcoot]

i was contemplating writing something that made ada look forgiving ;-) or at least was enough of a bitch that students took the whole "do this in pencil and paper first and save yourself a lot of aggravation" thing seriously... but to do that, i suppose i'd have to make them do all their assignments in fortran on punch cards, and have them drive across town to submit a batch job then wait a day or two for the output...

I Can Still Use An Apple II Today !

[Anonymous Coward]

IMO: It's 2003 and I can boot up an Apple II Word Processing program right now from a floppy drive and type whatever I want, print whatever I want, and leave the computer on as long as I want, and it doesn't crash, freeze, reboot by itself, etc. If I try that in Windows, I can't boot up and type without worrying about a potential crash, freeze, or reboot that could happen at any time.

Re:I Can Still Use An Apple II Today !

[Anonymous Coward]

yep and I can boot up my IBM PC-XT and run structural analysis, runoff analysis, soils testing apps, wordperfect 5.1, print it all to a modern HP Deskjet or an older parallel plotter, and then send an internet email....

not to mention run the shit out of starfleet II.

Re:I Can Still Use An Apple II Today !

[Anonymous Coward]

". If I try that in Windows, I can't boot up and type without worrying about a potential crash, freeze, or reboot that could happen at any time."

Amazing. Go and see a doctor. There must be something vital missing between your ears.

Re:I Can Still Use An Apple II Today !

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing. Go and see a doctor. There must be something vital missing between your ears

What a poorly worded unrelated response. What you said really explains you.

Re:I Can Still Use An Apple II Today !

[Anonymous Coward]

What a poorly worded unrelated response. What you said really explains you.

What a poorly worded, unrelated response. What he said described you rather well.

From the article

[Dylan2000]

Wozniak, who had dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley to get a job, was five years older than Jobs

Wha..? I just dragged my ass out of bed and I'm still sleepy and I'm expected to understand a sentence like that?

I need another coffee...

Re:From the article

[lyonsden]

Wozniak...was five years older than Jobs

Has this changed????

Re:From the article

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny.

What's interesting is that in some ways it has changed. When I was in college I had a friend who was two years younger than me. That was a huge difference back then. He just visited last week and we are the same age now. Sure we're still two years different, but it doesn't matter one bit.

Still, your comment is the best laugh I've had yet today.

Re:From the article

[douglasq]

Time expands and contracts depending on one's proximity to Job's Reality Distortian Field. It is similar to traveling at speeds approaching the speed of light. Time slowed down for Woz (relative to Jobs) once he left Apple. By my calculations, Jobs caught up with Woz on July 7, 1992 and is now six and a half years older than him.

You've made my day...

[nounderscores]

...Goodnight!

WOZ Speech at NC State

[smelroy]

Hear and watch the story Woz's life from the man himself. He spoke at NC State University on April 26, 2003. http://www.ncsu.edu/it/multimedia/woz.html

Re:WOZ Speech at NC State

[Brian_rts]

Um nice.. but its June now?

Re:WOZ Speech at NC State

[Mononoke]

Um nice.. but its June now?

You still tell people your age in months, don't you.

The original open source machine

[mabu]

I just remember...

the whole machine was designed around being open. The first thing anyone did when showing off their Apple was pull off the cover and expose its innards, the pcboard, the expansion slots. The excitement of adding an 80-column card!

I was a TRS-80 guy, but played with the C64s, the Pets, the 99/4s and everything in between. We always marveled early on at the Apple's color display and selection of games (Choplifter!)

Then they closed everything up and tried to go proprietary. Apple to me was always the underdog but their openness really gave them a chance to make it. But as soon as they achieved a substantive degree of success, the company got greedy and tried to monopolize the market. IBM stole their thunder by copying their open architecture design and having more resources. Apple got too greedy, too early and it cost them.

26 years later, has the company leaned? OS-X has potential, but ONLY if Apple doesn't try to "own" it. You'd think they would have learned something in all these years but they still seem to be innovative to a point, then shut everything down and try to make it as proprietary as possible.

My advice to Apple is to have more trust in the computing public. Embrace more open standards and don't feel so threatened if others can compete with you. This only adds value to your products and your company. Have you not learned anything in all these years? Don't simply private label FreeBSD as an "Apple Innovation". That will not work. Champion the marketplace and have faith that you will be rewarded for not being selfish. It really sounds stupid in today's economic age, but what has made Apple survive (aside from Microsoft needing it to shunt monopoly arguments) has been the loyalty of its users. Give them freedom and you gain even more loyalty.

Be open.

That should be Apple's new mantra.

Re:The original open source machine

[ColdGrits]

"The first thing anyone did when showing off their Apple was pull off the cover and expose its innards, the pcboard, the expansion slots. "

Which you can still do today. First thing I did when I got my PowerMac home was open it and look at what was inside.

The hardware is still based on standards - standard SCSI & EIDE hard drives and CDROM drives; standard interfaces; standard PCI slots; AGP graphics slots; standard USB & FireWire connectors.

"OS-X has potential, but ONLY if Apple doesn't try to "own" it."

OK, I'll bite - explain exactly what you are on about please?

Clue - they release back to the public all modifications they make to all open source they use. Darwin source is all fully available. Safari? All improvements they made to the rendering engine are returned to the public.

They provide full developer material and tools FoC.

Where's your problem?!

Re:The original open source machine

[Surak]

"The first thing anyone did when showing off their Apple was pull off the cover and expose its innards, the pcboard, the expansion slots. "

Which you can still do today. First thing I did when I got my PowerMac home was open it and look at what was inside.

The hardware is still based on standards - standard SCSI & EIDE hard drives and CDROM drives; standard interfaces; standard PCI slots; AGP graphics slots; standard USB & FireWire connectors.


Today, yes you can do that. But we old timers (heh) remember when you had to have a special tool to take apart a Macintosh. Opening the case by other than authorized service people was considered a violation of the terms of your warranty.

Re:The original open source machine

[Anonymous Coward]

You couldn't open up a Macintosh though. A single off-beige lump of plastic that required a special tool to get into, and had no room for people to tinker. The ROMS were closed and development tools cost. This was an extremly sharp contrast to the Apple ][

You can open up your Mac today because as the original poster pointed out, Apple has learnt that Open is better than Closed. It was all closed for a long time in the late 80's and early 90's though.

Re:The original open source machine

[Surak]

Also, on the 'non-proprietary stuff', Macs used to be virtually 100% proprietary -- proprietary networking (AppleTalk), proprietary slots (Apple Bus), proprietary keyboard and mouse (ADB), even Apple's implementation of SCSI was proprietary at one time.

Re:The original open source machine

[sydbarrett74]

It's no accident that the Apple ][ led the market in the early 80's precisely due to its open nature. Once they introduced the relatively closed Mac in '84, their market-share steadily dwindled over the next 20ish years.

Re:The original open source machine

[Mononoke]

Then they closed everything up and tried to go proprietary. Apple to me was always the underdog but their openness really gave them a chance to make it. But as soon as they achieved a substantive degree of success, the company got greedy and tried to monopolize the market. IBM stole their thunder by copying their open architecture design and having more resources. Apple got too greedy, too early and it cost them.

Worked so well for IBM, didn't it. [/sarcasm]

Re:The original open source machine

[cactopus]

My advice to Apple is to have more trust in the computing public. Embrace more open standards and don't feel so threatened if others can compete with you. This only adds value to your products and your company. Have you not learned anything in all these years? Don't simply private label FreeBSD as an "Apple Innovation". That will not work. Champion the marketplace and have faith that you will be rewarded for not being selfish. It really sounds stupid in today's economic age, but what has made Apple survive (aside from Microsoft needing it to shunt monopoly arguments) has been the loyalty of its users. Give them freedom and you gain even more loyalty.

They don't private label FreeBSD. OS X is based on their own work which includes some of BSD 4.4 in user-space. It was called OPENSTEP... and before that NEXTSTEP. Everything about the graphical environment and programming environment belonged to NeXT and was designed there. WebObjects came from NeXT. OS X has ported newer BSD utilities from FreeBSD as opposed to the older OPENSTEP versions, but it isn't FreeBSD. It's OPENSTEP 6.3 Mach for PPC if you will.

Then they closed everything up and tried to go proprietary. Apple to me was always the underdog but their openness really gave them a chance to make it. But as soon as they achieved a substantive degree of success, the company got greedy and tried to monopolize the market. IBM stole their thunder by copying their open architecture design and having more resources. Apple got too greedy, too early and it cost them.

This implies that they were the only ones writing software or manufacturing drivers and devices for their machines. No hardware company operates that way completely anymore. Apple was no more proprietary than IBM or Sun when it came to non x86 machines. A proper balance between controlling the architecture in question and completely opening it is required to maintain good profit for a single vendor as well as uniform compatibility and direction. IBM blew it by giving away the PC spec and allowing Compaq and others to copy it. Maybe if they hadn't, we might have a real x86 machine with a firmware instead of a crappy IBM kludgy BIOS that was designed to last a year tops... and is still in use today.

Someone else mentioned the early macs being proprietary with all these special things... Apple Bus?.. um Nubus is an IEEE standard... there were many 3rd party Nubus cards and only a few Apple ones. The only thing that people can really actually complain about was the fact that it was hard to open the original Mac and you weren't expected to... well the original Mac was "not designed to be expandable internally" It was a consumer box. If you wanted expandable you bought the Mac II series... these were some of the most expandable Macs on the market for several years including some of the Quadra years. Many Nubus slots... lots of space for RAM... lots of space (relatively) for hard disks. I used to run OpenBSD on a IIx with a 1GB FH 5.25" drive that was in a PC XT case with the ribbon run out the slot holes and into the Mac IIx via slot holes... that was certainly a sight.

I don't think people understand the many shades of what "proprietary" means. It's an incredible misnomer for what is actually going on in the computer industry.... True the "Steve" doesn't like clones... but what decent hardware (i.e. real computer manufacturer) vendor would? Clones cause incompatiblity, bite into your bottom line, increase support costs, and generally lower the quality of your product over time as well as its impact as an "innovative and elegant" architecture. Maybe a Sun model would have been better since the Sun clones never really took down Sun, but that's an entirely different market dynamic... Apple markets to consumers, and consumers see $ figures...irrationally so at times... heck they buy eMachines boxen (blech)

Re:The original open source machine

[archen]

That was a fundamental difference between Jobs and Woz. Woz not only wanted the thing to be open and free, he actually wanted to include a technical manual documenting all the electronics so you could wire it however you want! It seems that the deeper Jobs got into the Mac side, the less open Apple was about everything. After the Apple ][ team got shoved to the side, that was pretty much the end of that sort of thing. I wonder what Woz thinks about not even being able to control the DVD region on your own iBook DVD player.

Re:The original open source machine

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what Woz thinks about not even being able to control the DVD region on your own iBook DVD player

Woz probably does what everyone else does and re-flashes the drive with non-RPCII firmware.

Re:The original open source machine

[operagost]

NUBus is an IEEE standard, and the only thing about their SCSI that was "proprietary" was the use of nonstandard physical interfaces, such as DB-25 and HDI-30. However, these are standard connectors (if not standard implementations) and cables are easily purchased from third parties.

Re:The original open source machine

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

I recently fixed up a Classic II. It needed a T-25 (star) driver to open the case - no problem, except the screws were recessed about 10". It was definately engineered to keep users out. Contrast with the Apple 2, which pratically begged for the hood to be lifted.

Anyway, I eventually got a workable solution by filing down the blade on a standard screwdriver until it fit the Torx screw head. Maybe not a factory tool, but it did the job.

Re:The original open source machine

[Surak]

NUBus is an IEEE standard

Was an IEEE standard. It's been withdrawn. Besides -- name 3 other machines NOT produced by Apple that is NOT an Apple clone that uses NUBus. I bet you can't name one. Just because something is an IEEE standard doesn't mean it's an industry standard.

Face it, Macs were very, very proprietary until the PowerMacs appeared with their PCI buses, AGP video, and standardization on USB, firewire and ethernet.

Re:The original open source machine

[archen]

Unfortunatly I have a Sony combo drive for which there is there is no firmware flash yet. It doesn't look all that promising either as XVI is mainly only keeping up with powerbooks nowdays.

Re:The original open source machine

[puz]

IIRC, Apple-II's schematic was easily obtainable. I say this because I remember seeing the diagram for the "simple minimum-chip paddle circuit" and being very impressed. An ordinary engineer would have implemented this by forming a voltage divider with a pot and feeding the output into an A/D converter. Instead, Steve did it by varying the RC constant of a cheap oneshot timer and made the CPU measure the period through just one bit of I/O port to sense the dial position. This is what I call being creative.

Re:The original open source machine

[MsGeek]

I beg to differ about early '90s Macs being closed. The LC series were designed to be easily opened and easily tweaked with. Just like the Apple][ machines they were designed to replace in academia. Undo one screw, flip up the two snap catches, then flip open the "pizza box" top. Voila.

They were also very beautifully designed. Sleek and low slung. Gorgeous. Unfortunately they were crippled machines up until the LCIII. But the LCIII, LCIII+ and the LC475 (aka the Quadra 610) were rockin' machines. Replace the 68lc040 in the LC475 with a real 68040, and you have a mean little LC indeed.

The big mistake made during this period was taking the old LC475 motherboard design and grafting it, Frankenstein-style, to a PPC 603 chip. Ugh! Nassssty Performaaaas! We hatesss! We hatesss!

Re:The original open source machine

[Eponymous Shepherd]

IIRC, Nubus was developed by TI, and they made a couple of machines that used it. I can't cite them by name, though, and you're generally right about how extensively it was adopted. To be fair to Apple, though, it looks to me to have been one of their first steps toward opening the architecture.

Re:The original open source machine

[IntlHarvester]

There may have been some LISP Machines with NuBus.

Of course, the use of NuBus was a very defensible decision -- Macs were being sold as mid-range workstations ($3-$10K) in those days, and it would have been a complete joke if it came with crap like ISA.

Also, NuBus cards were more widely available and even cheaper than PC "standards" like MCA and EISA. Sun, HP, Next also had proprietary buses back then.

Re:The original open source machine

[The_Rook]

were the early big box macs (mac ii, iix, iifx, iicx/ci, etc) equally hard to get into?

was it possible that the compact macs were made hard to get into for liability reasons? opening the case exposed the crt's dangerous high voltage circuits.

Re:The original open source machine

[Anonymous Coward]

The flip side, Apple had built in and cheap to deploy networking, Plug n Play, hassle free multiple input devices, and built in high speed ports years before it became common on PC clones.

Re:The original open source machine

[usotsuki]

And the LC series, plus the Color Classic, could be upgraded to run Apple //e software. Used one of those cards once. Nice. Not 100%, but nice.

-uso.

Re:The original open source machine

[John Miles]

Worked so well for IBM, didn't it. [/sarcasm]

Yeah, actually, it did. Look at a long-term IBM stock graph sometime. Today, IBM makes a fortune from PC-based software and services... much more than they'd ever have made as the sole steward of a now-obsolete platform.

Just because they no longer own the PC platform's schematics and BIOS source code doesn't mean they can't build a large portion of their business on it.

Eventually, Microsoft will have to make an analogous adjustment to their thinking.

Re:The original open source machine

[GlassHeart]

Apple to me was always the underdog but their openness really gave them a chance to make it. But as soon as they achieved a substantive degree of success, the company got greedy and tried to monopolize the market.

Lament as you might, the moment a company goes public, the original founders lose a great degree of control over moral direction. You could say that a public company is entirely profit-oriented and amoral, and this is not unique to Apple.

IBM stole their thunder by copying their open architecture design and having more resources.

And IBM is a shining example in the PC hardware market? The historical fact is that the clones killed the IBM-brand PC, even though until about the VGA, IBM dictated all major iterations of hardware. I see no reason Apple would survive better if the Macintosh was open. That is, the 680x0 Macintosh might have done much better, but Apple the company wouldn't necessarily have.

Openness (or closedness) has no inherent impact on the marketplace today. When the Apple ][ was introduced, it shipped with programming manuals and a complete ROM listing. If Dell does that today, they'll literally just waste money. The x86 PC's relative success as a "breed" does have to do with its openness, but that success has not consistently benefited anybody except Microsoft and perhaps the largely unsung clone BIOS manufacturers. How many of the first generation clone manufacturers (or for that matter, IBM itself) are still around?

My advice to Apple is to have more trust in the computing public. Embrace more open standards and don't feel so threatened if others can compete with you.

Open standards like ethernet, TCP/IP, 802.11b and g, ZeroConf, Firewire, USB, ATA, VGA, and so on? What are you talking about?

Re:The original open source machine

[Anonymous Coward]

"Based on standards" does not equal "open". "FoC" does not equal open. Apple is half-assed open. They only use open source to save themselves a few bucks in development costs.

WTF??

[Draoi]

26 years later, has the company leaned? OS-X has potential, but ONLY if Apple doesn't try to "own" it. You'd think they would have learned something in all these years but they still seem to be innovative to a point, then shut everything down and try to make it as proprietary as possible.

How do you explain this then?

Re:WTF??

[croddy]

I think you mean this.

Re:WTF??

[Draoi]

And what does this have to do with MacOS X and publishing the sources?

Re:WTF??

[Anonymous Coward]

And what does this have to do with MacOS X and publishing the sources?

It means that a certain portion of so called 'open source advocates' are actually 'I don't wanna pay fer stuff' advocates.

Re:WTF??

[Knife_Edge]

That's nice. Why won't the GNU binutils build on OS X? Why do they use an unusual executable format (Mach-O) instead of ELF that was the standard on FreeBSD (and still is, on most other systems as well) before they came along? Although OS X claims credibly to be a Unix variant, I recently discovered it is apparently impossible to cross-compile for it.

The way Apple sees it, people who want to develop for their platform can buy it first, and to hell with anyone who wants to take apart the binaries they release for the system (or even to hell with me taking apart the binaries I made myself for the system, for that matter!).

The parent poster is exactly right, OS X is open to a point, but when you really want to get your hands dirty working with it, it is still closed in a lot of ways. Just because the source is open does not mean the system is open. I think they are suspicious of allowing people too much freedom with their system. This is evident in more obvious ways, too, like the closedness of Aqua.

Re:WTF??

[Draoi]

Why won't the GNU binutils build on OS X?

Dunno. My version of MacOS X already has the usual suspects; gcc, as, ln. The assembler and linker are GNU tools, but are the Mach-O versions. The standard GNU tools won't build straight up, AFAIK, but fortunately, Apple has provided the sources for their changes, so you can download those and build away.

Why do they use an unusual executable format (Mach-O) instead of ELF that was the standard on FreeBSD (and still is, on most other systems as well) before they came along

Because the kernel is based on the Mach kernel? The Mach-O binary format is well documented.

Although OS X claims credibly to be a Unix variant, I recently discovered it is apparently impossible to cross-compile for it.

*shrug* - it's PPC-based, in fairness. gcc should produce say an x86 binary, given the appropriate libs. As the platform is PPC, you need to manually provide them. That's to be expected. Can your x86 machine easily target Alpha?

The way Apple sees it, people who want to develop for their platform can buy it first,

So go download it (and the sources) from opendarwin.org and run it on your x86 box ... I've done it for kicks & it's pretty neat.

and to hell with anyone who wants to take apart the binaries they release for the system

The source for the kernel has been released by Apple, as well as the BSD layer stuff and various other bits (Kerberos, X11, Rendezvous, etc, etc). Who needs to take apart binaries?

(or even to hell with me taking apart the binaries I made myself for the system, for that matter!)

??? Do what you do on Linux - go disassemble it. Dump the symbols, whatever. It's no different.

The parent poster is exactly right, OS X is open to a point, but when you really want to get your hands dirty working with it, it is still closed in a lot of ways.

Sure. I agree - Darwin is wide open, APSL nit-picks aside. MacOS X, being a superset of Darwin, is not so much. Just how much openness do you want?

Just because the source is open does not mean the system is open. I think they are suspicious of allowing people too much freedom with their system. This is evident in more obvious ways, too, like the closedness of Aqua.

Well, yes. Aqua is closed. It's part of Apple's competitive edge. Unlike a certain other OS, Apple has done the good thing and opened up great chunks of the OS. I don't think they're "suspicious" of "allowing people" "freedom" - they're on the right path, they can't release everything.

(Disclosure/disclaimer: yeah, I work there. No, I'm not speaking for them.)

OT: free Apple ][ emulator + games

[dubbayu_d_40]

I found a free emulator and I also found my favorite game of all time "Taipan." The game site has just about every game known for the apple][:

emulator:
radiovibrations.com/software/apple252.zip

game:
classicgaming.com/vault/roms/appleiiroms.Taipan334 17.shtml

Re:OT: free Apple ][ emulator + games

[bhtooefr]

I'll assume that you've got a Windows box if you're using ApplePC 2.52B...

You might want to try Apple II Oasis for Windows. It's pretty fast on a 486 or up. It is shareware, but it seems like the Opera of Apple II Emulators. Closed source, pretty small, works with 99.9% of disk images, and is rather powerful (it's the emu of choice for Apple II programmers, because it's got good disk image management and transfer tools).

Re:OT: free Apple ][ emulator + games

[tuffy]

classicgaming.com is actually fairly light on Apple ][ games and software. A better bet is the asimov archive, which contains not only games but also a lot of other Apple ][ software. And, one occasionally sees Apple ][ stuff posted to usenet. Though I suppose the lot of it is a big heaping copyright violation, most of the original companies are defunct - which makes the stuff difficult to buy nowadays.

Re:OT: free Apple ][ emulator + games

[Anonymous Coward]

I forgot how much fun it was to deal opium.

Re:OT: free Apple ][ emulator + games

[usotsuki]

Apple Oasis is bombware.

Dapple ][ 0.27 works on XP although it's a DOS app. Hell, it runs on DOSEMU although the sound sucks.
</plug>

And it's a lot like ApplePC UI-wise plus it's programmer-friendly. The next release version, 0.28, will have a 65C02 macro assembler.

-uso.

Re:OT: free Apple ][ emulator + games

[bhtooefr]

A2O runs fine on my boxes...

95 (P75, 16MB RAM), XP (school's box, P3-866, 128MB RAM), and XP (C2000, 256MB RAM). I'll put it on my 2000 box (C466, 256MB RAM), but it should work fine.

A2O is actually more stable than Opera. Visit too many pages? BAM! Opera dies. Of course, Opera recovers in seconds. A2O needs to save state every second to recover that quickly.

Re:OT: free Apple ][ emulator + games

[usotsuki]

I mean that it's a time bomb (exits after 20 minutes). Otherwise it's nice, and I still have to get Z80 working on Dapple ][...

-uso.

Re:OT: free Apple ][ emulator + games

[bhtooefr]

I don't know if 2.5 does it though... (trying it out now) I know 2.4 does it, and logs the remaining time in the save state file (2.3 doesn't)

Re:OT: free Apple ][ emulator + games

[bhtooefr]

Shit... 2.5 DOES bomb. And no cracks, either...

Re:OT: free Apple ][ emulator + games

[usotsuki]

This is why I want to implement the Z80 in Dapple ][, otherwise, most of what Apple Oasis supports (not all, just most) is in there. Plus most of Dapple ]['s source is out there (objdump anyone?)

-uso.

Re:OT: free Apple ][ emulator + games

[bhtooefr]

Some other things that I like about Apple II Oasis that Dapple doesn't seem to do: (don't have time right now to go grab a ROM off asimov)

# GUI-based configuration - I use the KB more than most, but I still like a GUI for certain things.
# Percentage-based speed throttling - (this, and the odd hardware support, is why I HATE ApplePC) I don't want to have to put in a hex number for my favorite Apple II game to run at the right speed on every box I touch.

Something I would like to see that neither A2O or Dapple implement is ImageWriter emulation. I've heard that the IW has a 6502/65C02 inside, so you've already got the biggest part. Apple II Oasis can print straight text to any printer, and graphics to any printer that the Apple II software natively supports and is connected to the serial port. I didn't see if yours did that, but ImageWriter emulation would be nice (there was an emulator that tried that, but it appears to have fallen of the face of the earth).

Re:OT: free Apple ][ emulator + games

[usotsuki]

I have an ImageWriter II manual, so I could perhaps try to see about writing a renderer...

BTW, I should try to find a way to "auto-set" the CPU speed, but I'm not sure how. I'll think of a way, maybe... *sends e-mail to codeveloper*

-uso.

So this means that

[ciryon]

Steve Jobs is bad and unstable?

Pirates of Sillicon Valley all over again.

Ciryon

Re:So this means that

[MrLint]

Rememember, Steve may be a psycho, but hes*our* psycho.

Re:So this means that

[tbone1]

Remember, he may be evil, but he uses it for good. He's the Swamp Thing of the tech industry. "Do not bring your VB in here!"

Re:So this means that

[Oswald]

Actually, dude, he's your psycho. And Woz is your geek. And the sappy, sycophantish emails on woz.org are indicative of the kind of "in" crowd mentality that motivates so many Mac users to stay Mac users, even as Apple Computer, Incorporated (AAPL) milks them for all they're worth.

If we all woke up tomorrow in a world where roles were reversed and Apple had 95% market share and Windows was the rebel OS, a huge percentage of the Mac's current users would jump ship the first chance they got.

No doubt that Wozniak is a genius's genius, but look at the self-serving shit he publishes on his site. He and Jobs are the co-messiahs of a bunch of people who think that your choice of personal computer somehow defines you. It's not about productivity; it's about elitism and ego.

(good thing I have karma to burn. this one's gonna leave a welt.)

Re:So this means that

[rjung2k]

So that's why Jobs is vegan!

Fruitcakes

[jabbadabbadoo]

Apple isn't the only fruit company:

The first digital computer was a berry: Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC)

Not to forget the The Banana Computer.

Re:Fruitcakes

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realise that the Banana is a parody, right? Right?

Re:Fruitcakes

[jabbadabbadoo]

Yes ;-)

Re:Fruitcakes

[cosmo7]

the banana was also a real ][ clone. I remember seeing one in Morgan computer on new oxford street some time in the mid eighties.

I would like to thank my Dad..

[cdtoad]

Back in 1977 my father took out a load so that he could by me an Apple 2+ computer. Everyone else had Atari 2600's but he thought that it be better if I get something I could learn with, as it "had a lot of educational software" Yeah. I learned with it. Not school work, but how to program. I was 10 and knew Apple INT Basic and assembly language backwards and forwards. Then in 1983 I got the Modem :)

I guess they say you always remember your first. :)

Thanks Dad!

Re:I would like to thank my Dad..

[Anonymous Coward]

my father took out a load so that he could by me an Apple 2+

i'm guessing that educational software didn't include spelling or grammar tutorials ;)

Re:I would like to thank my Dad..

[BTWR]

in 1977 my father took out a load so that he could by me an Apple 2+ computer

Does this mean that your dad became a gay porn star to afford the Apple ][? (j/k)

Re:I would like to thank my Dad..

[kin_korn_karn]

he probably just wanted to be able to brag to his buddies at work. "My kid's got a COMPUTER and PROGRAMS it, what does yours do?"

Re:I would like to thank my Dad..

[Anonymous Coward]

When i was 4, my dad bought the basic compiler attachment for the intellivision video game system. I remember struggling through the manual, copying the samples and teaching myself a funky form of basic. when i got the hang of it i was starting to write my own programs at which time my dad taught me how to count in binary. naturally, this got me in trouble with a dull teacher in kindergarten when she asked the class to write 1-10 on paper for an assignment and i did it in binary...

now my dad and i compete for who can throw the most money towards a gaming rig.

thanks dad for starting me on the path to programming!

saviors and demons

[Chriscypher]

Woz brought us the first personally affordable hardware and helped to break the consolidation of power in the mainframe.

Linus brought us an unencumbered operating system and the benevolent credo of OSS.

They are the leaders of idealogical, as well as technological, movements.

Every major innovation has its saviors and its demons. Where do you want to go today?

Re:saviors and demons

[GlassHeart]

Linus brought us an unencumbered operating system and the benevolent credo of OSS.

Open source software predated Linux. The GNU project was launched in 1984, when Linus was just 15. He didn't get his 80386 computer until 1991, and in any case Linux was built on gcc. Linus is also "only" responsible for the kernel of the OS. The Unix utilities mainly came from GNU, X came from MIT, and KDE/Gnome were not created by Linus, either.

This is not to minimize his contributions. Linus Torvalds is a wonderful representative of the OSS movement, but he didn't "bring" you all of those things, all by himself. This sort of misattribution is what makes some people insist on calling it GNU/Linux, if only to make a point.

They are the leaders of idealogical, as well as technological, movements.

That's even more off-track. Linus uses BitKeeper, which isn't open source, and generated some controversy for that. Woz isn't terribly active with "ideological" pursuits, either. In fact, RMS referred to Linus as "just an engineer", specifically because of his neutral stance on politics in technology.

Re:saviors and demons

[Knife_Edge]

Good point. Anyone who believes Linus is much of an inspirational ideological figure should read Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. This book, which he co-authored, essentially outlines a very bland philosophical outlook, in my opinion. To sum up, Linus believes there are three levels of human social activity, survival, social order, and entertainment.

Building on this, Linus says he made the Linux kernel to entertain himself. That's it. Nowhere does he mention saving the world, or how important free software is for free society, or anything. After reading the book, I doubt he thought about these kind of issues at all before making or releasing his software.

Re:saviors and demons

[Anonymous Coward]

That's freaking awesome. I don't like everything about the man's ideology (kernel debugger, anyone?) but that statement is just... beautiful..

Tradeoffs

[grape jelly]

Tradeoffs have always been made regarding efficiency, among the most important in recent years being the necessity for affordably maintainable code, combined with the decreasing importance of having super efficient code. IMO, this discourages most who are currently learning how to program from mastering the art of designing and analyzing the runtime of code. I personally had many many arguments with someone I worked with who kept insisting that runtime didn't matter anymore on current machines. In the meantime, his awful code (by and large) kept system load on our development server above 2 for most of the development day. I shudder what would have happened if we'd moved that over to our production server....

Mad Tetris skillz.

[asb]

My dad used to play a lot of Microsoft's Tetris. So I had to play too just to keep my initials on the top spot. I once had a really good game going. I was in the zone. I was playing comfortably on the fastest level. I had way over 32k points.

And then the score rolled to -32k. I've never hated Microsoft as much as I did that day (and I hate them a lot). I was dumbfound. They can't code AND they can't play Tetris. And they call themselves professionals... I eventually took it as a quest to get the top score as close to 32767 as possible. IIRC I got it within 28 points. My dad never beat that score.

This doesn't have anything to do with Wozniak or Apple. But hey, they mentioned Tetris.

Re:Mad Tetris skillz.

[poot_rootbeer]

And then the score rolled to -32k. I've never hated Microsoft as much as I did that day (and I hate them a lot). I was dumbfound. They can't code AND they can't play Tetris. And they call themselves professionals...

And I'm sure YOU'VE never written code where you put 'int' where you should have put 'unsigned int' instead... c'mon, as far as coding errors go this one is trivial.

Re:Mad Tetris skillz.

[travdaddy]

>> And then the score rolled to -32k. I've never hated Microsoft as much as I did that day (and I hate them a lot). I was dumbfound. They can't code AND they can't play Tetris. And they call themselves professionals...

And I'm sure YOU'VE never written code where you put 'int' where you should have put 'unsigned int' instead... c'mon, as far as coding errors go this one is trivial.

It would be more trivial and commonplace if it were a bit more of a complex program. We're talking about programming Tetris here. It's a safe assumption that not testing high scores on any game is a big oversight for a professional game developer.

Re:Mad Tetris skillz.

[Anonymous Coward]

None of the coders could score more than 32k, that is unforgivable.

Re:Mad Tetris skillz.

[pyrrho]

I had a similar competition with my wifes uncle years ago. Problem, he was way better than me. Well, it wasn't exactly a problem, I still had the highest score on the list.

Re:Mad Tetris skillz.

[bhtooefr]

I found a cooler Microsoft Tetris (the macros that make it run don't work in OO.org, though). It's at andrewgray.com. He's also got some cool break your computer stuff.

Re:Mad Tetris skillz.

[geekoid]

My wife and I had the same competition with Minesweeper. She would get an amazing time, then next day I would just beat it.
Finally she was at the point where it just wasn't possible to get it done any faster.
Then I confessed, I had been editing the text file they kept the time in.
heh, cost me dinner and a movie, that one.

Re:Mad Tetris skillz.

[Travis Fisher]

Ah, but have you noticed the scores still sort properly in the 32k to 64k range? They just display as a signed int...

(Unfortunately I still haven't been able to wrap all the way back around past 64K; my top was at ~50k back when I was addicted)

--Travis

26 years?

[TheRaven64]

Is it just me, or is /. celebrating n years of everything recently? Conventionally years that are a multiple of 10 are celebrated, as perhaps are multiples of 5. This being a geek site, powers of 2 could perhaps be celebrated as well (which might be better, since they happen less frequently as the event becomes older). celebrating 26 years of something just seems strange though, unless every day is going to have a 'look at all of the things that happened on this day in history' article.

Re:26 years?

[Ghoser777]

I'm sure they were thinking of it being a sum of tens (30) minus a power of 2 (4) aka 26. That's far more geeky.

Matt Fahrenbacher

Re:26 years?

[bhtooefr]

Could it be 26 as in 2600, as the Apple II was one of the first hackable computers that was easy to get? (I'll subscribe if I can get articles that are 2574 years into the future!)

Re:26 years?

[Nick of NSTime]

Do you only celebrate your birthday when it is a multiple of ten? I guess you'll be having parties at McDonald's until you're 120 years old.

Re:26 years?

[Maechtig]

It's just you.

Sweet memories and random comments

[chia_monkey]

Ahhhh, the random memories. I remember playing on the IIe. One assignment we had was to generate a quiz, so I wrote a program to ask who all the US Presidents were. I was already a geek in 6th grade. Three years later we still had IIe computers (different school...different state actually). We had to "draw" something, so my monochrome monitor ended up with a top view of an F-15.

Then the IIc came out and I thought that was the bomb.

Back to Woz...he's the man. Jobs is the man. Together, they rock. Wox has that childlike curiousity that keeps him working on things and coming up with new ideas and inventions. Unfortunately it's not always the "best idea" that gets there. Luckily Jobs was his buddy and took the business reigns.

And kudos to Woz for teaching, being a philanthropist, and giving his time to the people. In a time when so many executives just don't give a flyin' F about the "little people" and would rather build a nice big golden parachute for themselves, or worse yet, just suck the money from the company and the people and start half a dozen scandals, The Woz is truly a wonder to behold.

Re:Sweet memories and random comments

[pyrrho]

indeed... he is... The Woz!

Who's the Woz now, then?

[ianscot]

Wozniak does seem to be the low pressure to Jobs's high pressure zone. Talking about the first prototype:

I used the smallest, cheapest chips I could in my design. Most of the chips I got for free from our lab stock at Hewlett Packard. I kept my supervisor informed about my hobby and HP had a policy of allowing engineers to have chips to build things of their own design with a supervisor's approval. It was a very good and excellent policy for those, like myself, who wanted to design things, and therefore better themselves.

Apple under Jobs seems like a decent place to work -- my sister's employed there, they've been a solid employer with integrity, at least measured against (ahem) some other examples I could think of. But as far as this sort of policy goes, doesn't it seem like Jobs has the professional design people sending out the memos and the engineers reading them, rather than communication in both directions? Jobs id's a market niche, he sets designers working on it, and the engineers make it work, is how I read it.

Would Apple under Jobs have recognized a Wozniak in its ranks who'd cobbled a breakthrough PDA in the shell of an iPod? What's it like for those folks now, at Cupertino?

Re:Who's the Woz now, then?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would Apple under Jobs have recognized a Wozniak in its ranks who'd cobbled a breakthrough PDA in the shell of an iPod? What's it like for those folks now, at Cupertino?

How do you think the iPod came to be in the first place?

Re:Who's the Woz now, then?

[DustSpun]

Although I've never worked at the big A I was married to someone who did. I also knew someone who reported to SJ. I think she had a nervous breakdown. Working at Apple back in the day was amazing but working for SJ was definitely NOT.

OMFG Choplifter!

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't thought of that in years. Thanks for taking me back.

Ahhh, the memories

[Tseran]

I never started on an Apple ][, I started with the //e, but before that, the Vic 20 and a whopping 3k of RAM. At school, we had //e's to play with, and being the geek I was, I quickly began to learn to program them. Soon enough, I had ripped the intro sound from Castle Smurfenstein and had it playing every time I turned on the computer with one of my disks. The days of fun, and computing and the emergence of software piracy. Ahhhh....the elite days of computing when all you had was some....err....what were those black square things called? Oh yeah...floppies....what ever happened to them? Do computers still USE those?

Don't forget Apricot

[Bigboote66]

I actually saw this in stores.

-BbT

emulation overhead

[ZorinLynx]

Don't forget emulation overhead. You're emulating an entirely different architecture, so it takes dozens of x86 instructions to emulate a single 6502 instruction. Not to mention you're doing the address decoding and register handling entirely in software.

Re:emulation overhead

[bhtooefr]

True, very true. Although, that's not much...

My P75 laptop with Win95 and 16MB RAM can pull 100% of the original speed for some reason.

Re:emulation overhead

[Anonymous Coward]

The CPU emulation isn't the intensive part -- it's getting smooth video and accurate sound.

I used to get 100% emulation speed on a 16Mhz Mac LC, FWIW (except when there was lots of sound).

You young whippersnappers

[jlanthripp]

...with your fancy-schmancy Apple ][ computers with 4KB of RAM...

Why, when I was your age, I ran a BBS on an abacus hooked up to two tin cans and a piece of string! And we liked it that way!

Re:You young whippersnappers

[Anonymous Coward]

Redundant?

Show me another post in this thread referring to either an abacus or tin cans and I'll accept that the parent post is redundant.

Damn, you apple fuckwits are a tough crowd!

Re:You young whippersnappers

[Laplace]

I remember seeing a blackjack program for my Apple ][+ that had a message from the author stating the program had "snob appeal" because it required 16KB of RAM.

Re:You young whippersnappers

[geekoid]

You worked for America Online?

This guy made me a programmer!

[NumbThumb]

Me first computer was an Apple ][
My favorite game was Breakout.

Reading now that Wozniak had written that himself, and that some of the features of the Apple ][ were invented specifically for that game is just... well... soooo c00l!!!

But even better: that Breakout implementation has a bug that AFAIR did not allow the paddle (or the ball??) to move to the very top position (Yes, the game ws played left-to-right), causing situations were you where either cought in an endless loop or would loose your ball. Anybody remember that one?

Being rather anoyed with that bug, I went ahead and fixed it. That was revelation! You could just walk right into a program and change it! how cool!
Now, some 15 jears later, i am a pretty decent programmer and just finishing my informatics dipoma... thanks, steve, for that sloppy coding!

P.S.: Breackout ist still my favorite arcade-type game.

(man, i need to change that sig. it's been there forever)

Re:This guy made me a programmer!

[Chelloveck]

I hear you. My first computer, in my senior year of high school, was the Apple //e. Paid for it myself, and didn't have any money left over for software. So I sat down with the AppleSoft BASIC manual and wrote (after "hello, world") a text editor. Okay, I admit it was an abomination of a program. But it worked well enough to tide me over until I got enough money to buy AppleWriter.

And now my 5yo has his very own 900MHz PC. *sigh* Kids these days.

Re:This guy made me a programmer!

[usotsuki]

Brick Out on the Apple ][, all 3 versions (INTBASIC, Little Brick Out, FPBASIC) were actually written by Bruce Tognazzini, not Woz, according to the source code.

-uso.

Re:This guy made me a programmer!

[NumbThumb]

You'r right, but you'r wrong:

From the apple 2 history homepage: LITTLE BRICKOUT was an abbreviated Applesoft version of Woz's Integer BASIC Breakout game (the reason he designed the Apple II in the first place)

I'm actually not sure which version was the one with the bug thoug. But i'm nearly sure that the game was called Breakout, not Brickout.

Re:This guy made me a programmer!

[usotsuki]

Get the DOS 3.2 Standard master, DOS 3.3 8/25/80 master and DOS 3.3 1/1/83 master and check for yourself. I have done so.

INTBASIC Brick Out has Bruce Tognazzini's name on it.

-uso.

Re:This guy made me a programmer!

[shfted!]

(man, i need to change that sig. it's been there forever)

No way! It's one of the funniest sigs on slash!

Re:This guy made me a programmer!

[usotsuki]

 MASTER DISKETTE VERSION 3.2 STANDARD

1-JUNE-79

 COPYRIGHT 1979  APPLE COMPUTER INC.

>LOAD BRICK OUT
>LIST 2340
Â2340 CALL -936: VTAB 2: PRINT " Â ***
   WELCOME TO BRICK-OUT ***":
   TAB 9: PRINT "BY BRUCE TOGNAZZI
  NI": PRINT

>

(Hit the lameness filter, because I was trying to force this thing to work right. I wish it were easier to print Exactly As Typed.)

-uso.

Reminiscing....

[Cackmobile]

The first computer I used when I was in my 3rd year of school. What a sweet computer. USed to play some garfield game and a crossword maker. Sweet as.

Also

[Cackmobile]

I am 22. I used the apple 2 in the 3rd year of school. I was 8. That means it was 12 years old when I used it. Go Oz public schools.

Re:Also

[micq]

I am 22 - I was 8 = That means it was 12 years old when I used it. Go Oz public schools.

I think your school system is more screwed than you know...

Re:Also

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh...

I used the Apple ][ in 1st-4th grade... that was in like 1994.. Imagine how cheep the school system bought those things.

P.S. Im in 9th grade now

Re:Also

[MalleusEBHC]

I am 22 - I was 8 = That means it was 12 years old when I used it. Go Oz public schools.

I think your school system is more screwed than you know...
(Emphasis mine)

Maybe the system is screwed, but at least he uses and recognizes proper pronouns.

Re:Also

[Anonymous Coward]

I seriously doubt it was an original Apple II. Most of the machines I used in grade school were Apple II+ or Apple IIe class systems. The II+ was on sale until 1983, I think, and the IIe was actually still sold to schools until late 1993.

Steve Wozniak

[Anonymous Coward]

he's a modest fellow isn't he? has he ever said to God, "you're in my seat?"

buttoned down...

[Diamondback]

of course he wasn't buttoned down. jobs wears turtlenecks.

Re:buttoned down...

[Surak]

*sigh* It was a metaphor.

Re:buttoned down...

[Anonymous Coward]

Metaphor? Is that some sort of transistor?

What about Acorn

[Cackmobile]

I know they arn't fruits but still its edible. Incase you don't know they are these british late 80s early 90s RISC computers.

Re:What about Acorn

[meadowsp]

Late 80s, early 90s?
What about the Acorn Atom,BBC Micro and Electron, all from the early 80's and definately not RISC.

Re:What about Acorn

[bhtooefr]

Well, wasn't the 6502 considered nearly RISC?

get one now on ebay

[S. J. Massey]

The Apple ][ was my first computer and I still have it. It's kind of sad to see them on ebay now for a lousy $26 bucks.

Re:get one now on ebay

[HTH NE1]

Hah. My sister got me a complete NeXT cube at a real auction for only $25, sole bidder.

You can also pick up old Apple II-series computers at your local small Apple dealer for less (and no shipping). I've rescued two platinum //e models, a //c, and a dead IIgs (to use as parts if my original starts to die). Even picked up an old Mac Plus just to run AppleShare and try booting a IIgs over an AppleTalk network.

Re:get one now on ebay

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that that computer didn't even work, that's not so bad.

Same here!

[BoomerSooner]

My parents didn't take out any loa(n)s though. I was fortunate to be the child of well off parents (until the mid 80's).

Without my first computer (Apple //e 1983) I probably wouldn't be in the position I am today. We go to lunch and my dad says "That was the best investment I ever made." That is a pretty strong statement in my opinion.

Ah, it's like the Cat's in the Cradle all over again! lol... (tear in my eye)

Re:Same here!

[Drakonian]

I was fortunate to be the child of well off parents (until the mid 80's).

At which point you switched parents right?

Re:Same here!

[Anonymous Coward]

>At which point you switched parents right?

That's when Reagan did to the country what Bush is doing again. A lot of people went from reasonably staying afloat to sunk thanks to the economic policies of the 1980s.

The Woz

[Anonymous Coward]

If you EVER get a chance to hear Woz speak, GO! He has some hilarious stories.

For example, when he was in college, he designed and built a small device that would cause interference on a TV. Woz loves pranks, so he would take his little device to frat houses when the guys were watching the tube. He would sit in back & make the interference fade in & out. Meanwhile, some poor guy would try to adjust the antennae while everyone was yelling at him to move it here or there. In the end, Woz would finally stop the interference when the guy was in some bizarre contorted position.

He told one story after another. It was great!

Re:The Woz

[Anonymous Coward]

i'll second that. let me guess, summer of 2000 apple intern? so was i. good times

"Lieutenant Dan sent me a letter,

[ScottGant]

got us invested in some fruit company. He said we didn't have to worry about money no more, and that's good! One less thing."

It still gives me shivers to think that these guys, working in a garage, started something big that went on to change the whole world.

Re:"Lieutenant Dan sent me a letter,

[bhtooefr]

Wasn't HP the same way?

Garage trip time

[anon*127.0.0.1]

I've still got my original ][ out there somewhere. Not a +, just a ][... we didn't need no fancy floating point math back in my day. Well okay, I got an Applesoft card and a 64K memory card for it. (God, I can't believe I paid more for that memory card then I did for this whole computer I've got right here)

Anyway, I fired it up a couple of years ago... it still beeps, the floppy drives still spin.. maybe I'll go bring it in the house and check it out.

Isn't it ironic ?

[Foddrick]

The most ironic thing about my years on the Apple ][ is that now I have more apple software than I had when I owned one. And it doesn't even fill half a cd :) I still start up the emulator once in a while and play some of the old classic games from my mis-spent youth.

Knob

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care what he did in the past.... after reading his web site I've come to the conclusion he's a knob.... a skilled one? yes.. but basically he's still a knob!

Re:Knob

[Anonymous Coward]

agreed!!!

changed the world??? maybe.

pretentious git?? definately!!!!

Congratulations on 26 years, 1 day....

[Figz]

I'm so excited to announce that it's been exactly 26 years and 1 day TODAY! Can you believe it?

Hey, I loved the Apple ][ as much as anyone, but 26 years just isn't an important anniversary. Why are we talking about this? It's as if we forgot to celebrate this last year and we need to make up for it....

Re:Congratulations on 26 years, 1 day....

[bhtooefr]

I'm thinking 2600, people. 2600 is a hackers' group. The Apple II was the first easily obtainable hackers' computer.

Re:Congratulations on 26 years, 1 day....

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it's an extremely important anniversary for those of us who use base 13.

The Difference was (from an inside source)

[Anonymous Coward]

Jobs ate the Green Acid ! (-;

(source) stage announcement at Woodstock by Wavy Gravy

April 26th

[srw]

Note the date... April 26th, 1977 was, as far as I can remember, the introduction date of the Apple ][. What exactly are we celebrating on June 5th?

Important.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear gentle sirs,

I am a switcher of three months, now a happy Mac user after years of Windows computing that just didn't make sense. I can't believe I waited so long to make the decision! I bought a Power Mac G4 with Mac OS Jaguar and haven't looked back since.

One thing I wanted to express is my desire for scat. Gay shit. I want to be a human toilet. I've been looking for the right nasty little boy who can train me and use me like the brown log shredder that I am-- sit me under a toilet seat and go to town pumping fudge into my mustachioed maw. I thought that by buying a Mac I'd get into the scene, and make some hot hookups with colons packed to the gills in crap worms. So far, however, I've been disppointed.

Mr. Jobs and the executives at Apple, I plead with you to release more information regarding getting into the hardcore underground stool swallowing scene. All I can think about is gobbling down an 18" ass-birth fresh from the fart factory. Mac users popping squats over my face and letting loose with a tempest of farts and raining a hail of turds.

I hope you can help me with this issue.

Thank you.

I wasn't one of the cool kids, but

[vizualizr]

I was one of the (supposedly) talented and gifted kids in 4th grade, 1984. So we got to take a "computers" class. This amounted to driving us over to the one place they had some computers, and teaching us how to do Apple ][+ lo-res graphics. For those that haven't done this, it generally amounts to drawing out a grid of pixels, then writing a BASIC program to draw a 40x40 pixel, 16 color (or was it 8 color) picture.

In retrospect, this seems dork-like, but boy was it cool at the time. More than that, I think it laid the cornerstone for me to go on to what I do today, which is high-end computer-generated architectural renderings and animation. Humble beginnings to a fun life. But I'll always be thankful I was taught how to make something pretty (kinda) by typing

hlin 0,30 at 3

It took away my fear of computers. Today, when people I know in life wonder at how I can sit down and just pick up an application and use it, I tell them that its because I got started early, and got past the fear.

Thank you, wedge-shaped beige computer.

Re:I wasn't one of the cool kids, but

[zptdooda]

Holy smokes - thanks for reminding me of that command. Some neurons that have been dormant for many years just fired again.

That was pretty darn impressive for a grade 4 student I'd say! No supposedly about it.

I was in grade 11 in the early 80's and tried that and the hi-res commands. It was my first time working in machine language, hand-assembling tiny programs just to see what happened to the very few registers - something like a,b, x,y stack, accumulator and that was pretty well it. But my memories are foggy. Will have to read some of the other posts to.

There was a really neat split-screen high-res mode where you could have a few lines of text at the bottom, but otherwise have pixel on the top 3/4 of the screen.

mac problem

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you Mac fanatics? I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes. At home, on my Pentium Pro 200 running NT 4, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this Mac, the same operation would take about 2 minutes. If that.

In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even BBEdit Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.

I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Macs, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a Mac that has run faster than its Wintel counterpart, despite the Macs' faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 300 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the Macintosh is a superior machine.

Mac addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a Mac over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.

Re:mac problem

[Llywelyn]

1) If you want an intelligent reply, you need to give better statistics on your (ancient) machines.

2) You shouldn't judge modern systems by ones that are nearly 10 years old.

3) If you want to debate, log in. I won't go back and forth with an anonymous coward.

Re:mac problem

[ZigMonty]

Dude, it's a troll. Ignore it and let the mods do their work.

Old Skool

[LegendOfLink]

Ah...the good ol' days...making your name appear incessantly line after line using BASIC built into the OS (when using GOTO was acceptable, not shunned upon)...showing off to your friends by typing "CATALOG" and bringing up the file directory...and who can forget, kicking all your friends' asses in Lemonade Stand back in grade school.

Yeah, all we need now is to have the Super Mario Bros. Super Show come back onto the air.

Re:Amiga

[srw]

The Amiga was designed and a prototype built by a separate company. They didn't have the expertise to mass-produce it, and so they sold it off to Commodore, who owned MOS and was able to reduce the chip count by building custom chips for it. I'm not sure what the name of the original company was, but the grandparent post definitely has the idea right and the parent post should be moderated "mis-informative" instead of "Informative."

One more commodore memory

[vizualizr]

To me, today, in the age of gigahertz, this little memory of my commodore still brings a smile to my face.

Boot the C-128, and the clock speed was 1 mHz.

From a command prompt, you type;

FAST

And it goes to a whopping 2 mHz. Overclock that baby!!! Of course, most of the time I was using my C-128 for anything besides BBS's, the first thing I did upon turning it on was to hold down the C= (commodore) key to get it to boot into C-64 mode so I could play the bevy of illegal software I had downloaded from the BBS's.

Good old days. When the owners manual actually taught you how to write programs.

Re:One more commodore memory

[Anonymous Coward]

Just FYI, c128 fast mode basically shut off the VIC chip (which is why you were limited to using the VDU in 80 column mode if you wanted video while fast mode was on). Cute hack, and works the same way the c64 shuts the VIC off to do cassette transfers.

Audio Tape Deck Storage

[WC as Kato]

My first program was written on the Apple ][ in the summer before my senior year in high school. Too bad I have no evidence of it. I couldn't afford the $500 floppy drive and the damn audio tape deck was unreliable. You could hear the screeching on the tape but you couldn't tell if it saved correctly. It sure did make you program more efficiently because you didn't want to write a lot and lose it when you turned off the power. Man, those were the days.

monitors Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[johnpaul191]

some people bought the Apple ][e and ][ GS monitors for their Apple ][c, they didnt pop up on that little ET looking stand, but they totally worked. They would have matched too i guess? the Apple ][gs had more of a white case than the beige ][e and ][+. My school had one hooked up to a 19" TV so the whole room could see you could use Logo in color....

For the record my Apple ][e has the 12" monochrome, which might explain why i still make my telnet windows green and black. Personally, i spent countless hours playing on my 2400 baud modem or battling my brother on Spy vs Spy or Beach Head or Castle Wolfenstein or Choplifter. Life was better with the Mach 2 or Mach 3 joystick.

i guess i show my age when i refer to a Mac's "command key" as the "open apple" key?

Re:monitors Re:Not necessarily the Apple][, but...

[leighklotz]

Did you use Terrapin Logo (which I maintained and wrote part of when at MIT) or Apple Logo (which was written by other folks from MIT who formed a different company)?

Apple ][ as Popular as WordStar

[WC as Kato]

In college, I worked part time in the computer lab supporting Macs and Apple ][s. In those days no one used the PC lab for writing papers because WordStar sucked in comparison to MacWrite. No one used the Apple ][s either but I one day taught a girl to use the Apple ][ to write a paper since there was a waiting list for the Macs. She loved not having to wait, so I sold her the one sitting in my closet for the previous 4 years. I had to hold her check ($250 USD) for about 6 months before she had enough money for it clear but what perfect timing. I got rid of that thing as the Mac Plus was becoming popular.

If only I can do this timing thing with the stock market...

still remember the Apple I introduction

[peter303]

I remember when the two Steves would bring their Apple prototypes to the Stanford Linear Accelerator auditorium to demonstrate them. At a time when hackers where programming blinking light patterns on PDPs and Altair consoles, the two Steves figured out how to hook up a monitor and keyboard (disks came much later). Some of this is captured in the Revenge of the Nerds, part I.

June? My motherboard says April 1977

[TNN]

For date of birth I trust my motherboard more than
my fathersbeard.

APPEL IS TEH SUX!! USE LUNIX

[Anonymous Coward]

asdf asdf

Re:APPEL IS TEH SUX!! USE LUNIX

[bhtooefr]

Yes, use Lunix! It's available for the C64 and C128, and it is being ported to the Apple II!

Re:APPEL IS TEH SUX!! USE LUNIX

[Llywelyn]

Dyslexics of the world, untie!

Re:APPEL IS TEH SUX!! USE LUNIX

[bhtooefr]

Sorry, forgot the URL. It's lng.sourceforge.net.

Apple does not represent Woz's vision

[Simonetta]

My first sense of disaffection with Apple occured in the mid-1980's when the first Mac was about one year old. As an electronics technology student, I was very impressed with the Mac and excited to find out that the amount of memory could be quadrupled at moderate cost by carefully removing the sixteen 64K Dynamic RAM chips and replacing them all with 256K Dynamic RAM chips. Then adding a jumper or two to the main board and the system was supercharged and ready for serious work.
So many people were doing this that Apple started to offer it as a factory upgrade. But they charged something like two to four times as much
as the technicians who were charging basically for the chips, the desoldering equipment, and the time involved. Naturally people went with the independent technician option.
Apple responded by invalidating the warranty of anyone who received an outside upgrade, AND refused to allow anyone with a third-party RAM upgrade to get updated firmware EPROMs to correct the assorted bugs in the initial release.
This gave me the impression that Apple was a really sleasy company that was in reality 180 degrees opposite to their 'empower your world, create the new future' ever-present advertisements and media hype.
To this day I can't shake the underlying feeling that Apple is primarily a sleasy, weird, and creepy company; regardless of how many hundreds of millions of dollars that they have managed to spend manipulating their image in the media.

Apple is what people buy when they have large amounts of other-people's-money to spend and have an unbalanced obsession with looking cool.

Thank you,
Simonetta

http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2001/virtuebeauty /f antasy.htm

Re:Apple does not represent Woz's vision

[surferosa]

i guess that that's the way it is with almost any hardware company nowadays, you fiddle with your purchased hardware and the warranty's void. i mean, apple may not be the squeaky clean people's champion but they've certainly delivered for me.

Re:Apple does not represent Woz's vision

[Surlyboi]

Apple is what people buy when they have large amounts of other-people's-money to spend and have an unbalanced obsession with looking cool.

Kind of a blanket statement, no?

I for one most certainly didn't use anyone else's
money but my own when I bought every last one of my
Apple boxes, from my first //c to the TiBook I'm
composing this on. I cut my teeth technologywise on
Apple machines. Do I appreciate some of the
less-than-customer friendly things they've done?
Of course not. I bought them because they got the
job done and didn't get in my way too much in the
process. But at the same time, I didn't buy any of
these machines to "look cool". (Hell, up until
OS X, Mac owners in most computer circles were far
from cool anyway)

Bottom line, as always, YMMV, but Apple's still
the best way to go if you're going to buy a box
and not build one yourself. (and before you trolls
come at me with the "you can't build an Apple box",
I'm talking computers in general, both X86 and PPC)

Re:Apple does not represent Woz's vision

[Anonymous Coward]

That's a rather twisted view of actually what was going on... Apple never offered a soldered upgrade to 1 MB of Ram. The Fat Mac came out about a year later but that was only 512MB. Yes, there were plenty of 3rd party upgrades to 512MB by replacing those chips but that was after memory prices came down. The MacPlus in 1986 was where a full 1MB came into the picture, with an upgraded ROM... I really don't recall a rom update to the 512K unless you consider the 512Ke that required it. The opening the case/warranty issue had nothing to do with Apple, it was a consumer protection issue because of the high voltages on the flyback transformer. (be sure to check facts before you post) I agree Apple started to get "snotty" about that time however... they became rich off the Apple //, and it started to show about 1985, then steve left and it ran on his fumes for about 5 more years, but then slowly fell apart over the next 7 or so years... Apple is still stuck in a "snobby" mode though not as bad as the early 1990's... If steve wants to make Apple shine again, release a headless, fixed keyboard Mac, similar to the Apple // design. It won't happen, but that's how to get marketshare back to the 10-20% range. AC

Woz likes his Segway

[stankyho]

Woz also has a good reason to get a Segway.

Did you even read that page?

[Llywelyn]

Or are you just going off at the mouth?

First, as another reader pointed out, this has nothing to do with Apple publishing source code.

Second, in order for the music-labels to agree to the iTMS they *had* to implement some form of protection.

Third, RTFA--read the link you posted. Apple's iTMS DRM is *extremely* mild--letting you burn it to an unlimited number of CDs (which can then be reripped to unrestricted AAC files), spread between three computers, and copied to as many iPods as you happen to have. About the only things you can't do with it are a) Share it across a P2P network, b) spread it to every computer in a computer lab.

Further, the AACs and MP3s that you rip yourself are not copy protected.

If anything the page you linked to shows how Apple is *more* open--I thought at first, even, that you meant to indicate this, but your other posts show that evidently not.

Re:Did you even read that page?

[croddy]

no, if you read the grandparent you will see that this thread comes from a more general discussion of apple's penchant for proprietary lock-down.

also don't forget that 16-22khz brings AAC to its knees :-)

Even better, free Apple IIc :)

[lowLark]

Ive got an apple IIc sitting around, you want it?
It's yours if you want to pay the shipping (or pick it up in seattle).

email me at IIC.10.remmakjd@spamgourmet.com
and let me know.

-Dave

Great, happy birthday to another obsolete tech.

[shodson]

Seems like there is some anouncement on the /. homepage about the birthday of some technology. Do we really need this? All of this birthday cake and ice cream is really putting on the pounds.

I'd like to know your secret

[teamhasnoi]

The last 20 years have been a blur -- Star Control II, Wolf3D, X-Wing, Quake II, Uplink, and lately UT2K3. All because Woz and Jobs decided to slap together an affordable home computing system. How the hell did you get all that to run on a //c? I can't even get Quake *1* to play on mine!

Re:I'd like to know your secret

[usotsuki]

Well, Wolfenstein 3-D will run on an Apple IIgs...

-uso.

best apple 2 game ever: Wings Of Fury

[waspleg]

i have an emu and a rom a round here somewhere i'm sure this site has it...

the most annoying part was that i had a laser 128k (apple IIe clone) and it was supposed to run both apple and ibm software, but in fact ran neither very well, so i could play the game but after i lost all myl ives i had to cold boot the machine and reload the game because it would glitch at the highscore screen and lock up

it doesn't do that w/ the emulator i have now heh

Re:best apple 2 game ever: Wings Of Fury

[bhtooefr]

I thought the Laser IBM box was called the XT10. That's why the 128/EX/EX2 had the giant keyboard. It was also the XT10 keyboard. I heard that the XT10 could emulate the Apple II, but not the other way around. The XT10, was, of course, an XT clone with a 10MB HDD.

Actually while you are correct

[BoomerSooner]

in the greater context of the nation as a whole, you're wrong about why my parents became poor.

1. Divorce
2. Oklahoma economy 80% dependant on oil
3. Housing market dries up completely (my parents are builders of houses)
4. Regan economy actually helped no one but the rich.

So you are right it's just you left out the first three reasons.

BATTLE OF THE LOSERS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Soil testing apps? Man, you must be catnip for the ladies...

Space for rent

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll nestle in right here with this thread and be recored in history. Let us bow our heads and give thanks to the Geeks that make all this possible. Interview with Woz 2 -parts Baltimore sun

Favorite games from the IIE era...

[Biologist]

Some of my favorite games from the IIE: Federation Karateka F15 Strike Eagle (with the Mach III joystick, oh yeah!) Kung Fu Master Super Boulderdash (I wish I could get a port of this working now, it's a great puzzle/manual dexterity game) I also recall attempting to write a role playing type game in Basic in about 5th grade taking place in the world of Dune. It took me two weeks just to program the first couple of graphics and it never went very far... oh well.

IN SOVIET RUSSIA

[noogle]

Apple celebrates you!

Re:IN SOVIET RUSSIA

[Anonymous Coward]

j00 are teh sux0r

But enough about you...

[jmb-d]

Did anyone else (who bothered to RTFA) get the feeling that the interviewer was more interested in Steve Jobs than he was about Woz?

Kinda like a guy chatting up a girl only in order to find out about her roommate...

Guy: So, what's your major?
Girl: Philosophy.
Guy: That's cool... So, is your roommate seeing anyone?

Lemonade!!!

[usotsuki]

One of the tunes was "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head".

BTW, I have a QBasic version, should I put it up and make a link? It's 95% accurate. If you don't need full authenticity, an old text-only version of the code for GW-BASIC/QBasic is here but has some bugs in it.

-uso.

Re:Lemonade!!!

[Llyr]

One of the tunes was "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head".

Also "Summertime (... and the Livin' is Easy)".

Somehow wheneve there was any probability of rain, my stand always got rained out. Left me with a lifelong suspicion of threatening clouds. And also of random number generators.

Sure, post your QBasic version. It'd be good to reminisce.

Re:Lemonade!!!

[usotsuki]

I'm ABEND until Monday, I'll try to dig it up and post it then.

-uso.

Re:Lemonade!!!

[usotsuki]

Hai desu!

Please don't /. me :)

-uso.

Dropped out?

[pherris]

I heard he was kicked out of Harvard for stealing $30k of computer time from a NSA project he was working on. BTW, is this true or just an urban myth?

Re:Dropped out?

[Timex]

I heard he was kicked out of Harvard for stealing $30k of computer time from a NSA project he was working on. BTW, is this true or just an urban myth?

I used to work with the guy who was responsible for Billy-Boy leaving Harvard. He worked in the computer lab and noticed that different people were using the same login- the one assigned to BG... Investigations found that a couple of the rules governing computer use were broken. BG was given an ultimatum: leave or be kicked out. He left.

IIRC, the project they were working on was actually what became MS-BASIC...

Long Live The Apple ][

[kmhebert]

I started programming the Apple ][ (][+'s and ][e's I believe?) when I was very very young going to a computer camp. I'll never forget it! We started with a LOGO turtle and I guess I haven't looked back since. Part of my initial fascination came from the simple yet at the time amazing experience of pressing a button on a keyboard and watching the letter matching that button pop up in a fuzzy green hue on the monitor. Amazing! My first programs were such groundbreaking achievements as Turtle Draws A Square, or Turtle Draws a Circle (What's the syntax? REPEAT 360 [FORWARD 1 RT 1] something like that???). It really doesn't seem that long ago, and now it all seems so primitive. At the time I was too young to realize the implications of what I was doing, to me it was just a way to partly recreate the awesome experience I had playing video games in the arcade. I loved for the Oregon Trail. Once my little pioneer got arrested somehow and I had to appear at a trial. I think I answered "NO" to "Do you promise to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" and it was GAME OVER> Do any of you remember this, or is it just a bizarre artifact of my imagination? Finally, I remember a hot rumor around this time that someone had written a unicorn-drawing program in LOGO and it took an hour to run but drew a fantastic piture of a unicorn. Does ANYONE know what I am talking about? Is this a true story? Anyway, it's great to look back and think about what was, at least it makes us appreciate what we have now more -- even if what we have now crashes 10 times as often as the "primitive" stuff we had back then! Thank you Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, and may your accomplishments be fondly remembered always.

Halo, anyone?

[rjung2k]

What about that "Halo" thingie running on the XBox? Wasn't that originally a Mac game as well, before Microsoft decided to assimilate the company?

Re:Halo, anyone?

[MoneyT]

yep. All of bungie's games were cross platform, and then M$ bought it and not only killed th emac version, but seriously delayed the PC version.

Re:Halo, anyone?

[Surlyboi]

They didn't kill it, just delayed it. according to IMG
It's still on the way. It's being ported from the
PC version, so there still may be a lag time between
PC release and Mac release. (further screwing Mac
users somewhat, damn you Microsoft!) but it's still
coming as of yesterday.

Somebody's got to say it

[smyle]

Every OS Sucks!

"everything since AppleDOS is just a bunch of crap"

My favorite feature was the assembly monitor

[HopeOS]

I had a ][+ and I still have my IIGS in a box somewhere. The best feature of all time was the ability to go into the assembly monitor, write code, disassemble, review, modify, patch and tweak the machine on the fly. Beyond any doubt, my ability to code everything from device drivers to applications began there.

I also learned a lot about writing software quickly without using either an assembler or a compiler. Save often though. The //e had a built in assembler, but I only had a ][+ so I wrote my own. Then, using that assembler, I wrote a more powerful one and bootstrapped my way up. It took an entire summer. That was a good summer.

The IIGS was simply awesome. By the time I put it away, it had a video overlay card, 15MHz processor, 500MB SCSI external hard drive, and a full 8MB of RAM. I had gone through two power supplies and three motherboards over 10 years. Other than the monitor, it probably still works today. Wonder if I could get a proper pin out on the monitor and hook it up.

Ahhh... I don't get nostalgic very often, but damn , that was good stuff. With the exception of Linux, everything after the IIGS has been a real bore. I even considered leaving computer work altogether; there was nothing left to explore. As they say at ubergeek, I'm a "super villian" now so my computer life has become much more exciting.

Fortunately for me, my wife appreciates my enthusiasm for computers. But then, that's why I married her.

-Hope

Re:My favorite feature was the assembly monitor

[Tiny Elvis]

Ah memories..

I had a similar experience with learning 6502 assy; typing codes into the monitor (//e assembler wasn't much, it translated instruction names, that was about it.. had to compute relative branches by hand, for example), etc. I would write out my code on a paper, computing branch locations, etc, then type it into the monitor. To insert instructions you had to copy the memory, then go back and adjust all the relative branch addresses by hand. Later I saved up and got Orca/M -- it was great!

I wrote a system that would switch into hires (super hires?) on a //e and hook into the char output routine, and it would allow you to use other fonts. It was somewhat slow, but it worked.

Some time later I upgraded to IIGS. My boss at the time gave me a 110 meg SCSI hard drive that the company didn't need. This was in the days of the 6-8 mhz AT with 10-20 gigs inside. I was determined to get that thing to work on my GS. I didn't have much money, but I got a SCSI interface card.. of course there was no driver for my drive, I had to write the SCSI drivers and work up some kind of a cable, etc. I had practically no knowledge of SCSI.. But after a few weeks I actually had it working. The first time I booted up prodos and saw I had 90 meg free on the volume, was pure satisfaction.

I also had an 8 meg card and a CPM card. In fact I used wordstar on CPM on Apple // to write a term paper or two.

Comparing Linus and Bill

[Tony]

Jobs and Woz are good in different ways. I don't understand why you have to give a comment like that.

It's a valid and important comparison. The poster is stating that they choose to admire technical talent and scrupulous behaviour, and not ruthless business acumen.

In this world, there is a surplus of ruthless, greedy, and selfish behaviour. That, we've got coming out of our collective ass. Note how we measure success.

Not enough people even know who Wozniak *is*, let alone what he stands represents to most of us geeks who cut our teeth on the original Apple ][, long before the PC ever emerged from the gaping bowels of IBM.

It's just like saying that Bill Gates seems to lack everything Linus Torvalds has.

What, like talent at computers? Scruples?

Gates has never been very good at computers. In fact, the early days of Apple and Microsoft are curiously similar. Both were founded by two friends, one of whom was good at business, and the other at technical things. In the case of Apple, Woz was an electronics wiz. For Microsoft, Paul Allen was damned talented at software.

Now, both of the real talent behind the founding of these companies have moved on, while the less-talented (geek-wise) partners milk it for everything it's worth.

Gates could not have written an OS kernel from scratch. Linus did. (Linux was a working kernel when he unleashed it on the world. It just wasn't very complete.)

The evidence indicates that Bill Gates has no sense of humor, and no scruples. Linus has both.

Most importantly, Linus didn't have to become the world's richest man to get a girlfriend. Plus, Tove could kick Melinda Gates' ass.

Re:Comparing Linus and Bill

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, is that real penguin-shit on your nose?

Re:Comparing Linus and Bill

[El]

Plus, Tove could kick Melinda Gates' ass.

Now THERE is a matchup we'd all like to see on Celebrity boxing!

Defender score more impressive

[Man In Black]

Personally, I think the fact that he was able to roll the score on Defender more impressive... damn that game is hard!

Even more impressive is that he did it on an actual arcade machine with the nasty controls.

26 Years of the][ typo

[Nom du Keyboard]

26 years of that "][" typo.

It's a Legacy Computer -- Literally!

[tilleyrw]

I am sure of not being alone when I say that the Apple II+ helped cement the role of myself and many other kids as future geeks.

Girls could never be as much fun as collecting pirate warez and besting the latest high score on Karateka. Naah.

"One more minute, Mom, then the trash goes out!"

Bob

Re:The Difference was (from an inside source)

[metachimp]

Uhhh... That's *brown* acid...

Not just a suit.

[Backov]

Ya, he's not just a suit - he's a SCUMBALL suit.

He screwed Woz over on their first ever cash deal.

He pushed Woz out of the company.

When he came back out of his ouster for his crap, he pushed out Gil Amelio, killed all of his projects (Newton anyone?), fired all of the people he hired, claimed credit for the financial reform that Amelio had accomplished (Apple was going for bankrupt, Amelio turned it around).

On top of that, as soon as he got in, he made an unnecessary $150 million deal with Microsoft that Amelio had refused because they didn't need the cash, and because Gates wouldn't give him what he wanted (timely ports of MS Office).

Jobs sucks. The fact that Apple has come back is nice and all, but that doesn't change the fact that there's a dumbass piece of shit running it.

Re:Not just a suit.

[Surak]

Woz was never exactly 'pushed out' of the company. He's been an Apple employee and has received a (his words) small salary since the founding of the company.

The fact is that Woz didn't like the direction that Jobs was taking -- he never liked the Macintosh. He wanted the company to further develop the Apple ][ archicture, which actually was quite extensible. The Apple IIgs, introduced in 1986, had a 16-bit processor, multiphonic sound, and 640x200 graphics capability. It was also the first machine introduced to use LSI (large scale integration), a chip designed by Woz called the Integrated Woz Machine.

It was one of the first multimedia computers. Although the Amiga still majorly kicked its ass in the multimedia department, it had more multimedia capabilities than anything else (excluding the Amiga of course) out at the time, including the Macintosh.

All-in-all it was a machine ahead of its time.

Unfortunately, Apple never took the IIgs seriously, instead viewing it as a means of bridging the gap between Apple II and Macintosh enthusiasts. Most Apple II people never saw eye-to-eye with Apple on the Mac's closed architecture (including me) and ended up buying so-called 'IBM compatible' machines.

I'll never forgive apple

[geekoid]

for calling the Apples IIc portable.

Bad Joss Taipan

[geekoid]

"Somone has just told you where to find the most addictive game of all time"

Curse you!

More importantly

[geekoid]

what are you doing in YOUR garage?

GR (Low Res Graphics)

[MyHair]

It was techincally 16 colors, but really it was "light" and "dark" versions of 8 colors.

The text mode display of an Apple ][+ is 40x24. The command GR changed it to "low res graphics" which left the bottom 4 lines as text and the top 20 lines had each character split into a top half and bottom half colored square/rectangular blocks.

For text and low-res modes (and hi-res btw, but low-res and text mode used the same memory range, 400H-800H IIRC--that's 0x400 and 0x800 these days) the display was mapped directly from main memory. In text mode each character was represented by its ASCII value. In GR/low-res mode the graphics 'character' was split into a high and low nybble to represent the block colors. No pallete, no RGB.

I was geeky enough then to get into 6502 assembly language (in pre-teen/teen years), so I even did some assembly programming of the display. (But I'm only an amateur programmer today.)

Come to think of it, both 0 and 8 were the color black, so you had 15 visual colors and 16 logical colors.

It was a very valuable learning tool. I doubt I would know as much about computers today if I had started on a 16- or 32-bit machine.

Waxing Nostalgic & Replying to Self

[MyHair]

By the way, the ROM image included BASIC and a mini assembler. CALL -151 IIRC put you into a hexdump/memory lister mode, and "!" would start the mini assembler. I may be getting it a little confused with DOS's DEBUG.EXE, but the concept was similar.

HGR was the hi-res command. I don't remember it as well, but it was meory mapped from 0x2000-0x4000 IIRC. It was 2 colors logically, but the display device was a TV and the output was designed so that two lit pixels would look white while alternating lit/unlit pixels would be a color.

If you had a lone pixel or vertical pixel line lit it would be a color whether you wanted it color or not. Two adjacent pixels (left-to-right) were always white. Vertical placement had no effect on color.

That should help explain why things look weird sometimes in Apple II emulators. You can't quite duplicate the effect in modern RGB. Not that you'd want to except to see how the graphics were natively viewed in this color-hack manner. Diagonal colored lines were extraordinarily jaggy.

It's all coming back now. The high bit told whether the color options for this byte should be blue/orange or green/violet. The next 7 bits were memory-mapped on/off pixels. So, for example you were in HGR mode and wrote binary 10101010 to 0x2000 you would get a colored line. (Note to continue the same color in the next byte it would be 11010101, so HGR wasn't totally easy.) 11010101 at 0x2000 would show the complimentary color (blue vs. orange or green vs. violet).

Of course that's for people with no social lives who like to code in 6502 assembly. Normal people would write a basic program:

10 HGR
20 HCOLOR 2
30 HDRAW 0,0 TO 150,150
40 HDRAW TO 250,10

See the grandparent post for a low-res BASIC example.

Then there were some that did the turtle graphics (early vector drawing with a turtle-is-the-pencil metaphor), but that was a separate product.

26th Birthday? Who cares???

[SUB7IME]

Who the fuck cares about the 26th birthday of a transistor board?

still got em

[beavmetal]

I have 3 Apple IIc laying around my house. I bought the lot for a dollar (including hardware and a Dec Mate and software) for some Elementry school spring cleaning sale. I spent a whole 10 bucks and got a truck load of excellent old stuff. Anyone want some satiite receivers. Apple Talk is fun.

Wake Up Neo.
Knock, Knock.
Follow the White Rabbit.

We used KidPix, not Photoshop...

[vistic]

...at my grade school on our Macs. It was fun.

Re:Trusty IIgs!

[Timex]

If you don't count the TI 99/4a, the Apple IIgs was the first computer i ever bought. I paid $1500 for it NEW, about a year or so before Apple pulled the rug out from underneath it.

I still have my IIgs. About five years ago, I installed a hard drive on it and upped its RAM to 8MB. It's still got the factory CPU... It is a ROM01 model. :)

I'll keep my IIgs, thanks. As long as it runs, I'll enjoy puttering around on it. One day, i'll even get it connected directly to my Ethernet LAN. (in the mean time, i'll have it connected to my Mac LC, which is then connected to my LAN...)

My Apple Powerbook vs. the Apple II vs. the Mac

[theolein]

The first computer I ever saw, back in 1979 in High School, was an Apple II (or I, I can't remember) I wasn't very much of a talented geek and even though I had an HP41 a couple of years later, I never managed to learn to programme for the thing (perhaps using RPN was a feat in itself ;) ). My first working programmes at university in 1981 were written in Pascal at first on punch cards for an IBM 370, then on an Apple II. The years after that we were using IBM PC's.

I was never really interested in the Mac until I got my first PC job in 1989 selling and supporting Windows 2.11, Corel Draw 1 and some amazingly expensive AT&T Truevision Vista and Targa graphics boards and related software (Topaz, Rio). The company I was working for was a major Mac supplier and by chance in 1990, I got chance to work in Prepress on Macs, Using Quark, Photoshop and Illustrator.

That experience, one of being able to use a computer without having to mess around with dip-switches or address or mindless shit like extended memory drivers, or even having to configure much in any way, was what made me the fan of Macs that I am today.

I own and use an old Lombard Powerbook with OS8.6 and a Titanium Powerbook with Mac OSX. My job is supporting 20 Windows users at a company and the levels of frustration I have to go through to find out how to solve some PC/Windows problem ensure that I remain firmly in the Mac (and Linux) camp at home.

article text

[bcaulf]

A conversation with Steve Wozniak
In an exclusive two-part interview, Apple Computer's co-founder discusses Steve Jobs and the company's roots
By David Zeiler: The Mac Experience

The Mac Experience
Originally published Jun 5, 2003

The Mac Experience

First of two parts

Though out of the spotlight since leaving Apple Computer Inc. in 1985, Steve Wozniak remains revered for his integral role in helping Steve Jobs establish the company in 1976. He is credited with single-handedly designing the Apple I and Apple II machines.

A native of San Jose, Calif., Wozniak was introduced to Jobs in the mid-1970s by a mutual friend, Bill Fernandez.

Wozniak, who had dropped out of the University of California at Berkeley to get a job, was five years older than Jobs, who was in high school. He later received his degree from Berkeley.

Since leaving Apple, Wozniak has dabbled in several unsuccessful technological ventures, such as a wireless universal TV remote control company called CL-9, while devoting much of his time to educational causes.

In January 2002, Wozniak announced the formation of a startup company, Wheels of Zeus, to design and build "new consumer electronics wireless products to help everyday people track everyday things." The company has yet to announce any products.

Wozniak, 52, was in Baltimore last week for the silver anniversary celebration of the Maryland Apple Corps. He received a standing ovation before beginning his remarks.

In an interview, Wozniak discussed Jobs, the first Apple and the 1999 cable television movie, "Pirates of Silicon Valley," which depicted the showdown between his colleague and Microsoft Corp. founder Bill Gates.

The Mac Experience will feature more excerpts next week.

How did you and Steve Jobs meet?

I think it was my second year of college. I finally got some parts from a company that I had worked for, so I could build a computer of my own design. It was the first computer that I had ever built in my life. It was a minimal one. It couldn't do much, but it had switches and lights and it ran.

We built it down in Bill Fernandez's garage. He lived down the street, a few streets down. And Bill introduced me to Steve. That's my recollection.

Steve thinks we met much earlier, but I don't think so. Bill said: "There's this guy you've got to meet, because he likes electronics and he pulls pranks. You two have so much in common." And we did.

What was Jobs like? Was he like how he was portrayed in "Pirates of Silicon Valley"?

He was very much like he was portrayed there. He was sort of a free-floating hippie who could go a lot of different ways. He ate a lot of nuts -- and walked around barefoot or in sandals. He could get a job at Atari as a technician-engineer who could take designs and finish them. And then he'd go out for a few months and work on spreads in Oregon, or go over to India, bathe in the Ganges River. Then he'd come back.

I was very much the opposite -- just real stable. A settled, middle- type person, feet on the ground, have a normal life and a family and a home.

Has he changed much over the years?

No. Those values are very much unchanged. But his head was always looking toward business. Always. Even in those days. The questions he would ask: "With this design, could you ever put a disk drive on it?" "Could you ever have multiple users on it, sharing it?"

It's funny that, way back in time, these little questions he was asking, they're things that he keeps making sure Apple does to this day.

What is your relationship now with Apple?

I get a small salary. I want to be an Apple employee forever, if I can. I don't know what the salary is, but it's real small. Whenever I'm in the press, it sorta represents Apple. And I have occasional phone calls to Steve Jobs; sometimes, we'll get together for lunch. He might ask me a few questions about what do I think about that, how are we doing here. I let him know

Re:article text

[Anonymous Coward]

Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire. The reality of your own nature should determine the speed. If you become restless, speed up. If your become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion. Then, when you're no longer thinking ahead, each footstep isn't just a means to an end, but a unique event in itself. This leaf has jagged edges. This rock looks loose. These are things you should notice anyway. To live only for some future goal is shallow. It is the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.
Robert Pirsig

[OT] about my .sig

[petard]

I used to be a little into chemistry in secondary school, but not so much anymore. The reason I link to the story is that it provides the context for one of my favorite quotes:

"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die."
-- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban

It's so frequently misquoted that I wanted to link to the original article.

Unfortunately, my .sig doesn't convey that very well, because /. counts the link characters as .sig characters and truncates the .sig... i'd do a tinyurl, but the trolls have conditioned slashdotters not to click on that kind of link for fear of goatse dot cx or similar :-P