Apple II Bits

In May 2006, Apple II coverage gained a new channel: the podcast. This popular form of timeshifted radio finally gained its own broadcast dedicated to our favorite desktop computer when Carrington Vanston, a Canadian previously unknown to our community, debuted 1 MHz!, offering "8-bit Apple news and 2-bit Apple reviews."

Later in 2006, the show was joined by Ryan Suenaga‘s A2Unplugged, which took a different tact with its regular programming coverage and celebrity interviews.

A2Unplugged continues publication to this day, though sporadically, with its 36th and most recent episode having been published five months ago. 1 MHz, on the other hand, published only a dozen episodes in its first two years before going silent in February 2008.

Not all was lost: the Apple II was still a frequent guest of general retrocomputing shows of the weekly RetroMacCast, as well as Earl Evans once-weekly, now-sporadic Retrobits. Along with A2Unplugged and the archival Echoes of KFest, these were our best and only radio shows.

David Greelish of Classic Computing recently decided to complement those sparse offerings with his own show, and his debut is a knockout. The Retro Computing Roundtable has published its first episode with lively chatter and insightful discussion among a star-studded panel consisting of David, Earl Evans, VintageComputer.net‘s Bill Degnan … and Carrington Vanston.

I guess I should take it personally that the Canadian never answered my emails, as David somehow got him back onto the retro scene. Not only that, but in the RCR podcast, Carrington off-handedly dropped a bombshell: 1 MHz would be back.

And it is. Last Friday, for the first time in 2.5 years, a new episode of the 1 MHz podcast was published. With little mention of his absence, Carrington launches right into his usual fare of news and reviews:

Krüe releases the TreeHugger GS/OS Printer Port driver, but will you dare to install version 0.0? The daredevilry continues as you risk blowing your mind when you view the Visual 6502 emulator. For less risky but no less enjoyable online ogling, check out Dr. Matt Barton’s book excerpt about LucasArts adventure games called The Maniac in the Mansion. And then come with me on a journey to the post apocalyptic world of Wasteland where we’ll fight mutants, build robots and learn to repair toasts. Finally, I track down the rare and elusive Wasteland Survival Guide for the Apple II, which just makes me want to play Wasteland one more time.

It’s a great episode, filled with Carrington’s usual zany humor and mile-a-minute gushing (does he ever breathe?). The episode is apparently made possible (or motivated by) corporate sponsorship, though it remains to be seen whether that will prove enough for future episodes.

We can hope so.

Find all these shows on iTunes:

• 1 MHz
• A2Unplugged
• Echoes of KFest
• Retro Computing Roundtable
• RetroMacCast
• Retrobits

In fewer than 70 years, the twentieth century went from debuting the horseless carriage to putting a man on the moon. Such rapid development was made possible by many new technologies that were not so much refinements on previous inventions but were wholly new creations.

In the decades since then, we have continued to refine those technologies, making them smaller, faster, and cheaper. In doing so, have we lost the ability to create and innovate?

One chess grandmaster thinks so. Garry Kasparov, who held the title of World Chess Champion from 1985 to 1993, recently pointed to the Apple II as the last technological revolution, marking our country’s technological developments since then as indicative of a “culture of optimization.” Wrote Oliver Chiang of Forbes:

… humans are still using many of the same fundamental technologies invented in the past couple of centuries, like the internal combustion engine or the airplane. “Call it lack of courage or complacency, but to a certain degree we lost this passion for the sweeping changes,” Kasparov said.

I agree with Mr. Kasparov. In 1977, the Apple II was a machine heretofore inaccessible to the average consumer. It was not only a new medium in which to perform existing tasks, such as painting and accounting; the personal computer represented a new way of working and playing. Since then, the function of the personal computer has greatly expanded in scope, thanks in no small part to both the Internet and multimedia capabilities, which have revolutionized such concepts as communications and filmmaking. But the computer itself has not changed much in the last thirty years. Computers have gotten smaller, from mainframes to desktops to laptops to netbooks to smartphones — but they’re still counting in ones and zeroes, just more of them than before. When are we going to stop working within the limitation of bits and start tapping the potential of quantum computers and qubits?

Maybe these developments aren’t just in the future; perhaps we already had the right idea but got sidetracked. Is it a coincidence that Mr. Kasparov’s reign ended the same year the last Apple II rolled off the production line?

A colleague and I recently had a friendly debate over whether to use one space or two after periods. We agreed that, whatever our personal preference, we should settle on the standard of the publication for which we’re writing. In her work as a Web editor, she occasionally has to remove those extra spaces, a chore that was recently made easier when a co-worker showed her how to use the find and replace function to do so.

“Did you not know you could find and replace punctuation,” I asked, “or did you not know how to find and replace at all?”

“I didn’t know about it at all,” she clarified. “I’ve been living under a software rock.”

I was astonished at her lack of familiarity with this basic word processing function. This oversight is not representative of inability: she had finished high school and college and been accepted into an esteemed graduate program in publishing, demonstrating a felicity for learning. She’s also not alone in finding software foreign, as I’ve met many people who on a daily basis are happy to use these machines in a most inefficient way. Most consumers think that programs are something to be mastered instead of tamed: they design their workflows around what the software expects, which is the antithesis of ergonomics.

For someone who grew up with the open architecture of the Apple II, I find this pattern unnerving at best, and one I want to understand better. To what can we attribute this regression?

The improved accessibility of computers is certainly a factor, as there is now a lower barrier for entry. Computers of three decades ago required a basic understanding just to boot the machine and then run the software. Yesterday’s lack of intuitive graphic user interfaces (GUIs), online help systems, and large installed user bases meant each person was alone in deciphering the programs — or writing their own. Such arcane knowledge is merely optional today.

A consequence of this approach is diminished engagement with users. Since they no longer need to hunt for features and commands, they no longer do so at all. They take everything at face value, not realizing the program’s potential that goes untapped. There isn’t even printed documentation that they can peruse to discover all the functions they’re not using.

You may think that, with the increasing prevalence of closed operating systems such as iOS, this accommodating mindset of computer users will become a necessary one. But a user needn’t have access to a computer’s command line to be able to use software efficiently. The first thing I do in any application I install, be it for a desktop computer or a cell phone, is investigate the preferences, so I better understand the options and behaviors available to me. When I installed Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac last week, I immediately set Word to save its files in .DOC format by default, eschewing the more modern .DOCX. This single customization thus prevented numerous headaches caused by friends with older software not being able to open my files. Most users wouldn’t think to explore that possibility.

That’s because making computers friendlier has, ironically, also made them less engaging, and thus less educational. Growing up with computers that made few efforts to be understood taught me how to understand today’s computers. For example, I recently purchased the new iLife suite from Apple. The multimedia editing software iMovie is immense in its capabilities, but because I’m curious and playful — qualities that are learned as much as they are innate — it wasn’t long before I was mixing clips, ducking audio, and exporting to YouTube.

Granted, programs like iMovie have overwhelming potential: today’s software is capable of so much more than could have ever fit onto a 140K floppy. Maybe today’s users are learning just as much about today’s computers as we did about the Apple II; it’s only the proportions that have changed, as the comprehensive simplicity of yesterday’s programs made it easier to grasp its commands in their entirety.

Behold, the Appleworks word processor command set in its entirety:
just enough to master. (Click for the full list.)

As more and more people use computers, will they become less and less efficient at doing so? Will our programs continue to bloat until only artisans and the hardcore can do more than scratch their surface? Or is that potential rightly buried, rewarding those dedicated few who know there has to be something better lurking beneath the surface?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. But I’ve seen high school students marvel at being taught new computer skills, from as basic as Microsoft Word’s “Track Changes” function to as esoteric as the Scheme programming language. The earlier we introduce users to such concepts, the sooner we’ll ignite that creative spark that will drive them to learn what else these fascinating devices can do. Then we’ll have a next generation not just of programmers, but of power users — and anyone who wants to compete with them in the workforce had best start cracking the books.