Every so often, a new bit of Apple II trivia comes my way. I was recently sent a message asking about whether Bell & Howell had made a beige version of its computer. David Bohrman had pictures of this, and informed me so. I…
The year 2013 is shaping up to be one in which there will be a bumper crop of retrocomputing goodness happening. The event I am most familiar with is KansasFest 2013, the 25th annual such event. Our keynote speaker will be Randy Wigginton, one…
Looking through my archives of material, I found some items that I’ve never seen online anywhere else. The text of Open-Apple and A2-Central is available in a couple of places, but no one has posted PDFs of the newsletter Ahs that was released during 1994 as the…
A year ago, a KFest acquaintance named Stavros Karatsoridis gave me a printed copy of his version of the Apple II “Blue Book”, the first Applesoft manual. His was the version that was written in November 1977, for the January 1978 release of Cassette Applesoft. The…
KansasFest Report: Andy Molloy presented a session about the Demoscene of the 1980s. The “Demoscene” refers to programmers who created software that demonstrated the graphics and sound capabilities of various computers. Some of the original demos of this type appeared for the Commodore 64,…
KansasFest Report: Randy Brandt spoke to us about his history with programming and with AppleWorks. He discussed his personal history, and getting his start in programming in 1976, learning FORTRAN in high school. This set the foundation for the programming work he did in the…
KansasFest 2012 Report: In John Romero’s keynote speech at KansasFest this year, he pointed out the significant contribution to gaming that has been made by programmers over the years. It “forged the future”, by teaching these pioneers how to write tight, fast code that…
Robert Tripp sent me this message (and I’ve seen this mentioned elsewhere), and I thought it should be reproduced here: What’s Where in the Apple? is in the process of being readied for release as an electronic book. I am the publisher and copyright…
I mentioned about this back in April, about a new book about the Apple II that was coming out soon. It is now available, and from the preview info I have seen on the author, David Finnigan’s web page about it, it looks like this…
Back in April, Harry McCracken of Technologizer and Time.com’s Techland wrote up a nice spread (photos and an article) about the 35th anniversary of the Apple II. He chose April as the month for this, as it was 35 years since the First West Coast…