Vintage Computers on the New York Times

tomreagan writes "The New York Times has a good article on vintage computers. It talks about a wide variety of the old beasts and is quite exhaustive. It makes me proud to admit that my favorite computer is still my first, a trusty Apple IIc. " Free login required, natch.

Comments

Whoops. Broken link.

[jfunk]

Here's the link:

http://www.ny times.com/library/tech/99/07/circuits/articles/22b itt.html

Apple II

[cje]

I know how you feel, dude. My Apple IIe is still my favorite computer, too.

Home computers were just more fun to use back in their infancy. Today they've become so common and mundane that there's no element of exhilaration when you flip the power switch. Back then, the technology was new and so was the experience. Back then, home computer users and hackers were digital conquistadors, exploring a brave new world. Today, we're all suburban commuters, plodding forlornly from one destination to the next.

The Apple II series was a helluva lot of fun to hack around on. I remember writing raw machine language code (bare hex bytes) in the early 80's because I had no assembler; manually calculating the number of bytes for the destination of a relative branch was a pain in the ass, though. I suppose for that period of time, writing raw machine language was the technological equivalent of punch cards. Every Apple II hacker worth his/her salt will remember what 20 ED FD did (just as every respectable hacker will remember that CALL -151 got you into the machine language monitor. :-))

Virtually no Apple II hackers thought much of Wozniak's memory-mapping "scheme" for the text/low-resolution and high-resolution screen memory (the old "venetian blinds" effect.) At one time, I had memorized the sequence of hex bytes that implemented the lookup table generator so that you could translate screen lines into memory addresses. This didn't slow things down too much, if you were careful about it, but it was still a bitch.

I can't be the only one who wistfully misses the days of doing long division and multiplication on an 8-bit processor with no division or multiplication instructions. Oh, and remember all of the undocumented 6502 opcodes? What a great way to make it a bitch for people to disassemble your code and get at the guts. :-)

Then there was the Disk II. I was once writing a game where fast disk access was absolutely required, and I ended up implementing what amounted to my own operating system (though this was not exactly new; some games like Broderbund's Karateka did exactly this, using spiral tracks to make the disk almost impossible to copy.) Direct access to the Disk II was maddening, painful fun. You had to litter your code with NOP instructions to get the timings on the write exactly right; a microsecond off in either direction and your data is corrupt.

Show of hands: Who's still got the old Beagle Brothers' "PEEKS and POKES Chart" handy?

A lot of folks who are new to the whole computing scene don't understand people like us when we so fondly reminisce about the days when computers were slower, bulkier, and harder to use. But it's because they don't understand a very basic concept that so many Slashdotters do:

Just because it's easier doesn't mean it's more fun.

Thanks for the memories, Apple.