Apple II Bits

When I joined the Juiced.GS staff in 2002 as associate editor, I was given a quarterly column in which to ruminate about whatever Apple II topic I wanted. Over the next 16 issues, I wrote about exploring Boston with Ryan Suenaga, the passing of Gary Utter, BASIC programming, and more. The freedom to write about whatever struck my fancy, combined with the structure of writing on a quarterly schedule, was enjoyable and inspiring.

Starting with volume 11, I become editor-in-chief of Juiced.GS and handed my column to Eric Shepherd. I still had my own column in the form of the quarterly editorial, but this one was a lengthier and a bit more formal and on-topic to the magazine. I’ve enjoyed writing it for ten years — but halfway through that run, I decided I wanted something more. I decided a blog would not only give me more options in what content to write and how to present it, such as the embedding of photos and video; it would also be timelier than a quarterly print pub could be, allowing pieces that were shorter but more relevant to everything that happens between issues of Juiced.GS.

Thus was born Apple II Bits, which turns five years old this Wednesday. A twice-weekly column for the first two years, and "only" weekly for the next three, it’s now produced 367 posts — which, at Juiced.GS‘s publication rate, would’ve taken me 92 years to write.

Friends outside the retrocomputing community are baffled how I can find something new to say about the Apple II every week. While there are times that it can be challenging, finding a topic generally isn’t all that hard: there’s always someone releasing a new game, or developing hardware, or publishing a podcast to keep the Apple II alive and well. I enjoy this regular opportunity to be creative and hone my writing on the topic that made me a writer in the first place. My thanks to all the creators and readers that make this blog possible.

For a less fascinating and more quantitative look at this site’s growth since last year, continue reading.

• • As of today, the site hosts 367 posts (52 more than this time last year), 1823 tags (+186), 441 comments (+31) from 133 readers (+4), and 1 blogger. With the exception of the number of posts, each of these numbers is growing more slowly year-over-year.
• • Year-to-year, our pageviews were down 8% and unique visitors down 8% in our fifth year. This is the second consecutive year of decline in traffic.
• • Our busiest day was August 1, 2014. I have no idea what people were doing here that day.
• • Our top posts three in the past year were all from 2011: “Selling to Pawn Stars”, “Best computer games from the ’80s”, and “Taking the Apple II online with Uthernet”. These were our top three posts the previous year, too. Correspondingly, the top search terms leading visitors to this site are “chris espinosa net worth” and “best apple ii games”.
• • Our top referrals were from A2Central.com, Twitter, and Facebook. This is the first time StumbleUpon did not break the top three and Facebook did.
• • Traffic from mobile devices was up 10%, and from tablets, down 7%
• • In the past year, we blocked 18,590 pieces of spam, down from 121,301 the previous year — WOW! More than half of all that spam came in October and November 2014 alone.

Growing up with the Apple II, I learned to program in BASIC. Its line numbers, GOTOs and GOSUBs, and spaghetti code were unlike anything I would encounter later in my education. Perhaps for that reason, I never mastered a language like I did BASIC. While I was able to grasp Prolog and FORTRAN, the "pointers" of C++ were so incomprehensible to me that I eventually had to change majors to get away from it.

Had I continued down that programming path, I doubtless would’ve faced many other challenging concepts as I attempted to master yet more languages, like C Sharp, Perl, PHP, Ruby, and more. By some estimates, there are over 20,000 languages in existence, only a fraction of which I ever could’ve learned on the Apple II. Some are more practical than others, while others are of more historical significance.

The BBC attempts to scratch the surface of those historical languages in a recent limited-run podcast series, Codes that Changed the World, hosted by Aleks Krotoski.

The podcast, which debuted this month and ran for all of five episodes, covers four languages: FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, and Java, with a fifth episode discussing how so many different languages are able to coexist.

Of course, you can’t discuss the rise of BASIC without the role the Apple II played, and vice versa:

BASIC enabled computing as we understand it today. When Apple was a two-man band building this thing called the Apple II, there were no other computers out there like it. So they had to put something on it that would allow individuals to program it themselves. Apple just wouldn’t exist without BASIC. And Microsoft! The first thing that Microsoft did as a company was selling BASIC to run on other people’s computers. The two biggest names in modern computing, Apple and Microsoft, both wouldn’t’ve happened if it wasn’t for BASIC.

BASIC celebrated its 50th birthday last year, earning it a cover story in Juiced.GS:

While researching that story, author Steve Weyhrich (who also pointed me to this podcast) delved into the resources available at Dartmouth College, where BASIC was invented. As part of its "BASIC at 50" commemoration, Dartmouth produced a free 38-minute documentary, Birth of BASIC:

If you want to learn more about other programming languages, Codes that Changed the World is available in iTunes. While it’s unreasonable to expect all 20,000 languages to be covered, I do lament that the podcast’s scope was limited to only five episodes, as I rather enjoyed these 15-minute encapsulations of technical topics for a lay audience. If the BBC or Krotoski ever produce more, I’ll be first in line to listen!

Even though everyone has seen it by now — it’s been reblogged everywhere — I would be remiss to not also feature it on Apple II Bits. And so, ladies and gentlemen and all others, I present: the Apple II Watch.

This video showcases an actual, wearable piece of technology with all the features demonstrated therein. Twenty-four-year-old DJ Harrigan, aka Aleator777, offers detailed instructions for 3D printing and assembling your own device:

The design would be a working device, heavily inspired by the form factor of the full size computer, but it would also be an imaginative exploration of a wearable tech world that began long before we had the technology to do so in a meaningful way. Calculator watches are already, by definition, a wrist-worn computer, and are pretty neat, but there’s just something so appealing about the idea a tiny wrist-worn CRT. I also wanted to push my new 3D modeling skills as well, so building a reasonable complicated enclosure was a fun challenge.

He doesn’t give an estimate of the total cost of assembling such a device, but he does list all the parts needed, including a Teensy Arduino as the main processor. All the schematics are available for download, as are some fun byproducts of the design, such as little floppy-shaped stickers.

My thanks to this hardware hacker for producing such a fun, creative project that caught the public’s attention and imagination! His work has been shared by the likes of Popular Mechanics, Gizmodo, The Daily Beast, Mashable, TechCrunch, NPR, Macworld, Lifehacker, Tech Times, IGN, and Dan Kottke — and was shared directly with me by several people, including Dan Muse, former editor-in-chief of inCider/A+. Even Steve Wozniak commented on the instructions: "This is incredible and has great significance to the maker community. I would buy this over the Apple watch and would wear it too! It would go well with my nixie watch."
Closed the developer:

This was a really enjoyable project to build and I certainly gained a lot of respect for the fine engineers who do this for real products. I’m definitely in the mood of creating even more anachronistic devices in the future. I would also love to see someone build on this and make a fully featured “smart watch” using a retro computer design and true OS. If you have any ideas for similar projects, I’d love to know. Thanks for reading!

Attending the Different Games conference in New York City this past weekend gave me plenty of opportunity to catch up with Juiced.GS staff writer (and frequent Apple II Bits blog subject) Ivan Drucker. While waiting for registration for KansasFest 2015 to open, we reminisced about our favorite moments of last year’s event — Ivan’s sixth KansasFest, and my 17th.

I was delighted to discover Ivan had not previously stumbled upon Kay Savetz‘s video capture of a unique moment: Martin Haye, having just demoed 8-bit Western RPG Lawless Legends, burned the game to disk and declared it <a href=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLBWA4qNQp4″ title=”5.25″ Floppy Disk in a Microwave – YouTube”>ready to ship.

For those archivists who thought it was too late to preserve floppies: Martin’s making sure of that!

For an equally entertaining pyrotechnic display, try burning an actual compact disc:

Ken Gagne, Gamebits, Apple II Bits, and Martin Haye offer no assurances, guarantees, or warranties, express or implied, regarding the safety of you or your hardware, software, or other property or loved ones as a result of information received or linked to from this or any other website.

Happy burning!