The Apple II Turns 35 Today

harrymcc writes "35 years ago this week, at San Francisco's first West Coast Computer Faire, a tiny startup named Apple demonstrated its new personal computer, the Apple II. It was the company's first blockbuster product — the most important PC of its time, and, just maybe, the most important PC ever released, period."

Comments

I started on one of those

[oDDmON oUT]

The parents bought it for their business and for us kids.

Re:I started on one of those

[jhoegl]

PPPFFFTTTT, IBM PS/2 was way better with its sixteen colors display matrix, its 1 minute per page dot matrix printer, and its clickity clackity keyboard of oversized proportions.
Begone ye hippie!

Re:I started on one of those

[Anonymous Coward]

My 48K Apple ][ was my first major purchase (in 1981); it cost more than the nonrunning car I bought in 1980, and more than the total of the car and the repair costs to get it running. Saved every penny, used a used color TV for a monitor, hacked a gameport print driver cable, and with later purchases played marathon sessions of Wizardry 1 and 2. It took a year to save up enough for the floppy drive (a Lobo, not an Apple Disk ][ which I could not afford for another year) and a better monitor.

I still have my ][, it gets pulled out every few months and hooked to the TV to play old games on, annoy the nieces and nephews with 8 bit graphics and raspy sound effects, and totally make my day. Dunno about yours, but my Apple ][ is forever ;)

(I still have the car too but its back to not running...)

Re:I started on one of those

[psergiu]

Apple II was released in 1977.
Macintosh in 1984.
IBM PS/2 in 1987.

Remove you presence from our lawn, n00b.

Re:I started on one of those

[cpu6502]

>>>sixteen colors

You poor souls. My PC had 4096 colors, near-CD-quality sound, and true multitasking (preemptive). In 1985. My PC was a Commodore. ;-)

Re:I started on one of those

[Anonymous Coward]

My first was an Apple ][+ with a centronics printer & related adapter, and I also had a second floppy disk drive. And, I was one of the privileged to have owned an Amiga 1000, 500, and 4000. I remember loading one A4000 with $30,000 in RAM, and 68040 accelerator card.

Re:I started on one of those

[mc6809e]

You poor souls. My PC had 4096 colors, near-CD-quality sound, and true multitasking (preemptive). In 1985. My PC was a Commodore. ;-)

And don't forget the GPU. In 1987, Gerald Hull even used it to perform simple additions for an Amiga version of Conway's Life, making it an early example of more general purpose programming with a GPU!

Unfortunately the Amiga wasn't that important, though it should have been.

Re:I started on one of those

[KnowledgeKeeper]

You poor soul... I had a machine that could do this but the machine was not too popular and people didn't use it until it was too late. They all thought it was a little better than spectrum and ported only lousy spectrum games. Heck, they even thought this machine couldn't do scrolling :D CPC6128, yeah! :)

Re:I started on one of those

[Anonymous Coward]

you forgot the commodore pet! they got it to the trade shows first, but apple beat them to the release

Re:I started on one of those

[Deep Esophagus]

My PC was a Commodore. ;-)

This. When I started shopping for a PC in 1978, the choices were: Apple ][+, TRS-80, and Commodore PET. After playing with all three for several weeks ("Kid, if I see you come in my store again without buying anything I'm gonna call the police!") I picked the PET because it was so cool to be able to do "graphics" simply as printable extended ASCII characters, and animate them with PEEK and POKE directly into video RAM. I couldn't understand why people thought that stupid Apple was such hot stuff.

Of course years later when it was all IBM (and clones) I became a major Apple fanboy... or at least a Woz fanboy. Still can't stand the Mac, and I pedantically correct anyone who calls that piece of garbage an "Apple computer".

4 KB of RAM and a 20x40 ASCII display should be enough for anyone!

Re:I started on one of those

[TapeCutter]

Coincidently Conway's game of life is why I forked out $80 on a secondhand Apple][ in the early eighties. I had read about the game of life in an old SciAM magazine and was obsesed with drawing pages and pages of little squares with pencil and paper, I had no idea how to program the apple, but if you have ever spent all night playing Conway's game using graph paper, you may appeciate why I forked out $80 and took the time to learn. A few years later I dumped my factory job and signed up for a CS degree (graduated in 1990, a couple of years before the commercial boom started in earnest), Even though I didn't know it at the time, that $80 'toy' changed my working life like nothing else since. And I think that last point explains a lot of the nostalgia surround Apple]['s, C64's, XT's Amiga's, etc, because I'm sure I'm not the only slashdotter who (for nerdy reasons) was fiddling with a home computer in the 80's and shitting gold bricks in the 90's.

OTOH, I had little to no interest whatsoever in the internet at first, I couldn't see what was so fasinating about 'diplaying a formatted document on a remote computer'.

Re:I started on one of those

[cpu6502]

>>>Unfortunately the Amiga wasn't that important, though it should have been.

I don't know about that. When PC gamers saw the graphics & sound on Amiga, it created a demand for better video and sound card to satisfy them. Also you can still see Amiga graphics if you watch old episodes of Babylon 5, seaQuest, Hypernauts, or Star Trek Voyager (3rd and 4th season). They were using Amiga 2000s and 3000s with early versions of Photoshop/animation software.

Re:I started on one of those

[Caerdwyn]

Bah. Kids these days.

First computer: Processor Technology SOL-20. Intel 8080 processor, Northstar BASIC and a screamin' 143k floppy drive. 1975.

You kids and your square keyboards.

Re:I started on one of those

[Kahlandad]

It's a bit dishonest to say that 'you can still see Amiga graphics' when they were using Video Toasters for those special effects.

Video Toasters came with the still poplar and still supported LightWave 3D, not early versions of Photoshop.

Re:I started on one of those

[Anonymous Coward]

10 poke 59464, 100

It had sound too!

Commodore PET ruled!!!

Re:I started on one of those

[antdude]

I had an Apple //c for gaming, edutainment, LOGO, BASIC, AppleWorks (love those ASCII art works like multiple folders), etc. Fun times. :)

Re:I started on one of those

[cpu6502]

>>>they were using Video Toasters for those special effects

False. I've used the Video Toaster in a television studio. It creates the various sweeps between scenes, but the actual graphics are generated by the Amiga's GPU. When you look at ships in B5 or Voyager, or subs in seaQuest, or CGI-generated people in Hypernauts, you're looking at actual polygon graphics produced by the Commodore Amiga at 704x480 resolution. It took the computer days-and-days of rendering to produce just a few minutes of CGI. (If you still have doubt, just watch the Star Wars Walker demo... all of which was produced without the video toaster.)

BTW thanks for fixing the name of the software (Lightwave). Over 20 years one forgets names. Even now I don't remember the software I used to get online, even though I used it daily. JXterm or something like that.

Re:I started on one of those

[flappinbooger]

Apple ][+ was my first computer too. Learned BASIC on it. DOS BOSS, peek, poke, so on. Played tons of games on it too. I was in grade school.

Then... After a few years, a new one came into the house.... Tandy 1000 with it's fancy pants 10 meg hard drive. Well now, aren't YOU special?

Sigh.

I remember occasionally it would glitch out and I would solve the problem by lifting up the front of the chassis by maybe 2 or 3 inches and let it fall down onto the desk. Worked like a charm. My dad disagreed, he preferred to reseat the chips properly.

Re:I started on one of those

[flappinbooger]

I'll have to ask my dad whatever he did with the old A2+.... Dual 5.25 drives, 80 column card, I think it even had a ram upgrade.

My dad's factory used networked apple ][s for production QC for YEARS, it was really the only cost effective data acquisition at the time. Worked just fine!

Re:I started on one of those

[Anonymous Coward]

False. I've used the Video Toaster in a television studio. It creates the various sweeps between scenes, but the actual graphics are generated by the Amiga's GPU. When you look at ships in B5 or Voyager, or subs in seaQuest, or CGI-generated people in Hypernauts, you're looking at actual polygon graphics produced by the Commodore Amiga at 704x480 resolution.

None of those graphics were generated by an Amiga "GPU", because the Amiga didn't actually have one.

It had a blitter, which is a fancy DMA memory copy engine, and it had "copper programs", which were an old and primitive tech (as in, not Turing complete) descended from Jay Miner's previous personal computer design (the Atari 8-bit). Neither is a recognizable relative of a modern GPU.

Programs like Lightwave 3D did everything with software rendering engines. The only function of the Amiga's graphics hardware was to be a dumb framebuffer.

(Also, as far as the Toaster was concerned, the main unique feature of Amiga video HW it took advantage of was that the Amiga had relatively high quality NTSC signal generation, and facilities for interfacing external HW (the VT) into the analog signal path. The digital side or "GPU" as you're calling it was basically irrelevant to anything in the VT or LW3D.)

Re:I started on one of those

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah. Sinclair were much more important in this space. http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/computers/computers.htm We were using them in robotics development at uni in Australia by the 80's and their instruction set was pretty much what the world is based around today. The Mk 14 hit the market in 1977.

Re:I started on one of those

[OakDragon]

This. When I started shopping for a PC in 1978, the choices were: Apple ][+, TRS-80, and Commodore PET...I picked the PET because it was so cool to be able to do "graphics" simply as printable extended ASCII characters, and animate them with PEEK and POKE directly into video RAM...

You could do that with the TRS-80, too. (I am not sure about the Apple.) Unfortunately the TRS-80 "graphics" were blocky monochrome things... I was attracted to the TRS-80 because I thought it was neat that it came with its own monitor, and I liked the crisp 64 x 16 screen full of text. It was *not* good for most graphic games, but some creative types did great things with it (witness Leo Christopherson's Dancing Demon).

Re:I started on one of those

[Miamicanes]

> true multitasking (preemptive)

Well... yes, and no.

The Amiga's UI was preemptively-multitasked (and interrupt-driven). To a large extent, Intuition was indifferent to the state of running applications. If an application crashed, the mouse pointer still moved, you could still drag screens, and you could still move and uncover windows. It SEEMED like preemptive multitasking compared to Windows, because Windows has always made applications responsible for managing their own window contents. If you obscure a window in Windows, Windows leaves it up to the application to re-draw it. In contrast, when you obscured a Window under AmigaDOS2.x (for instance), it just set a 'dirty' bit that didn't get cleared until the application did something to change the screen. As long as the dirty bit didn't get cleared, Intuition itself would save the contents of whatever got obscured, and put it back when you revealed the underlying window again. Under Windows, if the app crashed, covering the crashed app's window with another one just smeared it away into junk.

Likewise, Amiga's dialog boxes were completely indifferent to the state of the running application. This occasionally caused problems, because if your application threw up a dialog, then took a long time to do something before bothering to check its message queue, you could end up with absurd situations, like "User clicked BOTH 'ok' AND 'cancel' at least once".

In a real sense, Windows 2000 (maybe even NT) had better preemptive multitasking than the Amiga... but it didn't feel like it, because a badly-running (or crashed app) made the UI itself appear to be partly crashed. If you think about what Windows 2000 was really doing when it ran DOS apps, it was basically the equivalent of multitasking crack screens and megademos.

Put another way, the Amiga's multitasking was more sizzle than steak, but it pulled off the illusion well, and basically pulled off multitasking better than everything else in its era (Mac, PC, ST). Win32 multitasking (at least, NT and beyond) was technically superior in more and more ways with each new version, but because Windows apps themselves sucked so badly UI-wise when things didn't go well, the illusion of multitasking was prematurely shattered, and the user felt like it was inferior. If you really want to see true preemptive multitasking in a vintage OS, get Windows 2000 and run DOOM, WordPerfect for DOS, AutoCAD, and a bunch of other DOS apps in windowed mode. That was where Windows could really shine... it's just that by the late 90s, nobody really cared about multitasking DOS apps any more, and Windows did such a shitty job of multitasking the UI for actual Windows apps.

Re:I started on one of those

[toejam13]

Except that the IBM PS/2 came with a VGA video adapter. It could display 256 colors from a 65K color palette; the Amiga could only display 32 colors from a 4096 color palette. The extra half-bright (EHB) mode still used a 32 entry CLUT... it generated colors 32-63 by halving the luma intensity of colors 0-31; it wasn't a true 6bpp color mode. And the hold-and-modify (HAM) mode used differential values to calculate color; subsequent pixels had a limited color range as you could only jump so far in the color palette from one pixel to the next. Sure, you could use unique CLUTs for each scanline to increase the number of on-screen colors, but it required a great deal of processor power to calculate on the fly. That's why it was mostly limited to static images (just as it was on the Apple IIgs that could do a similar trick).

And while the Denise could thump any PC audio chipset in the 1980s, it was not near CD quality. The highest sample rate was only 28KHz with 8 bits of resolution. CDA has a sample rate of 44.1KHz with 16 bits of resolution. Sure, you could use the 6-bit volume control register to create additional quantization steps, but you sacrificed two audio channels to do it. And 12 bits of resolution was a theoretical maximum; real world resolutions were smaller, especially as samples got louder. And again, it required a great deal of processor power to calculate on the fly

Lastly, you could install Coherent-386 on an IBM PS/2. True multitasking along with memory protection and multi-user support. You also had Concurrent CP/M-286 and -386 editions. They weren't popular, but they were available. And if you really want to split hairs, OS-9 was one of the first preemptive multitasking operating systems for consumer computers (read: not mainframes or minicomputers).

Re:I started on one of those

[Rubinstien]

I was able to get a standing pass out of art class as a sophomore in high school to go work on art projects in the Apple II lab for a couple of months. Our art teacher was on maternity leave. I decided I did not like the substitute teacher, and luckily for me she had been given the explicit instruction to let me do whatever the heck I wanted to. So I elected to spend my time elsewhere.

The graphics available from BASIC on the Apple ][+ were crude, but better IMHO than the programmable-character "graphics" available on the early Commodore and TI machines. I wrote code for all of them -- including a program that let you use a joystick or paddle for an on-screen "Etch-A-Sketch" style drawing program that would let you save and restore your drawings. Doing that by re-defining characters on the fly in BASIC was not much fun. It did have an advantage over the "real" Etch-A-Sketch in that you had to hold down a joystick button in order to draw, otherwise the single-pixel cursor would just be moved around. I wrote that same program in Commodore Basic for my best friend's PET (at his house while he spent the time playing Intellivision), TI-Basic, and AppleSoft Basic.

That was the level I was at when I started trying to do "art" on the computer. While playing with things and reading magazines from the stack in the corner of the lab, I learned about how the Apple colors were actually pulled off, and realized that White 1/White 2 and Black 1/Black 2 were a half-pixel offset from each other. This allowed you to draw a white line and then draw a pixel-shifted black line on top of it to get thinner lines, which worked great for crosshatching and other fill effects. That got me interested in the fact that the fonts exploited this feature to get smoother curves on-screen, and I began exploring writing my own fonts and doing graphics from inside the assembler/monitor. As a result, I taught myself 6502 assembler and wrote fast "vector" graphics routines that I could call from BASIC, as well as routines that let me draw my own text on-screen as well, not constrained to the rectangular grid of normal characters.

I had to demo how I had been spending my time to my real art teacher when she returned. She appreciated what I had accomplished artistically (including various "vector" animations), but understood little of it. Her eyes glazed over when I began explaining assembly language routines. I got an "A" for my self-directed art study though, which consisted mostly of learning 6502 assembler :-)

Re:I started on one of those

[Anonymous Coward]

Still remember my first Apple ][ plus - it's still in my mum's attic

We started with an RF modulator and an old B&W TV rather than a monochrome monitor. Soon upgraded to the good old green monochrome monitor.

It was all CAPS - no lower case. Then Zardax come out with a word processor that did lower case (used a hardware mod that connected to the keyboard with alligator clips and to the game controller inputs). Those were the days.

First modem was an acoustic coupler to dial in to various BBSs and the Sydney University VAX (running BSD Unix I think). Upgraded this to a 300 baud modem - what a treat.

Re:I started on one of those

[dov_0]

My big sister's boyfriend gave us his old Apple II Europlus when I was a kid. Awesome little thing. When we weren't playing Akalabeth or Moonpatrol, we were teaching ourselves Apple Basic.

Re:I started on one of those

[Anonymous Coward]

I've read your post and I can't for the life of me work out what "Well... yes, and no." means. The Amiga had pre-emptive multitasking. It had it in 1985 (in fact, 1984, when the beta versions were working). Which bit of what you posted is the "no"?

Whether or not something that was released much later, for a totally different architecture, could do it "better" isn't anything to do with whether the Amiga had pre-emptive multitasking. I'm not even sure how one implementation of pre-emptive multitasking can be said to be "better" than another, come to that.

Re:I started on one of those

[tyrione]

>>>sixteen colors

You poor souls. My PC had 4096 colors, near-CD-quality sound, and true multitasking (preemptive). In 1985. My PC was a Commodore. ;-)

My NeXTCube with a NeXTDimension board crapped all over your Commodore. Not to mention the OS was lightyears ahead.

Re:I started on one of those

[Anonymous Coward]

I sold my Amiga in 1985 to buy an AT&T 3b1. Real UNIX System V. 67 MB hard drive.

My Amiga friends thought I was nuts. Over the next couple of years, they all bought 3b1's.

Re:I started on one of those

[Miamicanes]

OK, let me put it another way.

On the Amiga, when your app was launched, you could "halfway humor" intuition, open a screen for your app, then operate within that screen with complete indifference to the rest of the system. By doing that, other apps could be allowed to run simultaneously on screens of their own. HOWEVER, your own app had to be somewhat well-behaved for that to work. If your app never checked its message queue, hijacked the interrupt vectors, rewrote the copper display list, or basically acted like it owned the machine... it owned the machine. Coming up with programs that could genuinely and politely coexist and run simultaneously with other, unrelated programs was actually a fair amount of work. In that sense, Amiga's multitasking was cooperative.

For all intents and purposes, ALL multitasking prior to ~Win2k, Linux, and OSX was cooperative. The difference is, legacy Windows and MacOS made the UI subordinate to the applications, so badly-behaving applications compromised the UI as well. The Amiga's UI ran "above" most apps in a way that was fairly robust. Even when compromised, an application had to stomp the system pretty hard to totally disable it. Because things like the mouse pointer and screen-management basically ran on interrupt-driven autopilot, most applications (even many games) respected it and allowed it to keep living, because it was useful to them (at best), and didn't really get in their way (at worst). Thus, programs like SoundTracker could coexist with DeluxePaint and Textcraft, even if they couldn't meaningfully interact with *each other* at runtime. However, if you launched Giana Sisters, Vaxine, Grand Monster Slam, Shadow of the Beast, or anything like that, those other apps were going to get wiped away. Literally, the game would act like an arm scraping across a table to knock everything off and clear it. Even games that didn't act quite so rudely were likely to leave the other apps (or Intuition itself) in a state where they couldn't meaningfully continue to run after the game exited.

In simpler terms:

The Amiga had cooperative windowed multitasking, and pre-emptive high-level multitasking of its mouse pointer, screens, and dialogs.

Macintosh and Windows (3.x, and generally 9x as well) had cooperative windowed multitasking AND the UI itself depended upon programs behaving well, even for things like mousepointer animation and window/dialog management.

The applications themselves were always cooperatively multitasked. The Amiga's difference was that the operating system itself WAS kind of independent of those applications, as long as you didn't go out of your way to stomp on it.

Here's a later example: PalmOS. Under PalmOS, all multitasking was explicitly cooperative, but there was a "higher-up" level for PalmOS itself that ran independently in a very Amiga-like manner to ensure that you could (usually) kill crashed applications and return to the launcher. It wasn't completely *impossible* to get an application (like a terminal app) to multithread and run alongside the system, but Palm made it very hard to do so, because apps that did it were capable of completely destabilizing the device.

The point is that "pre-emptive" vs "cooperative" multitasking when you're talking about anything not involving a hypervisor (or operating system with hypervisor-like capabilities) is more a bunch of blurred shades of gray than a hard line you can draw in the sand. You can say that the Amiga's OS was "more" pre-emptive than everything else of its era, and pulled off the illusion of pre-emptive multitasking better than everything else did, but it wasn't REALLY pre-emptive in the sense anybody who's used VMware (or DOSbox emulation from ~Win2k onward, or Linux) would really view as "true" pre-emptive multitasking.

The Amiga did the best it could with the hardware it had available to it. With a MMU-equipped 68020 or better (separate on the '020, inherent to the '030+) and a bit of politeness (for apps to cooperate with Intuition and politely alloc

Re:I started on one of those

[TheLink]

You could poke directly into video RAM on the Apple II.

The Apple II was actually a very simple/primitive machine in terms of hardware - Wozniak managed to have most stuff done by the CPU and so reduce the number of supporting chips.

Re:I started on one of those

[helix2301]

See this is the history they should teaching in class. Educate students on business news so they get inspired to be innovators not imitators.

Re:I started on one of those

[operagost]

The PS/2 had a 256 color display at 320x200, even in the base MCGA model. You had to upgrade to VGA to get the 640x480 resolution, however-- and that mode was in 16 colors. And that IBM buckling-spring keyboard was excellent: just ask the folks who paid me $35 for a clean used one.

Dot matrix printers come from an age when you measured speed in CPS or LPM, not in pages per minute. I'm puzzled by how you could have believed that the Apple DMP was somehow faster... it was 70 LPS, which is about the same as 1 page per minute.

Yes, I am old.

Re:I started on one of those

[operagost]

Or OS/2, but is that too obvious? Just lacked the multi-user support.

Re:I started on one of those

[Rotag_FU]

I started as a kid with a pretty sweet Apple IIe with dual disk drive, extended memory, and 80 column card. I learned basic on it, typing, and general computer knowledge. I loved that thing. I was absolutely heart broken when I found out that my dad sold it at a garage sale after I was in college for not much money. If I would have known he was going to sell it, I'd have bought it from him. It still worked great and meant more to me for nostalgia value than whatever pittance he got for it. Oh well.

Re:I started on one of those

[cpu6502]

>>>Amiga didn't actually have a GPU

Funny that. I could have sworn the Amiga came with not just 1 but *4* processing units. One for sound (SPU). Two for graphics (GPU). And of course the central processor (CPU). And they multitasked the execution of programs, such that one could be playing music code, another manipulating graphics, and the CPU crunching algorithms.

To imply the chipset was nothing more the dumb slave chips with no intelligence is a falsehood worthy of a politician. It was because of the 3 coprocessors that a 7 MHz Amiga could run circles around a 8 MHz Macintosh, even though both had the same CPU.

Furthermore the Amiga was just not a "frame buffer". SOMEBODY had to generate the ships that were flying around in B5 space, or subs in seaQuest's oceans, and it sure as hell wasn't the video toaster. It was the Amiga's graphics, raytraced one frame at a time.

Re:I started on one of those

[mattack2]

The point is that "pre-emptive" vs "cooperative" multitasking when you're talking about anything not involving a hypervisor (or operating system with hypervisor-like capabilities) is more a bunch of blurred shades of gray than a hard line you can draw in the sand.

I understand what you're saying, but I think it's more like the other tricks are _blurring_ the line that otherwise is a hard line.

In other words, it's preemptive if there is nothing an app can do to prevent the other apps from running. They may be blocked on the filesystem or something, but they still can get CPU time. It's cooperative if the apps HAVE to do something to be "friendly" to give other apps time. (e.g. they have to call GetNextEvent() or related APIs for other apps to get time on Mac OS pre-OS X.. If they're just using CPU time doing a calculation, no other apps get CPU time.)

Many of the other aspects you're talking about seem to me more closely related to protected memory (and/or virtualized hardware) than preemptive vs cooperative multitasking.

Yes, even with preemptive multitasking, apps can be "friendlier", but I don't think that greys the hard dividing line, it just makes the entire system better to the user.

Re:I started on one of those

[gmanterry]

I gave my II+ to my then 5 year old son and bought a IIe when they came out. I still have both and they both still run.

Re:I started on one of those

[Miamicanes]

Actually, I think you're right. I guess my memory got a little fuzzy after 20 years (omg, has it *really* been that long? I feel old...). After reflecting on it for a while (and skimming a few ancient articles online), I think the years I spent writing PalmOS stuff kind of mangled my Amiga memories a bit. Thinking back harder, I think AmigaDOS multitasking worked through the video interrupt. From what I can remember, there was an official place to put your own jump vector (or maybe it was an official call to pass the address of your own verticalblank handler to a list that AmigaDOS would iterate through and jsr to one at a time after it finished doing its own vblank work), but the way AmigaDOS did context switching was to play with the return address on the interrupt stack. Something like this:

(Intuition is executing)

(vblank interrupt). AmigaDOS is the official interrupt handler. It looks at its list of executing tasks, and determines that Intuition is the current one. It pops the return address from the stack, and saves it in Intuition's "next return address" slot. It then saved the state of a0..a7 and d0..d7 in 64 bytes, and executed its own code. Then, it executed all the user interrupt handlers for other running apps. Finally, it looked at the list, determined that the next app to run was going to be Soundtracker (for example), copied its saved registers to a0..a7 and d0..d7, and pushed its return address onto the stack. Then executed the RTI, which magically resumed execution of Soundtracker.

(Soundtracker is executing)

(vblank interrupt). Same as before, except this time it saves the registers and return address in "Soundtracker's" slot. It executes its handler and the wedged handlers, then determines that the next thing to run is WordPerfect. Restore the regs, push WP's return address, and RTI.

I'm sure it was more complicated than this, but I think that was kind of the essence of how it was able to forcibly grab control of the CPU from uncooperative apps.

Re:I started on one of those

[hawk]

Bah. You kids.

Pre-built computers.

and I thought I wimped out on my first machine by using ICs and wire wrap . . . :)

hawk

Re:I started on one of those

[robthebloke]

The Amiga had a graphics accelerator (for hardware blitting), but it's a big stretch to call it a 'processing unit'. The difference between a GA and a GPU is that the latter is turing complete. The GA in the amiga couldn't do much beyond 2D parallax and sprite effects, although it was very good at syncing with NTSC/PAL signals, which meant it could act as an extremely good framebuffer (it was a hell of lot cheaper than buying a pronto!)

The GA in the amiga could not be re-programmed in any way, so it could *not* be made to handle 3D! Any 3D images created on an amiga without a video toaster, would have been rendered (very slowly!) on it's CPU. All raytracing examples from that time, were created on the amiga's CPU (remember all those glass spheres over the chequerboard floors?). Even now, raytracing is rarely used for production work because it's far too expensive computationally (although you might use trace() within a raster based shader).

It was the video toaster, specifically the VT screamer (and later models), that was used to render 3D graphics. Those were 150Mhz MIPS CPU + 64Mb of ram (The older ones were mainly used for video editing). At the time, it was the next best thing to an SGI machine (~200Mhz Mips). The VT did not do ray-tracing. From 1994 onwards (after commodore was officially dead), you might still be using a video toaster, but you'd have been using it with a windows PC rather than an Amiga running at 10% the speed. The examples you have been citing as examples of the Amiga graphics are all sadly examples of the Video Toaster + Pentiums (or later). Earlier work (1990 -> 1993) would probably have been using the Amiga. The amiga was a fantastic machine, but once commodore destroyed itself, it's use in FilmFX work pretty much ceased..... By 1999 or thereabouts, consumer grade PC's were outperforming SGI machines, which relegated most VT's and SGI machines to the skip :(

Re:I started on one of those

[cpu6502]

>>>Any 3D images created on an amiga without a video toaster, would have been rendered (very slowly!) on it's CPU

No shit. That's what I've been saying all along. The CGI in B5, seaQuest, et cetera was rendered by the Amiga CPU and displayed with its graphics chip..... about one hour per frame.

Re:I started on one of those

[Anonymous Coward]

oh yeah, my trash 80 color computer, was, hell i forget, why do you bother to remember that stuff?????

Re:I started on one of those

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? How fast is your son's mile these days? :)

Re:I started on one of those

[Anonymous Coward]

My NeXTCube with a NeXTDimension board crapped all over your Commodore. Not to mention the OS was lightyears ahead.

Yeah, 5 years later. Even PCs were doing true color by 1990.

How much did that setup cost, BTW?

Props to Eric the Half a Byte!

[HornWumpus]

My old Apple ][+

Damn I'm old.

Re:Props to Eric the Half a Byte!

[Nimey]

Are /all/ your computers called Eric?

Re:Props to Eric the Half a Byte!

[cpu6502]

The first time I touched an Apple was in reading class, which would have been 1985. It was a nice machine but I couldn't understand why it was a boring monochrome screen, and simply went "beep" instead of playing music. (I didn't realize the Apple II was already ~8 year old technology.)

I never touched another Apple until the Mac SE when I reached college. And once again I wondered why it was monochrome, had almost no musical ability, and wouldn't let me run more than 1 program at a time. (Still better than an IBM PC though, which I avoided like the plague.)

Re:Props to Eric the Half a Byte!

[Anonymous Coward]

You missed out. By the time the Mac SE came out, PCs had 386 CPUs, high colour SVGA, inexpensive digital audio and if you wanted, a MIDI synthesizer.

Re:Props to Eric the Half a Byte!

[cpu6502]

>>>By the time the Mac SE came out [1987], PCs had 386 CPUs, high colour SVGA, inexpensive digital audio

In 1987? That's a stretch. Maybe by 1990, but the PCs were still pretty expensive to purchase. And they were stuck with crappy Windows 3 or 3.1. (Yeah I remember.... I remember how much I hated it.) The PC gaming graphics still didn't look that great. So I stuck with the Macintosh and Commodore Amigas until 1998, then upgraded to a cheap PC with Win98 (because it had the same look-and-feel as the Mac OS).

Re:Props to Eric the Half a Byte!

[oldhack]

Back in those days, half a byte was called a nibble.

Man, I dearly wish we kept it, the green monitor, floppy disks and all, if only so that we can play Lode Runner, Hard Hat Mack, etc.

Re:Props to Eric the Half a Byte!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it isn't. My PC in 1987 was exactly as I said. 386, SVGA graphics, a parallel port DAC for digital audio and a Roland MT-32 for MIDI. By 1990 I had upgraded to a 486 and a Sound Blaster, keeping the MT-32 for music of course.

As for Windows, well, I didn't switch away from DR-DOS/Novell DOS until Windows 95 came out and even then I booted into DOS by default until sometime after Windows 98.

Re:Props to Eric the Half a Byte!

[jedwidz]

A nybble even!

Re:Props to Eric the Half a Byte!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to call bullshit on that. When the Mac SE was introduced in March '87, the standard VGA wasn't even out yet. The first third-party VGA-compatible chipset (Trident 8800) didn't come out until 1988, let alone SVGA. Not sure what you had, but it couldn't have done better than 640x480x16 or 320x240x256.

Re:Props to Eric the Half a Byte!

[ross.w]

It's people like you what cause unrest.

Re:Props to Eric the Half a Byte!

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'm going to have to call ignorance on that. VGA and SVGA both arrived in the same year. My Tseng ET3000 from 1987 was an SVGA card capable of running at 800x600. The Trident 8800 was NOT the first VGA card, not even Trident's first VGA card, and you are sorely misinformed if you think that it was.

Trust me kid, I was there and I had it. You probably weren't even born.

Re:Props to Eric the Half a Byte!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's people like you what cause unrest.

Help help I'm being repressed!

Re:Props to Eric the Half a Byte!

[Anonymous Coward]

I stand corrected. I was a teen then, but I wasn't into PCs yet.

There was still no VGA when the Mac SE came out though. :)

Hooray!

[Anonymous Coward]

35 years ago one could play games on their Apple computer, like Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Dragon Wars, Wasteland, among others.

Today Apple creates consoles that run Photoshop with one button to avoid confusion by 'savvy' users.

Re:Hooray!

[Anonymous Coward]

35 years ago one could play games on their Apple computer, like Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Dragon Wars, Wasteland, among others.

Today Apple distributes the first and third most popular single Unix distributions in the world.

Re:Hooray!

[Hatta]

You can still play Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Dragon Wars, Wasteland, and others on your Apple computer, even if it isn't 35 years old.

Re:Hooray!

[Nerdfest]

How would things go if you submitted an iOS version of that? Things have changed.

It's fun to ask people if they played the original Castle Wolfenstein, with most thinking of the much later Wolfenstein 3D. It was a pretty cool trick to get 'voice' out of an Apple ][ in the early 80's.

Re:Hooray!

[NardoPolo88]

Ahh Voice....We had apple ][+'s and //e's in my school...crap I dating my self now...and I remember running SAM (Software Automated Mouth) on them. Needless to say as a Jr. High student we were basically just have fun making it curse. At home we would use my C64 and SAM to make prank phone calls. We were all such rebels then.

Re:Hooray!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's fun to ask people if they played the original Castle Wolfenstein, with most thinking of the much later Wolfenstein 3D.

I learned all of my German vocabulary from the original Wolfenstein.

When I asked a German exchange student what "Liebfraumilch" meant, she apparently had not heard of the wine of that name because she looked at me funny and said, "Milk." Much later I realized she probably thought there was something perverted about a game with Beloved Ladies Milk. And then I realized she was probably equally uncomfortable about the whole Nazi aspect.

Ah. To be young and naive again!

Re:Hooray!

[Rotag_FU]

Apple distributes Android? :)

Re:Hooray!

[ncc74656]

How would things go if you submitted an iOS version of that? Things have changed.

Look up Best of FTA. Used to be you could get it to drop to a BASIC prompt, but I think the current version reboots on Ctrl-Reset. I tried changing the startup slot in the Control Panel, but got nowhere with that. I think you could still transfer ProDOS filesystem images over to it and use it as a more general-purpose Apple IIGS emulator, but I've not tried doing that yet.

PC?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a Mac, silly.

Re:PC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Shhhh... it can't be a PC. If it is, the MS anti-trust case looks less valid. Also, Intel hardware running Linux is always ready for the desktop, unless it's competing with MS in an court where anti-trust is an issue. Then, and only then, A box running Linux is not a worthy competitor for the same hardware running Windows. Wheeew. You almost blew it there for a lot of people.

Re:PC?

[mark-t]

No, it was not a Mac. It was an Apple ][... a completely different computer from even the very first Macintosh computer that Apple made.

Most important PC released? Please

[Anonymous Coward]

More RDS in action.

Commodore, Atari, Coleco, Tandy, IBM - all were there to eat Apples lunch. There were other kit-based machines before the Apple. If they hadn't marketted it as a consumer durable, someone else soon would have. It's not like it really took visionary insight to know that people would want to buy a computer, if it was affordable.

So go wank off to your stickybear games, or whatever you do. Imma fire up my C64 and play some jumpman.

Also celebrating 35 (this year not today)

[cpu6502]

- Commodore PET (same CPU as Apple II)
- TRS-80 with Zilog-80 processor (best selling computer of 1978, 79, and 80).

Source: http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2005/12/total-share.ars/3

Re:Also celebrating 35 (this year not today)

[Anonymous Coward]

True. The C64 also sold way more units than the Apple and many of the C64 coders went on to develop for the NES and SNES making it the more influential platform by far.

Of course, the Apple was better thought out than the PC. It had autoconfiguring expansion cards in the 70s while people were still setting jumpers on the PC cards up until the 90s.

Re:Also celebrating 35 (this year not today)

[jedwidz]

Case in point: Manfred Trenz wrote Turrican on the C64, and later single-handedly wrote a Turrican game for the NES.

I never played the C64 games, but I've seen footage that looked extremely close to the Amiga versions I'm familiar with. That says a lot about how capable the C64 was in the right hands.

Re:"News" for nerds?

[stewbacca]

Lemme guess. You are in the 18-24 demo?

Re:Most important PC released? Please

[stewbacca]

Imma fire up my C64 and play some jumpman.

Even the AppleFanBoy I am can agree with this! Jumpman > Breakout.

One Of The Most Expensive As Well

[EXTomar]

Although not strictly the Apple II, the IIe was the first real computer brought into my house growing up. Now that I'm a professional working adult, looking back on that box with the green monitor, the one floppy drive, and other details I wondered how in the world my parents were able to justify and afford the thing! As the article correctly points out, at $1200~ 1980 dollars that is around $5000 today! That was probably the most expensive piece of technology in the house at the time and I never realized it at the time where instead I was simply happy to mess around with Applesoft Basic and various games.

Re:One Of The Most Expensive As Well

[pwnyxpress]

As the article correctly points out, at $1200~ 1980 dollars that is around $5000 today!.

Close, but about $1000 short

Re:One Of The Most Expensive As Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Although not strictly the Apple II, the IIe was the first real computer brought into my house growing up. Now that I'm a professional working adult, looking back on that box with the green monitor, the one floppy drive, and other details I wondered how in the world my parents were able to justify and afford the thing! As the article correctly points out, at $1200~ 1980 dollars that is around $5000 today! That was probably the most expensive piece of technology in the house at the time and I never realized it at the time where instead I was simply happy to mess around with Applesoft Basic and various games.

A couple of years ago people were spending more than that on big screen TVs. They've come down in price since. It all depends on whether you have a disposable income. TVs can be educational but are usually used to watch junk and a bigger TV adds nothing to the quality of the content (though bigger may impact learning/attention for younger children). Your parents through wisdom or accident chose to spend money on something that contributed to your education and your ability to compete. Then and now there are luddite parents and educators who believe if you introduce a child to a computer you can't also teach them to do math in their head or have them memorise times tables, and who are proud of their ability to restrict their children's access to technology. Be thankful your parents weren't idiots.

Re:One Of The Most Expensive As Well

[NibbleG]

As the article correctly points out, at $1200~ 1980 dollars that is around $5000 today!.

Close, but about $1000 short

How is an eBay auction today relevant to the adjusted price of a [computer] in 1977?

Re:One Of The Most Expensive As Well

[cpu6502]

$1200??? Wow. My first computer was only $400 (the C64). For a CRT, we just plugged the thing into the TV.

Re:One Of The Most Expensive As Well

[Anonymous Coward]

On the one hand, it's a lot of money. On the other hand we still had a large middle class.

That said, the early Apple computers were definitely a sign to me of *upper* middle class. I had to wait until the C64 hit $400 to get one. I don't count the TI which I had for about a year before that--it was a Christmas present which was a pure surprise. My parents realized its limitations soon after I did.

Re:One Of The Most Expensive As Well

[cpt kangarooski]

Being able to be plugged into a tv was one of the outstanding features of the Apple II from very early on. You'd need a Sup 'R' Mod if you didn't have a composite input on your tv, but this was no obstacle.

IIRC the guy who made the things (per an agreement with Apple, who didn't want to bother with the FCC certification for it) sold a few hundred thousand of them.

Re:One Of The Most Expensive As Well

[oldhack]

Apple operated with shrewdness. They pumped their machines into schools with discounts, and managed to con our parents that they were THE educational tool unlike Commodores and Ataris which were "merely" game machines and toys sold at K-mart.

However, Apple II was indeed superior with their open architecture even while lacking in graphics and sounds.

Re:One Of The Most Expensive As Well

[iroll]

I spend about eighteen hours a day with a computer on in my presence, and eight-plus hours interacting with one. I'd hazard to say that I'm computer literate.

I also happen to be one of those luddites who thinks people should learn to do math on paper first, only I prefer to think that it's important for a person to be flexible and capable of doing math without a calculator. You might never do long division again, but then again, you might; wouldn't it be a lot easier to have it already exist in your mental toolkit? And simplifying fractions isn't just an exercise to satisfy your 4th grade teacher; it prepares you for algebra.

Being able to know when to use math-on-paper and when to switch to your graphing calculator or excel shows that you have a better sense of what you're working with, not that you're anachronistic. Understanding what your calculator does when it solves a matrix is a strength, not a weakness.

I mean, is it so crazy that I can touch-type 90 wpm, and yet also believe that people should be able to write legibly with a pen and paper?

Re:One Of The Most Expensive As Well

[tlhIngan]

I spend about eighteen hours a day with a computer on in my presence, and eight-plus hours interacting with one. I'd hazard to say that I'm computer literate.

I also happen to be one of those luddites who thinks people should learn to do math on paper first, only I prefer to think that it's important for a person to be flexible and capable of doing math without a calculator. You might never do long division again, but then again, you might; wouldn't it be a lot easier to have it already exist in your mental toolkit? And simplifying fractions isn't just an exercise to satisfy your 4th grade teacher; it prepares you for algebra.

Being able to know when to use math-on-paper and when to switch to your graphing calculator or excel shows that you have a better sense of what you're working with, not that you're anachronistic. Understanding what your calculator does when it solves a matrix is a strength, not a weakness.

I mean, is it so crazy that I can touch-type 90 wpm, and yet also believe that people should be able to write legibly with a pen and paper?

Ditto. Because doing things "the hard way" teaches you things that being a computer technician or calculator technician never will. (And yes, mindlessly punching in numbers and recording the answers down makes you a technician - you just operate the machine).

Math should be taught first by hand done longform, then mentally. Being able to qo simple basic arithmetic in your head is VERY valuable - and if you wish ti participate in society, you will be doing math mentally. E.g., estimating how much tax is to be added on an item when you go shopping. Or eat out - having a rough idea of the bill beforehand is very valuable in not busting the budget. No you don't have to get it down to the exact penny, but knowing the general amount is sufficient. It's useful to figure out if you need to take out another bill, or if maybe the cashier has charged you wrong and you're about to be over or undercharged.

Writing legibly is important as well - tablets are everywhere, but not quite prevalent, and you might need to actually write something down and give it to someone. Writing down an address or phone number takes seconds, whereas trying to exchange email addresses can be an exercise in frustration and take 10 times longer. Hell, business cards - lets you write notes about the company - like "call about supergizmowidget special offer" or "sells test equipment" that sort of thing.

Important skills to keep up.

Re:One Of The Most Expensive As Well

[iroll]

It's funny; the basic argument that I hear for "more computers" and "more calculators" is that the calculator frees you from drudgery and allows you to spend more time on the big picture, or the important concept.

I'm not going to deny that this is true sometimes. But having been a teacher I also think that it's warning that the lesson isn't being done as well as it could be. There's so much in math and physics that can be done without pages of arithmetic or with just a limited amount of algebra or calculus that carries so much meaning. That there's really no reason to assign problems with so much "drudgery" that a computer becomes indispensable.

I think that there's a real balance that needs to be found, where learning to work by hand leads into interesting problems that lend themselves to application of computers. That's so much different than just using a computer to skip to the answers.

Re:One Of The Most Expensive As Well

[tlhIngan]

It's funny; the basic argument that I hear for "more computers" and "more calculators" is that the calculator frees you from drudgery and allows you to spend more time on the big picture, or the important concept.

I'm not going to deny that this is true sometimes. But having been a teacher I also think that it's warning that the lesson isn't being done as well as it could be. There's so much in math and physics that can be done without pages of arithmetic or with just a limited amount of algebra or calculus that carries so much meaning. That there's really no reason to assign problems with so much "drudgery" that a computer becomes indispensable.

I think that there's a real balance that needs to be found, where learning to work by hand leads into interesting problems that lend themselves to application of computers. That's so much different than just using a computer to skip to the answers.

Nothing wrong with that. But it's a ladder. You start with the absolute basics of pen and paper arithmetic - it's dull and boring and really the only way to teach it is drilling. Though situational word problems definitely help (especially since a lot of times you only need basic arithmetic - e.g., shopping/going out/etc).

One the basic building block of arithmetic is done, you move up to algebra and the like, to which a calculator can be handy after all the symbolic manipulation is done to get the final result. But here the skill is in the algebra - the calculator is to prevent the skull-drudgery of the arithmetic from getting in the way of learning when it adds nothing ot the lesson.

Then comes calculus, where a computer helps with the basic algebra so the lessons on doing the derivatives and integrals can sink in and it's reduced down to an algebraic expression, at which point you might as well just pass it through as doing the algebra achieves little learning.

From there comes applications, where one would actually use those mathematical skills in practical situations. Here a computer is handy in getting the final answer - the hard part is finding out how to get to the answer, not the actual grinding through.

Though having the basic skills down pat can help you apply judgement as appropriate. Because knowing what the range of the answer should be is paramount in order to ensure a mistake wasn't made - either in data entry, setting up the equations, or bugs in the calculation program. At the very least, one should be able to guesstimate the magnitude of the answer (0 significant figures) - which can also be done through experience. But also looking at the calculations, you can get maybe 1 significant figure for your estimate, which would be good enough to verify that the mechanical part of the task was done correctly.

And even though you're doing the physics part and letting the computer do all the pages of algebra and calculus for you, it never hurts to review the work. Nothing would suck worse than to realize for some reason, your paper boiled down to 2+2=5 (unless that was your goal) because you took the answer the computer gave you blindly.

Re:One Of The Most Expensive As Well

[hawk]

It wasn't so much "didn't want to bother," but a deliberately distancing.

My understanding is that that circuitry had been meant to be part of the ][, but it would have crated FCC issues for all of the machines, not just the ones going into homes.

Sending it to another compay made it just plain not an apple product, and completely distance the real product from FCC rules, which were changing rapidly at the time.

Gee, if someone wanted to sell an adaptor for it, wow, that was cool, and it just happened that that product's existence would sell more apple products . . .

hawk

marketing

[nurb432]

While i'm an Atari guy, i admit we lost and they won. Marketing is what made the difference.

And i disagree that it was a complete shoe-in for the average guy to want to buy a computer just because it was "affordable" ( a relative term ) as you more importantly had to convince them they wanted this strange new device.

Re:marketing

[narcc]

I think VisiCalc sold more Apple II's than any marketing effort on Apples part at the time.

They did well in primary education as well -- I don't remember what they did to get Apple II's in seemingly every K-6 school (or classroom!) in the 1980's -- clever, though.

Re:marketing

[cpu6502]

>>>While i'm an Atari guy, i admit we lost and they won.

Only just barely. Apple in 1996 was deep, deep in debt. It was headed to the same black hole as Atari and Commodore fell into (bankruptcy). As Steve Jobs himself said, "We were only 60 days away...... I called Bill and told him to deal directly with me from now on." -- That's when Bill Gates gave Apple some cash, which allowed them to pay their bills, rather than defaulting.

Re:marketing

[nurb432]

Does it matter how you lost? I could go into how Tramiel's sons ( and illegal business practices from Nintendo ) killed Atari, or why commodore died out of the business market.. But its all academic, while we weren't watching, Apple beat us while we were all bickering about who was better than whom, and then IBM/MS almost beat Apple later..

End result is only 2 were left standing,and ultimately that is all that really matters in the business world.

Re:marketing

[cpu6502]

>>>Does it matter how you lost?

Yes. History matters because you can learn from it. --- Apple didn't beat Atari and Commodore. The Intel/Microsoft dominance with ~99% of the market led them all to the slaughter. Commodore died in 94, Atari in 95, and Apple in 96 (almost).

Apple's saving grace was Bill Gates and Steve Jobs being friends, so that Bill helped-out Steve with some cash. Otherwise Apple would have disappeared too.

Re:marketing

[toejam13]

I'd say that it was less about friendship and more about mutual reliance. Apple needed Microsoft's productivity software. Microsoft needed a strong opponent in the marketplace to avoid government scrutiny regarding its monopoly status.

Re:marketing

[Anonymous Coward]

>>>Does it matter how you lost?

Yes. History matters because you can learn from it. --- Apple didn't beat Atari and Commodore. The Intel/Microsoft dominance with ~99% of the market led them all to the slaughter. Commodore died in 94, Atari in 95, and Apple in 96 (almost).

Apple's saving grace was Bill Gates and Steve Jobs being friends, so that Bill helped-out Steve with some cash. Otherwise Apple would have disappeared too.

Actually, it was more about Apple being on the verge of winning a major QuickTime patent lawsuit against Microsoft, and Jobs using it as leverage to get important strategic concessions in the settlement. You really think Gates was that level of friends with a guy who loved to needle Gates and his company for lacking taste, copying everything, etc.? That Gates would voluntarily throw a lifeline to a competitor, one of the few of the size and scale which could be a real threat? (Remember, we're talking about the same Gates-led Microsoft which never missed a chance to stomp even the smallest of potential competitors who were merely potential threats.)

Also, Apple didn't get cash out of the deal. Microsoft bought a large chunk of nonvoting Apple stock, with an agreement to hold it for a few years. The other part of the settlement was that Microsoft had to commit to something like 5 years of support for Mac Office and Internet Explorer (at a time when IE was the only good Mac web browser and Apple didn't have the resources to go its own).

In other words, the terms of the settlement were really about putting Apple out of harm's reach. It ensured MS couldn't kill Apple by ending support for vital applications, and gave MS a major financial stake in Apple's future health.

Re:marketing

[Kyusaku Natsume]

While i'm an Atari guy, i admit we lost and they won. Marketing is what made the difference.

Steve Wozniak's hardware, Steve Wozniak's software and Steve Jobs vision made the difference.

Re:marketing

[cpu6502]

Agreed.

If it wasn't for the anti-trust lawsuit, Gates probably would have waited 60 days for Apple to declare bankruptcy and disappear as a competitor (as he did with Commodore, Atari, Netscape, ...). Today when he looks-on at Apple's dominance in the MP3 and smartphone markets, he probably wishes he had done exactly that. ;-)

Re:marketing

[Alioth]

Apple weren't in debt in 1996, they still had a considerable amount of cash on hand. However, what they were doing was not exactly growing as a business, to say the least.

Time to boot Oregon Trail

[KatchooNJ]

Toast to evenings once upon with that soft green monochrome glow... and me dying of dysentery.

Re:Time to boot Oregon Trail

[wjcofkc]

Ah memories. If I had a mod point for you. Cheers old timer.

Wonder if I can get the apple ][ version of that game running under emulation or maybe it's off written in javascript or flash somewhere...

Re:Time to boot Oregon Trail

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.virtualapple.org/oregontraildisk.html

Re:Time to boot Oregon Trail

[Anonymous Coward]

I know a lot of people look back fondly on that version of the game, but I never played it.
I did see a few kids playing it on Apple IIc computers in my junior high library.
For me, the real game will always be the one from MECC Elementary Disk 6, where the menu just called it "OREGON".
That was the one where shooting a deer, wolf, bandit, or Indian meant timing the "press any key" just right so the buckshot would creep up to it over several seconds and hit it.
I played it last week on sdlmess.
And that wasn't even the earliest version!
If you care, read Jimmy Maher's extensive history of The Oregon Trail.

Re:Time to boot Oregon Trail

[cpu6502]

M.U.L.E.
Enough said. "Archon" was also a cool game. And Spindizzy. And Silent Service. And Red Storm Rising. And Pirates. And.....

Re:Time to boot Oregon Trail

[antdude]

You can play it in colors AND online: http://www.virtualapple.org/oregontraildisk.html ... ;)

Re:Time to boot Oregon Trail

[KatchooNJ]

Yes! :-D All great games... although, I actually played those on the C64. heh But I have to admit that the superior M.U.L.E. experience was on the Atari 800 because you could play with 4 players. :-D

Re:Time to boot Oregon Trail

[QuantumLeaper]

You could play 4 player on the Commodore 64 version too. 2 with joystick and 2 on the keyboard during the auctions, but you could use the either joystick to pick the land when it was your turn. What I liked was you could cheat with someone against the other players.
Collusion was great!

Re:Time to boot Oregon Trail

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm so old that Oregon Trail was actually *ahead* of my time. By the time that game was released in the mid 80's, I was already in high school. While we still had plenty of Apple II's there (and in grade school as well), I was too old to have been introduced to it as school. I've always heard about the game, but never actually played it. I got too old, too quick!

Re:Time to boot Oregon Trail

[Creepy]

Weird... I didn't play any of those on the Apple ][, and I played nearly everything on the Apple ][. Oregon Trail is the exception, because I was living in the state that created and funded it. I played a bit of M.U.L.E. on a trash-80 I think (youch!). Silent Service was definitely on a colorless mac, and Archon and Pirates definitely on an IBM PC. Spindizzy I've never heard of until now, but looking it up I see it was similar to Marble Madness, and I played the actual Marble Madness port, so I probably didn't care.

Probably my favorite Apple ][ games, and there are a lot of them, were Choplifter, Rescue Raiders!, Sabotage, Castle Wolfenstein, Drol, Ultima, Wizardry, Karateka, Below the Root (eduware label be damned), Irving and Bird 1 on 1 (I had that game mastered and made $150 off of it in contests, so I had to include it), Lode Runner, Autoduel, Aquatron (the best defender clone ever), Conan: Hall of Volta, anything Infocom, Skyfox, and SunDog: Frozen Legacy. Oh, and I loved the total conversion Castle Smurfenstein (Dino Smurfs was OK, Smurfenstein was better).

Re:Time to boot Oregon Trail

[KatchooNJ]

True... true... but it was definitely better with 4 joysticks. :-)

Okay, you win.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're absolutely correct. You are the man. Enjoy your victory. Now, please excuse me while I go have sex with a woman.

was my first, too.

[nblender]

The Apple-][ was my first as well. I had to move beyond Integer Basic to asm in order to figure out the increasingly complex copy protection that was evolving as fast as we could figure it out ... Did my first BBS'ing with a Hayes MicroModem...

good times ...

"most important PC ever released"

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? What a wanker's definition. It was the most successful of the bunch, no doubt, but "most important?" I'd prefer the IBM 1401 (my first "PC" at C-E-I-R) with 4000 bytes of memory, which was a LOT earlier; it was the first computer that medium- to small-firms could buy to automate their billing systems. And, the most significant part of THAT whas the IBM 1403 Printer!

iWoz

[misfit815]

Started with a used ][+. Strangely, to this day, I've never owned another Apple product. In the early years, it was a matter of cost and availability to me. These days, I just prefer to stroll around outside the walled garden. But, man, I loved that computer.

Re:iWoz

[Dog-Cow]

We need a -10000:Pretentious Shit mod option.

Re:iWoz

[misfit815]

Hah, ok, yeah, it did sound pretty pretentious. It's all true, though. I remember looking at some Apple system that had 128k or so in a glossy magazine thinking of all the stuff I could do with it. I have no idea what that was, but apparently it was some killer stuff. And then I went to work for a guy who gave me a used 286, and I was in the IBM PC world for good, trading up for better parts whenever I could.

And, seriously, I've never owned any iAnything. The walled garden thing is spot-on. I'd rather do without than opt-in. I just found it curious that I never managed to own any other Apple item, even back in the "good old days".

Re:Most important PC released? Please

[Anonymous Coward]

The Apple II wasn't a kit machine (for most people, though a kit version was available early on.) Apple beat Commodore and Tandy to the punch; Atari was content to be a consolemaker at the time, and IBM took its sweet time realizing that the lowly personal computer would be a threat to its mainframe business.

The Apple II was the first of the Big Three home computers, the most popular, and the longest lived (it hung on until the end of 1993) and the most successful in business, thanks to VisiCalc.

The IBM 5150 was definitely more influential in the industry, but it never would have happened if the Apple II (no, not home computers in general...the Apple II specifically) had not showed Big Blue the chinks in its armor.

Re:Most important PC released? Please

[Anonymous Coward]

In before John Titor

Re:"News" for nerds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not fair. I'm still in the 18-24 demo and this is great to read. It helps me to learn more about the experiences of computer evolution. I still go on and on about the NES to the kids and they can't figure out the excitement I have. This puts it into perspective I suppose.

The domino that knocked all the others down.

[Shoten]

The Apple ][+ (please, people, use the right characters for it) on which I learned to code back in 1980 in school, thanks to the incredible forward vision of a man I only knew as "Mr. McAniff." All good things in my life...and there are so, so many of them...came from that. Rest in peace, Mr. McAniff, I bow to you now and for all time.

Re:The domino that knocked all the others down.

[Osgeld]

characters depend on model, II appeared on the IIe platinum, I usually type // cause that is what my //e enhanced that we had for half my life, and the //c that I have today

Re:"News" for nerds?

[mark-t]

Your assertion is provably false.

The submitter cared enough to submit it. The submitter is someone, and therefore not nobody.

It got approved to be an actual headline story. Those that approved it are also not nobody.

Your statement is better qualified as *YOU* do not care... and perhaps are incapable of imagining how anybody else could care.

Short of having some possible religious reasons to not recognize birthdays and anniversaries, I'm unsure why the fact that some other people might care about this should be a problem for you.

Hunt the Wumpus

[Anonymous Coward]

I cut my programming teeth on an Apple ][+... I still own a working Apple //e and //c... What really blows my mind is those 5.25" floppies still work great... I've baked them, frozen them, boxed them, dropped them, stepped on them, and generally abused the frack out of them for 30 years... I even still have a copy of Hunt the Wumpus and Oregon Trail!

Re:Most important PC released? Please

[Hatta]

Commodore, Atari, Coleco, Tandy, IBM - all were there to eat Apples lunch.

And every one of them is out of the PC business today.

Also 35 today

[tommeke100]

me :)

Happy Days...

[Anonymous Coward]

I fondly remember buying BeagleBrothers Software, reading "AppleBlad" Magazine (in Dutch/Flemish) and typing over the peeks and pokes in Integer Basic.
And then suddenly, my interest in machine language was born: programming the 6502 and trying out all the memory locations in the C000-CFFF area to see what happens with your hardware (video, diskette drive...).
Together with an collegue I even wrote my own Assembler IDE for Apple ProDos.

But the best memory was that NOBODY bothered me with PC being infected with crapware. Heck, people didn't even dare to call me: i was the computer voodoo priest and computers were still used in companies with 10+ people or schools.

Re:Happy Days...

[lord_mike]

I loved the disk care warnings on the Beagle Bros. floppy disk envelopes. I always took care to not put the disk in the toaster, but I unfortunately didn't heed the warning about feeding disks to an alligator. Who knew that would ruin them? ;-)

I also loved the "ragtime" graphics and fonts on all of their products.

Re:Happy Days...

[KatchooNJ]

And don't fold the floppies into paper airplanes, either! ;-)

Angry Dads!

[Sebastopol]

Who else remembers mom and dad arguing about the cost of this, with mom (and the urging of your teachers) on one side, and dad's worry about the cost on the other? And then Dad complaining that they didn't need to spend $1,400 on another Atari (2600). Then the countless summers with an angry Dad threatening to pull the plug if you didn't go outside and get at least a half an hour of fresh air? And now as 40-somethings we hear our angry dads apologizing? Who knew it would turn out the way it did....

Ah the summer of 1980 and all that family strife over the Apple...

Re:Angry Dads!

[Osgeld]

dad bought ours for his biz

Apple II personal computer isn't 35 yet

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because the Slashdot crowd is the kind that should Know (knowing is half the battle,) the OP probably should identify this as the 35th anniversary of the Apple II kit. Not a purchasable personal computer.

The first personal computer was the TRS-80 Model I, which was a real product in stores in August/September of '1977. (August for the first units.) The Commodore shipped its first units in October, where the Apple II didn't even have it's case tooling set up until December or early 1978. So it's a little 'fuzzy' to use the kit build as an anniversary when almost everyone is remembering the production units. [That said, one dealer was supposedly assembling the kits themselves and then selling the machines.]

But once you include kits, then there's a whole history of personal computing that predates all of the above. Scelbi, Altair 8800, IMSAI 8080, CP/M, Gates & Allen's BASIC, etc. None of which got the 'anniversary treatment', so perhaps next year for the Apple II? And not until fall for for the TRS-80.

Re:Apple II personal computer isn't 35 yet

[Anonymous Coward]

The first personal computer was the TRS-80 Model I, which was a real product in stores in August/September of '1977. (August for the first units.) The Commodore shipped its first units in October, where the Apple II didn't even have it's case tooling set up until December or early 1978

The first Apple II shipped in June 1977. Seriously, you couldn't even Google that??

Commodore PET was announced in January 1977, when Apple had been selling Apple I computers for 9 months. Oh, did you forget about that one?

Schools

[nurb432]

That was part of the marketing plan. Get the kids used to them so they will ask for them as adults.

To get them in there they got huge discounts, and sales guys bugging them to death.

Re:"News" for nerds?

[SoCalChris]

He must care some. After all, he clicked on the story to read it.

/Remember getting a mouse for my Apple IIc, and thinking what a horrible input method that it was, and that it would never catch on.

Re:"News" for nerds?

[Tharsman]

Computer evolution is a liberal myth! It's time intelligent computer design theories be properly covered in our educative system!

So, it all started with a forbidden apple...

Maybe the most important PC ever released

[Tough Love]

Maybe not. The IBM PC was way more important.

Re:Maybe the most important PC ever released

[Anonymous Coward]

Fair enough, but the Apple II running VisiCalc popping up in places of business got serious attention from both the top bosses at IBM and the engineers in Boca Raton, who were clearly influenced by the Apple II. Some of the grid-paper sketch proposals of Lew Eggebrecht, the main PC designer, note comparisons with the Apple II in the original PC design spec.

The Apple II also had an incredibly long life span, my first PC was the //c in 1985. Not far of the original II, just more memory. Same great 1mhz clicker-sound poll-driven io wonder.

Re:Maybe the most important PC ever released

[dragonquest]

I'd agree to this. But the reason PC was more important was that it gave rise to Open Architecture and that too from the big blue. Suddenly clones popped up everywhere ensuring the long life of the PC.

Re:Maybe the most important PC ever released

[Anonymous Coward]

"But the reason PC was more important was that it gave rise to Open Architecture "

Are you seriously retarded?? You could get the complete Apple ][+ schamatics and it had slots for expansion. How much more open did you want?

Re:Maybe the most important PC ever released

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple sued clonemakers into oblivion, duh.

Re:Maybe the most important PC ever released

[Anonymous Coward]

They were doing it wrong.

IBM did the same thing to clone makers that used their patented technology.

What made cheap PC clones possible is reverse-engineering the BIOS, so that IBM couldn't claim their technology was being illegally distributed. Compaq made a fortune doing this, though Columbia Data Products was first.

There is a //e Enhanced sitting on my desk right..

[PotatoHead]

. now!

I've got a project going to put a modern micro-controller into it. There are times when I will write on it too. The keyboard just brings back a wonderful state of mind and many memories of happy times.

Like another contributor up thread mentions, I owe a lot to a Mr. Krouse, who put a few of us on the machines and encouraged us to "go boldly forth", and we did! Figuring out binary math on the blackboard, typing in 6502 assembly language into the monitor to make fast little subroutines, and sounds. Shape tables. Then there was Copy II+ Yeah baby! We had some of everything floating around the school.

Text adventures were the best. I still enjoy playing them. Heh, I've not looked, but those need to be on the smartphones yesterday. Hook 'em early.

LOGO, PASCAL, CP/M...

Artifacting. When I was a kid, the Apple graphics fascinated me. Other computers had a different look to them, well generally. It turns out Woz exploited NTSC to get color. The 3.58 Mhz color carrier present on composite video signals limits overall luma resolution. Small pixels end up getting translated into both luma and color because of their high frequency content. The phase between them and the reference color signal dictates which color will be seen.

Pixel position on the screen equates to color, in other words. Additionally, on all but the very first revision Apple ][ computers, the 7th bit in the high-res graphics screen would trigger a 1/2 pixel phase shift, creating the first "color cell" type graphics to be seen. Of course, that also introduced color clashing...

My first Apple experience was on the monochrome green or amber screen monitor. They had a fairly high image persistence too. I want one for some stuff today, for that exact reason. Man! We are tossing the CRT's at an amazing rate, driving up the cost considerably. I regret getting rid of my old one now, but I digress.

Simple on or off pixels made a lot of sense, until that Apple was connected to a TV where the color fringing on text could be seen, and a whole lot of it could be seen on the 80 column text! That triggered a lot of learning about TV signals, and artifacting on just about every machine I've been on since. If it outputs to TV, I've tried artifacting on it. Lots of fun.

Some of us in high school proposed making up a character set to provide for moderate resolution color graphics. Non user definable characters was seen as a clear disadvantage after we saw what the Atari, Commodore, and other machines could do. My CoCo also had a fix character set, BTW.

The number of variations on artifacted pixels ended up being quite high, with some impressive images possible. Before the Beagle Brothers software came out, we had written a simple painter program in Applesoft and were creating some fairly nice images, though many of those ONE DOT AT A TIME. When displayed on an 80's era TV, colors were seen all over the place, creating pretty solid pixel artists out of some of us.

(not me, I kind of sucked)

When double-high resolution graphics hit the scene, it became apparent that the 1Mhz 6502 wasn't really enough to fully exploit the machine capability. Until that time though, I was stunned at what people managed to do with the Apple. The other machines had faster CPU's, or better graphics chips, not just some hard-wired TTL thing, and that made for more appealing visuals in most cases, but... The Apple was a well rounded experience, and the funny thing about them was most owners had a good setup. Games saw good ports, and the experience, even the wierd audio from clicking the speaker was very good.

So much software for the Apple...

The best though? The machine was laid bare. It shipped with ROM listings, and the slots and pins inside just screamed, "hack me!", and the built in monitor said, "program me!"

Those years spent learning how to get an Apple to do stuff were responsible for my professional work today. We learned so much!

Some days, I'm crappy, bur

Apple ][ trivia: 1-bit Stencil Buffer & Cutsce

[UnknownSoldier]

Some cool Apple ][ trivia ...

- Karateka was one of the first games to have cut-scenes. Here is the end-game music in MIDI format =)
http://michael.peopleofhonoronly.com/dev/applewin/karateka/karateka_end.mid

- Conan: Hall of Volta by Datasoft (*) was the one of the first games to use a 1-bit stencil buffer!
http://michael.peopleofhonoronly.com/dev/applewin/conan/conan_stencil_buffer.bmp

- Broderbund games (Drol, Spare Change, Captain Goodnight, Choplighter, etc.) offered smooth animation because they used the (initially) undocumented V-SYNC: (Vertical Blanking) !
RDVBLBAR = $C019 ;not VBL (VBL signal low)

I highly recommend AppleWin for finding out old Easter Eggs =)
http://applewin.berlios.de/

* To see the stencil buffer you need
a) disk image
ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II//images/disk_utils/cracking/the_saltine/Conan%20A.dsk
b) Mount disk A in the first drive in AppleWin
c) press F2 to boot
d) at the intro. screen press F7 to enter the debugger
e) in the debugger type the following commands to view the HI-RES pages 1 or 2 respectively
HGR1
HGR2

Re:Most important PC released? Please

[NardoPolo88]

I will only disagree with the "most popular" part of that statement as the Commodore 64, though late to the party, sold considerably more units during its shorter run (1982 - 1994) and thus would be the more popular of the two. Apple II series sold ~6million units during its run and the C64 sold ~17million. But when all is said and done the 1st computer I ever used was an apple ][ and it was the reason I fell in love with computers. So it is not the most important "home personal computer" it is on a very short list.

Woz Floppy Drive

[Artemis3]

I'm sorry but there was something more: The Floppy drive, namely, Woz floppy drive... Did you ever use floppies with the other machines? Then you know what i mean, several minutes vs few seconds to boot the very same program, and hell nothing would crash if you accidentaly pushed a button when the drive was reading, unlike certain other brand...

Marketing pushed Macs later.

Re:Woz Floppy Drive

[Creepy]

The (Woz) floppy drive probably saved me from never caring about computers. I used the Apple ][ with a tape drive one year in elementary school and the unreliable 7-8 minute load time was more than my attention span could handle. I probably spent an hour total in the lab that year. The next year (1978 I think, may have been 1979) they got disk ][s and I learned BASIC. By the next year, I learned assembly. Then came the Sneakers and Sabotage... I had been an Atari 2600 gamer before then, but 1981 was the year I moved to computer gaming - still in Elementary School, mind you - neither my Jr High nor High School had computers you could access outside of a class. For that matter, my Jr High only had one computer - an IBM PC in the Electronics classroom, and my High School had computers you could only touch if you took a class teaching BASIC (and by then I was fluent in BASIC, Assembly, and PASCAL).

Robotwar

[n2505d]

I had typed-in programs from the various mags at the time into my Commadore and peeked and poked a bit. However it was the game "Robotwar" that got me really interested in programming. My first original programming was done on an apple ][. A turning point for me; pointed me toward programming, math and science. Cheers to the apple ][! BTW, I still boot one from time to time to play Robotwar!

The Apple II is no longer manufactured

[mysidia]

Don't you actually have to be alive at 35 to reach the age of 35?

Apples have been obsolete and out of production for a long time. We don't normally talk about those who are dead, transformed into aquariums, and buried, as reaching a certain age -- corpses are ageless.

Re:The Apple II is no longer manufactured

[Nyder]

Don't you actually have to be alive at 35 to reach the age of 35?

Apples have been obsolete and out of production for a long time.
We don't normally talk about those who are dead,
transformed into aquariums, and buried, as reaching a certain age -- corpses are ageless.

My Apple II is still going strong.

I still have it. Yay. Best Apple product ever.

[drwho]

Don't like the mac, the iphone, the ipod, the ipad, or the isoul. woz++

First West Coast Computer Faire

[calidoscope]

I was there and stopped by the Apple booth to pick up one of their brochures after hearing about the company from a friend. Still think it is stashed away somewhere in my collection. I was a bit more impressed by the Compucolor, but that machine unfortunately never took off.

One amusing note was finding out five years later that Trip Hawkins had also attended the Faire that year and that's what led him to join Apple.

Re:First West Coast Computer Faire

[tgeek]

Ah the old CompuColor! I fell in love with it at a local computer store in Toledo, OH. The big selling point for me was the Star Trek game where the Enterprise shot a block graphics phaser at the Klingons. Previously all my Star Trekking (actually a modified Space Wars) was scrolling text based. I don't recall if the price tag was $2000 or $5000 -- either way it was well beyond any reasonable hope for my working class minimum wage budget (at that time).

Re:First West Coast Computer Faire

[hawk]

The Compucolor, or the Compucolor II (with its peculiar half density drives). I don't think I ever saw a "I," and am not sure that it really made it to production.

anyway, AppleTrek is the one I found unique--the computer set its move before you made yours, and the Klingons had photon torpedos, too.

You could maneuver between two of them, the move. One would oft shoot the other--who, if he survived, w likely to return fire.

I learned to program cheating at that game :)

hawk

Appleworks Paid for Development of the Mac

[QuincyDurant]

At $250/copy, this was not a cash cow; it was a cash stampede. I got far more than my money's worth from it--used it hours a days for years.

Re:Appleworks Paid for Development of the Mac

[PotatoHead]

Yeah, same here. Great value, and everybody knew it. If they didn't, it only took a quick, "hey look at this!" demo to seal the deal. Notably, Apple still leverages software in tandem with hardware today. It's a compelling model. Not the cheapest, but very high value overall.

The only other company, I can think of right away, that did this was SGI. IRIX came with a nice set of basic multimedia tools.

Re:Most important PC released? Please

[Anonymous Coward]

I will only disagree with the "most popular" part of that statement as the Commodore 64, though late to the party, sold considerably more units during its shorter run (1982 - 1994) and thus would be the more popular of the two. Apple II series sold ~6million units during its run and the C64 sold ~17million. But when all is said and done the 1st computer I ever used was an apple ][ and it was the reason I fell in love with computers. So it is not the most important "home personal computer" it is on a very short list.

The C64 was extremely late to the party. Commodore's initial entry was the PET, and even that came a few months after the Apple II, did not last as long in the market, and did not sell as well. The market was well established by the time the C64 came along; if it had never arrived, some other cheap home machine would have filled the gap and nobody wold have noticed.

Ah, Integer Basic and Pascal

[mattr]

I was lucky enough to get an Apple ][ when I was a kid. Not the ][+ so it had Integer Basic not Applesoft floating point basic. So you could only use integers..

I remember many, many hours spent making an animation for my middle school art class project (everyone else was drawing stuff). It was a drive through the desert looking through a dashboard, with cacti going by and I think engine sound.

I remember getting a Language Card (a 16KB memory expansion I think) so I could use Pascal which was very cool though it would tend to switch to a wierd graphic character set, hence I had to learn to read a new alphabet. I also ended up getting a modem. A color taxan monitor and discovering how to set a high bit to get a couple more colors (ending up with magenta, green, and IIRC brown and orange). I wrote a database to search for National Geographic magazines with it I remember.

A friend (Steven Hayes) introduced me to 6502 assembler. He would write programs in a paper notebook and test before typing in. He made a polyphonic synthesizer played from the keyboard, which he used to do a performance in front of the highschool - with the computer wrapped in tinfoil. Also he created arcade games - a robotwar clone and an asteroids game using 3D space, 3D polygons and two paddles to control pitch and yaw.

I still think PIE (Programmers Interactive Editor) by Hayden(?) was an awesome program. The Bilestoad was a cool game but Wizardry ][ was the best.

Re:Apple ][ trivia: 1-bit Stencil Buffer & Cut

[Anonymous Coward]

ITYM Choplifter.

and it's been

[Anonymous Coward]

downhill ( in the world of personal computing ) ever since.

Re:"News" for nerds?

[Anonymous Coward]

You go on and on about the NES, yet you weren't even born in its heyday, since you're 18-24.

My clone: Formosa LM-2000

[Anonymous Coward]

Or something like that. It was virtually identical, except a somewhat whiter color of the box, and Formosa in the ROMs :-).

Interesting times;, I didn't have any software, and no money, and that damn AppleSoft was slow, so I wrote a macro-assembler in basic, and used that to write real applications :-)

Way back when ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Liked the Apple II. Loved the Apple IIe. For those that don't remember, this was way back when Apple computers were actually worth having.

It is not today

[Anonymous Coward]

... it is yesterday.

Still in use

[GlobalEcho]

I sold my old Apple ][ just two months ago on eBay. It went to a fellow in Colorado who needed to do some kind of data work. I was happy to see it wasn't gong for parts, at least not yet.

Re:Apple ][ trivia: 1-bit Stencil Buffer & Cut

[sliderr]

I'm going to have to fire up the ][+ tonight and play some of those games again...

I still have my Apple ][+

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought my Apple ][+ system in 1981 and spent $4,000 on it (Console, 2 floppy disk drives, 13" Color TV, Epson MX-80 printer, upgraded RAM (64K!), and UCSD p-system). I was glad I had the floppy disks because trying to record and playback from a cassette tape was flaky at best.

In 1982 I landed a contract that more than paid for the system. I still boot it up once and a while for nostalgia. Ah, the memories.

Finally got the kids a Nintendo when one busted the keyboard playing a game.

Ahh...

[Anonymous Coward]

Love the old computer nostalgia. My first...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/grayimaging/3727738895/
Zenith Datasystems Z89. Couldn't do much more than Basic and Supercalc, but it was my first and cut my teeth on it.

Prince of Persia

[jones_supa]

If someone hasn't heard about it yet, the source code for the Apple II version of the original Prince of Persia has been found in Jordan Mechner's spring cleaning. Before someone spouts "sure, and my uncle is Bill Gates", check out the website. Enjoy.

Re:Most important PC released? Please

[Anonymous Coward]

IBM is still in the PC business.

I'm in shock...

[doccus]

A tech article? On slashdot? What is the world coming to?....

Re:Apple ][ trivia: 1-bit Stencil Buffer & Cut

[UnknownSoldier]

Ah, yes, thanks for the correction.

Re:Most important PC released? Please

[Anonymous Coward]

> IBM is still in the PC business.

In what way? They sold their PC division to Lenovo in 2005. They since divested their shares in Lenovo and they now have so little Lenovo stock (5%) they don't even have to disclose their interest.