Archive for April, 2014

Celebrating four years of Apple II blogging

April 28th, 2014 7:49 AM
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Filed under Musings;
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Four years ago today, on Wednesday, April 28, 2010, Jon Stewart briefly featured an Apple II on The Daily Show. I wanted to share that video with the Apple II community, but I didn’t feel like I had a good outlet for it. Despite having been on Twitter for three years, I wasn’t a prolific user (and, by some degrees, I’m still not); the Apple II Enthusiasts group on Facebook is easy to get lost in; and my only WordPress blog about the Apple II, launched a year earlier, was the Juiced.GS site, which didn’t cover non-Juiced.GS aspects of the community.

I needed a platform, fast. Fortunately, I’d already built one: in August 2009, I’d built this site, with consultation from Peter Watson and Mike Maginnis. That Thursday, without knowing my focus or publication, I pushed out that first blog post and rushed off to attend ROFLCon II at MIT.

The next Monday, I posted a story about Charles Mangin’s Mac Mini in a Disk II drive. So far, I’d happened to publish posts on Thursday and Monday. I decided to let that be my schedule. Two years later, I narrowed it down to Mondays only. And two years after that, here we are.

A lot’s changed since then: I helped launch the Open Apple podcast, providing yet another community voice; Juiced.GS‘s subscriber base has grown by leaps and bounds; I’ve resigned from the KansasFest committee. With all those changing outlets, I’ve enjoyed the stability and reliability of knowing I had to come up with something to say about the Apple II every Monday — a frequency that surprises my friends outside the community, who would expect a monthly or quarterly post to suffice. (Ha!) It’s a tradition I intend to continue.

Celebrating four years of apples at Apple II Bits.

Another tradition is the annual reflection of the site’s demographics, analytics, and statistics. As I did in 2011, 2012, and 2013, here is a look at the site’s scope and growth.

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Steve Wozniak delivers an iMac

April 21st, 2014 12:37 PM
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Filed under Mainstream coverage, Steve Wozniak;
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Steve Wozniak is a man of the people. Whereas many celebrities elevate themselves above the consumers upon which they built their empires — or, unsure how to handle their unexpected fame, become recluses — Woz has never shied from his fans and friends. Whether it’s insisting he pay to attend KansasFest 2013, or waiting in line with everyone else for the new iPhone, he’s the most down-to-earth living legend you could ever meet.

A good example of Woz’s nature can be seen in a video recorded a few years ago but published just recently. Emma, an Australian pre-teen whose parents were buying her a new iMac, was astonished to find the Apple representative who made the home delivery was none other than Steve Wozniak himself! Despite being younger than the Apple II, Emma had the good sense to recognize whose presence she was in, yet the wherewithal to not completely freak out.

I don’t know how her father arranged this delivery, but he opens the video with the observation, "This is like having your lightbulbs delivered by Thomas Edison." It reminds me of something I believe Eric Shepherd said in 2003, when Woz was announced as the KansasFest keynote speaker: "It’s like having Jesus Christ come to Easter dinner."

Who knows where Woz will pop up next?

(Hat tip to Jesus Diaz)

The superiority of obsolete operating systems

April 14th, 2014 10:09 PM
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Filed under Musings, Software showcase;
3 comments.

The savvy comedians of LoadingReadyRun — who have previously tipped their hat to computers of yore with their Desert Bus fundraiser, references to HyperCard, and spotlight on the Apple II — are at it again. In today’s weekly video, "The New Old Thing", they put forth an earnest proposal: replace Windows 8.1 with MS-DOS.

Earlier this year, MS-DOS’s source code was donated to the Computer History Museum, joining a collection that already includes Apple’s DOS 3.1. LRR’s video makes a compelling argument for why this newly available older operating system is a superior productivity platform. An excerpted transcript follows, though I’ve replaced references to MS-DOS with DOS 3.1:

Newer stuff isn’t necessarily better. Think of DOS 3.1 as a hand-crafted, artisinal operating system. [A GUI, mouse support, 3D graphics, 1080p video, the Internet] — all that stuff just slows you down. DOS 3.1 turns your computer into a mean, lean computing machine. Background processes hogging up all your memory? DOS 3.1 only runs one program at a time. Distracted by TVTropes at work? DOS 3.1 doesn’t go on the Internet! It just gets out of your way and lets you get your work done.

What’s so great about a GUI anyway? How many times have you lost a file in that maze of folders on your computer? With DOS, you just type the name of the file, and bam! You’re there! And you don’t have to worry about remembering the name of the file, because they can only be eight characters long, anyway. And another thing! A Windows 8 install is almost 20 gigabytes. DOS 3.1 is only 300K — as in kilobytes! It takes up less space than that picture you tweeted this morning of your venti ice non-fat hazelnut macchiato.

Bottom line: if you want to mess about and play Angry Birds, just use your phone or your tablet. When you want to get some serious, distraction-free work done, DOS 3.1 is for you.

I made several similar observations six years ago when I argued that GS/OS is better than Windows Vista and OS X (an article I’ve since wished I’d written for Juiced.GS, not Computerworld). We keep using this software because it provides a focused environment with familiar, fast methods for accomplishing specific, basic tasks. Older software is more stable, secure, compatible, and portable.

Like A2Central.com once said: it’s not obsolete — it’s proven technology.

UPDATE (May 15, 2014): DOS is good enough for George R. R. Martin!

Let’s Play Death in the Caribbean

April 7th, 2014 11:39 AM
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This winter, I launched a Google+ page for my YouTube gaming channel. As I began exploring the gaming communities on this social network, I discovered Leigh Alexander, a Gamasutra editor with a large following. She is an accomplished fiction author and columnist, and I’ve now enjoyed her writing for some time. But when she chose to expand into video, I was pleasantly surprised by the subject that a journalist on the cutting edge of technology would choose for her YouTube debut.

Alexander’s first foray into video is a Let’s Play of the Apple II game, Death in the Caribbean:

A "Let’s Play" is a video game walkthrough with commentary that focuses on the player’s experience, instead being a tutorial that provides strategy (though it can do that, too). Alexander follows through with that promise, having grown up playing this game with her father. On a recent return to her parents’ home in Massachusetts (hey, that’s where I live!), she recorded this video that reflects not only on how the game expanded her vocabulary with words such as "crevasse" and "brazier", but on other lessons: "[Death in the Caribbean] taught me from an early age that disaster can happen anywhere, at anytime. Even if the whole world sprawls out in front of you like a beautiful place ready to be explored — you can die, just by being a little bit wrong" — something you’re never too young to learn.

The launch of Apple II Bits in 2010 coincided with my discovery of Let’s Plays, at which time the genre was relatively unknown. I imagined myself being one of the first to bring this video format to the Apple II. While I’ve since recorded dozens of Let’s Play videos of Nintendo games, I’ve never executed on the idea to apply that experience to my favorite retrocomputer.

Four years later, Let’s Plays are booming, with no less prestigious an outlet than The Atlantic giving the issue coverage, detailing how PewDiePie, the most popular channel on YouTube, makes millions of dollars a year producing Let’s Play videos. If you’re baffled why Let’s Plays are so popular, Jamin Warren of PBS Digital Studios explains the appeal of Let’s Play videos:

Between the proliferation of Let’s Plays and the age of the Apple II, you might think, what more remains to be said about our favorite games? Plenty, reminded one of my YouTube followers. "I hate it when people who LP an older game and say ‘I have nothing original to contribute’," commented Gaming Media. "YES YOU DO! If you grew up with the game, you have stories about the game that no one else has."

Even those who didn’t grow up with a game can still provide unique commentary. As Alexander did, Gaming Media recently turned to Virtual Apple ][ and recorded a Let’s Play of Oregon Trail, a game that came out decades before he did:

(Skip to 4:52 into the first video for a fun blatant plug!)

Neither of these recent videos is the first Let’s Play to come from the Apple II: Jesse Hamm recorded his own playthrough of Death in the Caribbean three years ago; Brian Picchi has recorded reviews of games like Gold Rush! that could be considered Let’s Plays; and I in turn recorded a similar hybrid video of Picchi’s Retro Fever, a year after unboxing and playing Zéphyr.

There indeed remains much to be preserved, shared, and experienced of the Apple II on YouTube. I hope that Alexander, Gaming Media, Picchi, and I continue to find the time and enthusiasm to explore this fun intersection of old and new media. What games would you like to see us play next?