23 Years Later: the Apple II Receives Another OS Update (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Yesterday, software developer John Brooks released what is clearly a work of pure love: the first update to an operating system for the Apple II computer family since 1993. ProDOS 2.4, released on the 30th anniversary of the introduction of the Apple II GS, brings the enhanced operating system to even older Apple II systems, including the original Apple ][ and ][+. Which is pretty remarkable, considering the Apple ][ and ][+ don't even support lower-case characters. You can test-drive ProDOS 2.4 in a Web-based emulator set up by computer historian Jason Scott on the Internet Archive. The release includes Bitsy Bye, a menu-driven program launcher that allows for navigation through files on multiple floppy (or hacked USB) drives. Bitsy Bye is an example of highly efficient code: it runs in less than 1 kilobyte of RAM. There's also a boot utility that is under 400 bytes -- taking up a single block of storage on a disk. The report adds: "In addition to the Bitsy Boot boot utility, the ProDOS 2.4 'floppy' includes a collection of utilities, including a MiniBas tiny BASIC interpreter, disk imaging programs to move files from physical floppies to USB and other disk storage, file utilities, and the 'Unshrink' expander for uncompressing files archived with Shrinkit."

Comments

Still better. . .

[smooth wombat]

than Windows 10.

I had Prodos on My Apple][e in 1983-84

[La Gris]

> is pretty remarkable, considering the Apple ][ and ][+ don't even support lower-case characters.

Wrong, there was a Prodos for the Apple][

> Apple ][ and ][+ don't even support lower-case characters

There was a program that piggy-backed the char display and used graphic mod to display lowercase characters, even supported accentss. Had bee used by word-processors back then. AppleWord and the Jane environment.

And Yes I affirm, there was a Prodos for the Apple][ back then.

Source

[manu0601]

I understand this is an independent developer's work. How can he name the software like Apple's product, and even print "(c) Apple Computers Inc" on it? Shouln'd that awake Apple's army of evil lawers?

Not without an 80-column card, son

[drinkypoo]

Without an 80-column card, those machines do NOT display lowercase characters. That is to say, out of the box, neither the ][ nor the ][+ does what you think it does. Your citation says as much.