Apple II Bits

KansasFest is a week over, and all I have is memories.

Memories — and an awesome mug.

https://twitter.com/16kRAM/status/492749522863263744

For the second consecutive year, attendee Michael Sternberg hosted a Structris tournament based on his version of Martin Haye’s original Tetris game. I entered and, after a poor showing in 2013, rebounded in 2014: I had the highest score in the first round (100 points); went up against the reigning champion and broke the world record in the second round (249 points on level 17); and, in the third and final round, defeated the developer himself. It was pretty epic.

To give something back, I’ve created a Let’s Play video of Structris, coinciding with last week’s 25th anniversary of the North American launch of the Nintendo Game Boy, which came with Tetris. Enjoy!

KansasFest 2011 is over — and thus begins my annual coverage of the event for Computerworld.com. Each year, I find a way to bring the Apple II to this enterprise IT site, giving both our retrocomputer a wider audience and Computerworld some diverse and fun content.

But the Apple II has been represented in many other articles during my four-plus years at Computerworld. Members of our community are IT professionals with staggering amounts of institutional knowledge, and as helpful as they are in-person at KansasFest, they have always been willing to be a resource during my research into related topics. I thought it’d be fun to index who has appeared as a source, or who has provided content, to Computerworld.com:

• Tony Diaz
• The cure for a hungry, sleepy laptop— Tony provided some technical advice for an issue I was having with my laptop. I don’t remember what his exact contribution was, as I didn’t tell him during that IM conversation that I was going to use his words in this blog post.
• Anatomy of an Apple IIc — I’d sent Tony a link to the PCWorld story "Anatomy of an Icon: Inside the Apple IIc", with which he then took technical issue. With his permission, I adapted his email response into this blog post.
• Sold on eBay: New-in-box Apple II, never opened — Tony offered a quotation as to why the Apple II is still enjoyed by hobbyists today.
• Face-off: 1979 Apple Graphics Tablet vs. 2010 Apple iPad – Computerworld — This was my KansasFest 2010 article, but Tony provided many of its photos, as did Loren Damewood and Mark Frischknecht.
• Steve Weyhrich
• Sold on eBay: New-in-box Apple II, never opened — Dr. Steve provided a historical look at what made the Apple IIc a successful model.
• Tony Ward
• CompuServe, Prodigy et al.: What Web 2.0 can learn from Online 1.0 — Tony Ward, former file library manager on Genie’s A2 RoundTable, is a modern-day Delphi community manager. His perspective on how Delphi has survived into the present day was surprising and useful.
• Eric Shepherd
• CompuServe, Prodigy et al.: What Web 2.0 can learn from Online 1.0 — As a former GEnie sysop, Sheppy provided valuable insight into why GEnie was popular and what ultimately killed it.
• Mike Willegal
• Apple-1 goes for $213K in Christie’s auction — Mike’s Apple-1 index was cited for information about other known existing Apple-1 machines.
• Eric Rucker
• Apple-1 goes for $213K in Christie’s auction — I cornered Eric in IRC, where he pointed out some of the qualities of the Apple-1 that was being auctioned. The final story quoted him.
• Peter Watson
• Linux Air: Hitting the road with the Eee PC — By the time Peter got his hands on this netbook, Computerworld had already published its own review and couldn’t commission Peter to write another one. But he did anyway, which we happily published as this complimentary blog.
• Mike Maginnis
• PalmPilot, BlackBerry, iPhone: A history of conquerers — Here’s a blog post that Mike wrote and which Computerworld published.
• Ryan Suenaga
• Ryan never directly appeared in a Computerworld article, but when I was presented with a list of companies to profile, knowing Ryan motivated me to choose his employer, Kaiser Permanente.

I look forward to other opportunities to put Apple II users’ names in lights!

Last week, I belatedly reported that Christie’s auction house would be selling an Apple-1 on Nov. 23. On that date, by the time I remembered what day it was, the lot had already sold and Christie’s had closed. I was at work at Computerworld and mentioned the occasion to the news chief, who suggested I write about it, as the reporter responsible for Computerworld‘s auction’s pre-event coverage was on holiday. I was already planning on blogging about it for this site but didn’t have any details about where the computer had gone, so I questioned the potential for my article to be newsworthy.

But thanks to a blog comment by Eric Rucker, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at KansasFest 2010, I was able to take the story in the opposite direction by examining where this particular Apple-1 had come from. A quick trip to IRC, and I had the retrocomputing expert on the line, helping me get my facts straight.

The resulting article, which got some love on Google News, is now posted on Computerworld.com:

Christie’s auction house in London today sold an Apple-1 computer for £133,250, or $213,600.

The lot, which went up for auction at 9:30 a.m. ET today, had an estimated value of between $160,300 and $240,450.

Two hundred Apple-1 computers are estimated to have been created and sold for $666.66 before Apple Computer Inc. was founded in 1977. Once the Apple II, the company’s first official product, was released, many of the Apple-1 models were reclaimed as trade-ins. Only about 50 are still known to exist, many of them indexed by hardware developer Mike Willegal.

Read the rest of this story at Computerworld.com »