Apple II History

Can’t be all work and no fun – though this fun was a lot of work! See what it’s like to walk around inside of an Apple II:

Addendum:

After I originally posted this, I decided that it needed a little more explanation. (I also wanted those unfamiliar with the game to appreciate the work involved in making that Apple II stuff; walking to school uphill in the snow both ways was easy compared to this!) You can read about Minecraft at the entry discussing it on Wikipedia, or if you want a lot of detail you can read the Minecraft Wiki.

In brief, Minecraft is, in my opinion, like Legos on steroids. It’s like Legos because you can build things; the “on steroids” part comes in because you can actually be that little Lego guy or gal and walk around on or in your creations. It is also somewhat reminiscent of 8-bit games; it is gloriously pixellated, and does not do its best to be realistic. Everything is squarish, from the sun moving across the sky, to the smoke rising from torches you can use to keep the darkness at bay.

The game runs on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. You can even play it in a browser window, as long as you have Java installed on your system; it is a Java game, with little add-ons made to be compatible with whichever operating system on which you are using it. The game is still in Beta, which means that there are bugs, but they are fairly minor most of the time.

It plays in two modes: Survival and Peaceful. In Peaceful mode, your only problem at “night” is being able to see what you are trying to look at. In Survival mode, nighttime becomes dangerous, because various lethal creatures spawn and will attack you if you encounter them. If you don’t have a safe place to stay the night, you will die.

Unlike Legos, in which you simply open the package and start building, Minecraft requires you to create tools to use to make better tools, and ultimately use those tools to get better stuff that can be used to do the actual building. So, the first thing you have to do is break up a tree to get wood, use that wood to create boards, and then use the boards to create a workbench. The workbench helps you create a wooden spade and pick. These will help you dig a shelter for that first night. With the wooden pick you can mine stone, which can be used to make a stone pick and spade, which lasts longer, and makes it possible to find the next important resource: Coal. With coal you can make torches to help your underground mining (or cave exploring), as you search for iron ore to make the next level of tools out of iron. And if you dig deeply, you can find diamonds (the best material for tools and weapons), or gold (only good for making a clock at this time), or redstone (used for various switching devices and simple circuits).

There are animals all over the place: Pigs that are only good for food to regain health; cows, which can be milked or you can use their hides to make simple armor; chickens, which have feathers that can be used to make arrows; and sheep, whose wool can be used as a building material, especially if you want colored blocks. It was prolonged sessions searching for and harvesting wool from sheep that made it possible to create the Apple logo in its rainbow colors, and the various non-stone items in my giant Apple II, its monitor and its disk drives.

There is more to the game than this brief explanation provides. You can see it in action on the numerous YouTube videos about Minecraft; search for ones that explain how to get started. And although I doubt that the electric circuits the game allows the user to create will not get much more sophisticated than they are, if that ever happens, I’ve got the framework to create a computer to go with my case.

And if it becomes possible to change the color of stone to something besides gray, or more easily find sandstone (which is beige), I’ll have to try making this Apple II look less like a faded Bell & Howell Apple II, and even more like the Real Thing.

My first introduction to a microcomputer was a North Star back in 1980, and soon after had my first contact with the Apple II Plus. In both cases, I experienced the benefits of the latest and greatest in data storage and retrieval: The power of the floppy disk. I did not go through any of the trials and travails of those who had to load and save programs and data using cassettes (or, prior to that, paper tape).

Because of the time when I entered the Apple II scene, the whole topic of software cassettes was unknown to me, beyond a vague knowledge that they existed for a short time. In “computer years”, however, a short time can be a very long time. For a full year after the introduction of the Apple II in mid-1977, cassettes were the only way to do data and program storage and retrieval. And even after the Disk II became available in June 1978, at $495 it was not something that all Apple II users immediately purchased and began to use. For the first several years of the life of the Apple II and II Plus, cassettes were used by many, many of those early owners.

Surprisingly, Apple, Inc. still has a page on its support web site that outlines the details of the Apple II cassette interface (part 1 about the format of data on the tape and part 2 about use of the read and write routines from the Monitor, assembly language, and Integer and Applesoft BASIC). Brutal Deluxe, a software company that got its start in the days of the Apple IIGS, has created a web page documenting a collection of as many Apple II programs on cassette as can be discovered. Many of those listed have actually been digitized and are there available for download and execution on an appropriate emulator (such as Gerard Putter’s excellent Virtual ][) or transfer back to a cassette to run on a real Apple II.

Finally, I just discovered Andy McFadden’s excellent technical and programming discussion about the obscure topic of copy protection for cassette software on the Apple II. Everyone who knows about the Disk II on the Apple II and software that was distributed on it is aware of the many software protections schemes that made use of the flexibility that Wozniak built into that device. What I had not previously known was that with some clever programming hacks, early software companies made it difficult for the casual user to copy and share program tapes with others, while retaining the ability to load and run those programs. Some of the programs would not only load but also automatically run without further intervention from the user beyond entering the Monitor command to read data from the cassette!

Again, I am impressed with the power and flexibility that Wozniak built into that wonderful Apple II !

The 6502 holds a place of honor amongst the Apple II faithful only slightly lower than that occupied by Steve Wozniak. Apple likes to conclude their press releases with a brief company history that begins with the phrase, “Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II”. Well, whether or not the personal computer revolution was truly ignited by Apple may be up for dispute amongst retro computing enthusiasts, but there is no doubt that it was the 6502 from MOS Technology that ignited the imagination of Woz to create the first Apple-1, and later the Apple II. It was as important to Apple as the internal combustion engine was to Henry Ford.

According to an article on Techworld (and reprinted on MacUser), digital archeologists Greg James, Barry Silverman, and Brian Silverman have literally taken the 6502 processor apart, layer by layer. Using this information, they have created a Javascript animation of the function of the 6502, which shows what is happening within the chip as a short machine language program is executed. You can view this animation here at visual6502.org.

Addendum: Thanks to Ken Gagne’s quick eye, here are two more articles about this:

http://research.swtch.com/2011/01/mos-6502-and-best-layout-guy-in-world.html

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=5396743D539B7755

The end of one year and the start of a next has traditionally made us think of the past, present, and future. Perhaps that was where Dickens got the idea to use ghosts of those persuasions in order to tell his Christmas Carol story. In any case, the inspiration for today’s post comes from Dan Fogelberg’s 1981 song, Same Old Lang Syne. The story told by his song is of meeting an old girlfriend unexpectedly at the grocery story, and their conversation together afterwards. It is about the present and past, and contains the bittersweet feelings of sadness as she leaves.

The phrase “Auld Lang Syne” is loosely translated as “for the sake of old times”. It implies a remembrance of days past. As I listened to Fogelberg’s song again this year, it occurred to me that it could be adapted to re-discovering that old Apple II, in the basement or a closet.

Apple Lang Syne
by Steven Weyhrich

(parody of Dan Fogelberg’s song, “Same Old Lang Syne“)

Was in the basement where I’ve stored my past
Looking for boxes Christmas Eve
Knocked over one containing floppy disks
When I caught it on my sleeve

Beneath there sat my trusty Apple II
So neatly boxed and packed away
I thought of all the fun I’d had with it
And the many games I’d played

(instrumental verse)

I pulled it out and plugged the wires in
Opened the software I had bagged
It made its “beep” as then it powered up
But the disk performance lagged

I started AppleWorks and VisiCalc
Ran Ultima^[1] and RobotWar^[2]
With my old joystick I ran Hard Hat Mack^[3]
As I sat there on the floor

I coded some in Integer^[4]
I played some Serpentine^[5]
I browsed Softalk and GS+
And my other magazines

Yes, I had bought myself a MacBook Pro
That helps me work and game and buy
I’d like to say it was simplicity
But I wouldn’t want to lie

I saw the years had been a friend to this,
My Apple II I knew so well
I gazed with fondness at its faded beige
And its missing letter “L”

I saw the ads in all the magazines
Back when this friend was on the top
All the exciting things I’d hoped to buy
But my mother made me stop

I played a game of Snack Attack^[6]
Lode Runner, Zork, and Drol^[7],
Plus Wizardry^[8] and Sourceror^[9],
A.E.^[10] and Apple Bowl^[11]

I tried GraFORTH^[12] and DoubleStuff^[13]
Some Castle Wolfenstein^[14]
Reliving early elegance
Another “auld lang syne” …

The box was empty and my hands were tired
Was running out of things to play
Unplugged the monitor and floppy drive
Picked up and put away

I saw an early ad for Macintosh –
And felt that old familiar pain … ^[15]
And as I turned to make my way upstairs
Heard echoes in my brain …

1. ^[1]written by Richard Garriott (Lord British), was one of a series of fantasy and adventure games↩
2. ^[2]game by Silas Warner and published by Muse in 1980, RobotWar allowed you to program robots to battle each other↩
3. ^[3]game by Michael Abbot and Matthew Alexander, and published by Electronic Arts in 1983, it played much like Donkey Kong↩
4. ^[4]Integer BASIC, of course↩
5. ^[5]a snake-tail-chasing game published by Brøderbund and released in 1982↩
6. ^[6]game by Dan Illowsky and published by Datamost in 1981, was one of many Pac-Man clones for microcomputers↩
7. ^[7]game published by Brøderbund in 1983↩
8. ^[8]game created by Andrew Greenberg and Robert Woodhead, published in 1981 by Sir-Tech↩
9. ^[9]text adventure game written by Steve Meretzky, published in 1984 by Infocom↩
10. ^[10]shoot-em-up game in space published by Brøderbund in 1983↩
11. ^[11]old Integer BASIC game simulating bowling↩
12. ^[12]graphic-based implementation of the FORTH language by Paul Lutus, published by Insoft in 1981↩
13. ^[13]programming language made to work on double hi-res graphics on revision B Apple IIe with extended RAM↩
14. ^[14]game by Silas Warner, published by Muse in 1981↩
15. ^[15]this “old familiar pain” refers back to the days when, although the Apple II was carrying the company, Apple was virtually ignoring it while trying to get Macintosh sales to pick up and thrive. It was frustrating to be an Apple II user in those days, and for some, mention of the Mac evoked feelings of disgust and annoyance.↩

Take a look at Ken Gagne’s apl2bits.net blog here for a video by Brian Picchi reviewing the Apple IIGS. Nicely done!

Back in 1988, Apple did a little PR for the Apple II line on The Computer Chronicles series. Here is that program, hosted by Stuart Chiefet and Gary Killdall, featuring the Apple IIc Plus and the new GS/OS for the Apple IIGS. It includes interviews with John Sculley, Laura Kurihara (Apple IIc Plus project manager), and Bill Cleary of Cleary Communications. It also discusses the new Macintosh IIx. Anne Bachtold, Apple IIGS product manager, demonstrating GS/OS 4.0 and its new FST for accessing other devices such as a CD-ROM, the Installer, and the Advanced Disk Utility. Also interviewed was Stuart Roberson, director of marketing at Activision, who talked about PaintWorks Gold.

Here is the movie, direct from Archive.org.

Bob Bishop was involved with much more at Apple than APPLEVISION. And next summer at KanasaFest, he will be presenting the keynote speech for that annual Apple II gathering. See the detailed story at the KFest web site.

Another piece of past fun, as posted on GEnie and reproduced in the GEnieLamp newsletter:

>>> WHAT’S HAPPENING IN THE APPLE II ROUNDTABLE? <<<
“”””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””””
~ September 1, 1994 ~
//////////////////////////////
APPLE ANECDOTES /
/////////////////////////////////

True Stories
“”””””””””””
by Dean Esmay

I’ve never told this story publicly, but I figure it’s long enough ago, and Apple’s interest in this Apple II stuff is behind us, so what the heck.

A few years ago we got a license to distribute the DOS 3.3 System Master on-line, which we hadn’t had before. So the disks were mailed to us, straight from Apple Licensing.

So I get this really nice package from Apple with the nice white disk envelopes and labels and stuff. And just to make sure everything’s kosher, I boot the System Master that they sent us.

Well, it boots into DOS 3.3… and up comes an old copy of Locksmith, the ancient Pirate’s Favorite in the heady days of the DOS 3.3 Apple II world.

I’m really not kidding. I looked over the disk carefully and that’s all it was… a copy of Locksmith. On a write-protected, Apple labelled disk that Apple Licensing sent straight to us.

What’s doubly funny is the original Locksmith was copy protected, so this means that somewhere in Apple’s history, someone either “cracked” this or accepted a pirate copy.

When we got it we realized these people had no idea what the heck they were doing when it came to Apple II stuff. So we quietly uploaded another copy of the DOS 3.3 System Master we had lying around, and that’s what’s up there in A2 today.

I wonder if I still have that disk? I’m pretty sure it’s buried somewhere in my huge collection of 5.25 disks, gathering dust.
🙂

(A2.DEAN, CAT13, TOP12, MSG:102/M645;1)
reprinted from the A2Pro RoundTable (8 October 1993)

While looking through some of my old notes today, I came across this old message. I had said I would include it in my history, and it got filed away and misplaced. Well, now that I’ve recovered it, I had better keep my sixteen year old promise and post it.

Not all of his statements are necessarily correct; I don’t think the Apple II was the first micro to use a disk drive. However, it may have been the first that affordably did so.

“Clyde III” was the handle for Clyde Dodge. Nicely done, Clyde.

(from MAUG Log, Newsletter of The Monsanto Apple Users Group, St. Louis, MO 63129-1623, Vol 10, No 3, March 1994; article submitted by Ralph Supinski from America Online)

What It Was All About

From: Clyde III

Years from now, when Power PCs are considered low-end machines, and Macs and Pentiums have long since been forgotten, I hope they’ll remember the Apple II.

What the Apple II was all about:

The Apple II was about computing in color: the first computer with built-in color video.  The Mac tried to make black & white cool, but it almost died on the vine for trying.  Now that every computer uses color, except for the cheap or light weight, will they remember that the Apple II was the first one?

The Apple II was about the speed of disk drives: the first micro-computer to use a disk drive.  Remember cassette tapes?  Could it have been theat they might today be using hard cassette drives, if not for Woz and his Disk ][?

The Apple II was about fast startups and low memory overhead: the only computer ever to use sensible floppy disk-based operating system.  DOS and ProDOS required nothing more than the juice from the plug and a closed drive door to get up and running from a floppy.  ‘Nough said!

The Apple II was about business sense: the first spreadsheet that lit the business world on fire.  After Lotus and Microsoft knock each other out fighting over this crown, will they remember that it was Visicalc on the Apple II that first blew everyone away?

The Apple II was about integrated applications: when Mac’s OS and Windows are long gone, will they remember that it was AppleWorks that showed the way?

The Apple II was about losing yourself in a computer game: the greatest software was born on the Apple II. Ultimas I-V were created on the Apple II.  Wizardry was born on the Apple II.  Sierra On-Line’s first game was programmed on an Apple II.  Will they remember?

What the Apple II was all about was breaking open the door to computing for the rest of us and giving us access to this most powerful and wonderful of pursuits.

We will never forget.

Clyde

That’s what this site is all about. Thanks for the sentiment, Clyde; it was well spoken.