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Christmas lights | Apple II Bits

Christmas lights


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Merry Christmas! What better time of year to decorate your abode with gratuitous displays of light and sound. It’s become tradition for creative homeowners to design increasingly elaborate audio/visual performances, synchronizing music with flashing luminescence.

Such showmanship has been around as long as personal computers have enabled them. A recent story in WIRED interviews the artists behind several such displays, including one who attributes the trend to the Apple II:

The craze began in the 1980s with pioneers like Chuck Smith of Franklin, Tennessee, who linked his Christmas lights to an Apple II in the garage. "I was on the bloody cutting edge of this and I didn’t even know it," he says.

Beyond this article, I can’t find any online references to Chuck Smith or his Apple II-powered holiday displays, nor videos of same. I’m curious to know how author Graham Hacia, making his WIRED debut with this byline, tracked down this early adopter. In the meantime, if anyone has examples of other Christmas lights that connected to the Apple II, I’d love to hear about them — please share in the comments below!