Apple II Bits

For more than a decade, Apple’s website has offered free downloads of legacy software, including a variety of Apple II and Classic Mac OS operating systems and utilities. The URL was always the same:

http://www.info.apple.com/support/oldersoftwarelist.html

This page was referenced throughout the years in Juiced.GS, as recently as September 2014. It wasn’t a resource that was often called upon, but it was often relied upon as a place where Apple acknowledged its history and provided some meager support for its legacy customers.

All good things must come to a 404: as Ivan Drucker reported this weekend, this directory has simply disappeared from Apple’s website. Steve Weyhrich contacted support to ask where it went and was told simply that it’s gone. And, thanks to the site’s prohibitive robots.txt file, to Google’s cache and the Wayback Machine, it’s as if the page never existed.

Both Ivan and Dagen Brock pointed out a harsh reality: Apple doesn’t care about anyone who hasn’t bought anything from them in the last 36 months (the span of AppleCare). Whether this obsolescence is planned or not, Apple’s business is in selling you new hardware and software. Support for older equipment is only a means to that end — or, in the case of Apple II software, a dead end.

It’s sad to realize that Dan Budiac’s Apple IIc registration card and David Greelish’s petition for an Apple museum were both for naught.

Fortunately, the omnipresent Jason Scott has succeeded where Apple has failed: his byline is on a 2012 upload to the Internet Archive of Apple’s complete older software list. And since we’re dealing with decades-old software, this mirror being three years old is of no consequence — nothing’s changed in that time.

Although it may not make any business sense to do so, it’s a shame Apple doesn’t better respect its history, especially when there’s little cost to doing so. Thank goodness for the community of Apple II enthusiasts who still remember where we came from.

At a recent PAX East 2015 panel on empathy games, I asked: "Since empathy games are often based in reality, do developers of such games hold themselves to a higher standard in terms of being authentic — as opposed to a more fictional game world, which doesn’t purport to represent a real-life situation?"

Perhaps it was unfair of me to suggest empathy games are alone in this higher standard, as games have been founded in reality for as long as there have been games. Oregon Trail was based on a 2,200-mile route travelled by 400,000 settlers in 1846–1869. No work of fiction, the game is the product of some serious research and was widely used in classrooms as an early form of edutainment.

But, like many grade-school history lessons, some of the details weren’t quite right. Phil Edwards recently did some historical research of his own and determined 9 myths you learned from playing Oregon Trail. The article is a fun and fascinating read, with far more details than these succinct headlines:

1. Not everyone used oxen. Some people used handcarts.
2. Traveling at a “grueling” pace was less fun than it sounds
3. You wouldn’t have randomly forded a 40-foot-deep river
4. You couldn’t kill thousands of pounds of buffalo
5. Dysentery was much, much worse than a punchline
6. No one got a funny headstone with curse words when they died
7. Native Americans didn’t really want your sweaters
8. The rafting trip at the end of the game was insane
9. Starting out as a banker was even better than you realized

References to a rafting trip don’t ring a bell for me, so I suspect the article is based on a version of the game that didn’t appear on the Apple II — likely the 1990 MS-DOS edition. Still, it’s fun to see where fiction diverges from fact.

But what if it went the other way, and instead of a game or book based on reality, we had reality based on a game? It’d probably end up looking like the Oregon Trail movie trailer (Oregon Trailer?), which I originally shared on this blog five (!) years ago:

Fortunately, fan films aren’t the only media we have to rely on. Any armchair historian can learn more about this unique expansion of early American settlements in The California and Oregon trail, a 1901 book by Trail veteran Francis Parkman.

Or you can just play the game.

(Hat tip to Inside.com via VideoGames)

A recent CNET story has popularized the unearthing of design schematics for the Disk ][ floppy drive and the contract that outsourced its operating system. This story has been a Big Deal, having been picked up by TUAW, Slashdot, A2Central.com, and others.

This story is also an opportunity to consider the scale and scope of computer history. We Apple II users have gobbled up this news, but I suspect it hasn’t achieved awareness outside the small circles of retrocomputing enthusiasts and computer historians. After all, what relevancy does the Apple II have to the Apple Inc. of today, whose foundation lies not in desktop or even laptop computers, but in cell phones, tablets, and MP3 players?

It wouldn’t be the first time the Apple II has failed to penetrate the public awareness. When I presented the history of the Apple II to the Denver Apple Pi users group, the audience was eager and receptive — with one exception. When one person learned the topic of my speech would be the computer that Apple made before the Macintosh, her response was, "Apple made computers before the Macintosh?" She didn’t see the relevancy in this archaic machine and chose not to stay for the presentation.

Similarly, when I recruited Jason Scott as a guest speaker for my college course, he asked my students the loaded question, "How many of you would agree with me if I said Nintendo is thirty years old?" Nintendo was in fact founded in 1889 and dabbled in many industries, from playing cards to hotels to taxi services, before landing in electronic entertainment. Home video games are just a blip in the timeline of the company that set the standard.

These are just two examples of modern consumers being ignorant or uncaring of the lineage behind their everyday tech. I don’t know that this oversight is necessarily evil so much as it is the product of irrelevance. Is it one we need to change? I would presume that awareness of the existence of pre-Macintosh computers has improved since the passing of Steve Jobs, but my experience is that just as many people as ever respond to my stories of the Apple II with a comment such as "That was my first Mac!"

The Apple II was sold for 16 years, 1977–1993. Sixteen years ago this year, Steve Jobs returned to Apple. That second era has achieved historical notoriety, both for the metaphoric prodigal son’s return and for the reinvention of Apple Computer Inc. as a profitable company. Yet what was long the flagship product of the company’s first 16 years seems to have fallen from public consciousness. Is all tech history susceptible to the vagaries of time? Or is the popularity of computer history directly proportionate the penetration of that era’s computers? Since 1970s computers were not widely adopted by the mass market, is their history similarly of limited appeal? Do we need to improve the Apple II’s public image — not just for the health of our retrocomputing hobby, but for the annals of time? If so, how?

I welcome your historical perspective on this matter!