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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."
Lemme guess. You are in the 18-24 demo?
Toast to evenings once upon with that soft green monochrome glow... and me dying of dysentery.
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
Apple II was released in 1977.
Macintosh in 1984.
IBM PS/2 in 1987.
Remove you presence from our lawn, n00b.
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>>>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 AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
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 :-)