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1200-Baud Archeology
jamie found this singularly geeky article on reconstructing Apple I BASIC from a cassette tape. It claims to offer the first confirmed perfect dump (BIN) of the 4096 bytes of this venerable interpreter. Terrific fun for the whole family. "The Apple I is extremely rare. Only 200 were built, and less than 100 are believed to be in existence. Neither Steve nor Woz own an Apple I any more, and neither does Apple Inc. The cassettes are even rarer, as not every Apple I came with one... So here is how to decode the signal. Let us first open the audio file in Audacity and look at the waveform... It is now time to write a small program to measure and dump the width of the pulses."
*off to bathroom*
I'll report my findings later
It would be way cool to have an Apple I emulator on my phone. Come to think of it, a DEC PDP-1 emulator with SpaceWar would be pretty sweet, too.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That must be one weird family...
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I was actually thinking VIC 20. (I painfully admit that the first was not a woman but a PET and my father and I built a wooden case for it but that predated the VIC 20 by about a year or so.) I played FLOG off of tape and saved my SkiDownHillFaster game to tape damn it! Now somoene better get off my lawn but probably not you.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
There's a simple solution; post it as a hex (or binary or octal) dump. You can then claim that it's just an excerpt of the first trillion or so digits of pi. By the time Apple's lawyers determine it isn't, the guys who decoded & published it will be long dead.
Hmmm....an Apple in Java....I'll have to try that.
*dunks a piece of Washington Golden Delicious in his coffee*
*munch*Not*munch*bad*munch*
My blog
Many seasons ago, in a high school computer lab in the Bronx. I would save programs from computer labs Commodore PET to tape and wonder why they would always be blank the next day. Over time I realized that riding the NYC trains with my school bag on the car floor was not such a cool idea. NYC trains were somehow erasing the tapes when they were place closed to the floor. Until I figured this out there were many nights spent pondering what the gods of computing had against me. Curse you Number 6 Line! Curse you!!!
"Ahhh the suffering...."
"Vacuum tubes"? You were lucky, we had to play Space Invaders on an abacus made from a handful of hot gravel. And if we missed a single alien our father would flay us alive!
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
You think you had it bad? We had to play Pong with wooden mallets!
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
the idea was to make talk radio accessible to def people.
Like Mos Def and Def Leppard?
Bow-ties are cool.
The fun is in recovering it, not using it!
The real fun is in irritating Woz by reporting all the bugs to him again.
Hey Woz. I just found this small program you wrote and boy, is this code terrible!