Apple II Bits

Summer blockbuster season is here, as heralded by last week’s release of The Avengers: Age of Ultron. Comic-book superheroes will be smashing across the screen all summer, with the likes of Ant-Man and The Fantastic Four soon to follow.

Many of these characters are the creation of Stan Lee, who has played as much a role in the development of the comic book medium as Steve Wozniak has in the creation of the personal computer. If Thor, Iron Man, Captain America, and the Hulk can team up, why can’t these legends?

Geeks need wait only a year for that union to occur when Woz and Lee combine forces to bring us Silicon Valley Comic Con 2016.

Says Woz:

I want to give Silicon Valley it’s very own kind of Comic Con where everyone can have fun enjoying what they love. Today we’re lucky to have so many kinds of entertainment, from movies, TV shows, web series, music, video games, social media and more, and the lines between entertainment and the technology we love so much in Silicon Valley are getting blurrier every day. We’re going to create a place where all these different kinds of interests can come together, and we can come together too.

The event will be held March 19–20, 2016, in San Jose, California — home to the Children’s Discovery Museum that Woz founded. Although tickets are not yet on sale, you can register to receive information for attendees, exhibitors, or media.

The creators of Spider-Man and the Apple II will make an awesome team. Who knows what fun their fans will have at the inaugural Silicon Valley Comic Con!

(Hat tip to Conviron Altatis)

Education? I’m a fan. I taught at the high school level for several years and have been a college instructor for twice that. Teaching kids not what to think, but how to think, is the best investment I know to make in our future.

Turns out Steve Jobs was of a similar mindset. In a 1995 interview with Daniel Morrow of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Jobs related his drive to ensure other kids had the same opportunities he did:

When I was ten or eleven I saw my first computer… I fell in love with it. And I thought, looking at these statistics in 1979, I thought if there was just one computer in every school, some of the kids would find it. It will change their life.

Jobs investigated what it would cost to donate a single Apple II computer to every K-12 school in the United States. The cost was prohibitive for such a fledging company, but made economical and affordable with various tax incentives and deductions. Jobs lobbied for even more flexibility, getting as far as landing the Computer Equipment Contribution Act of 1982 on the floor of the Senate, after sailing it through Congress. Alas, it never made it past that point. In the end, Jobs’ outreach was limited to California, where each of over 9,000 schools benefitted from Apple’s generosity.

Audrey Watters over at Hack Education has more details and links, including to InfoWorld‘s and Creative Computing‘s reports of that era. It’s a fascinating look at the marketing and financial strategy by which Apple came to dominate the classroom.

As reported by the Cult of Mac, id co-founder John Carmack recently tweeted a photo of his son learning to program on an Apple IIc:

Teaching my kids programming on an Apple //c is like kung fu training in the primitive wilderness. pic.twitter.com/fHCHuFA4ni

— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) February 23, 2015

This looks like the same IIc that Carmack received as a Christmas gift in 2012:

https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/283632618946318336

The Apple II and education go hand-in-glove — this post is the site’s 18th to be tagged "education". However, the two sentences of the Cult of Mac’s story that struck me have little to do with education. First is this detail of Carmack’s origin story: "As a kid at Shawnee Mission East public school (one of the first in his family’s part of Kansas to get a computer lab), Carmack taught himself BASIC on an Apple II." Shawnee Mission is only 12 miles from Rockhurst University, home of KansasFest; might it be a homecoming to invite Carmack to be the event’s keynote speaker, joining his former colleague John Romero among the speaker alumni?

That paragraph’s next sentence is a wonderful example of unintended consequences: "Later on, [Carmack] bought an Apple IIGS to start his game-making career, as revealed in the fantastic book Masters of Doom." And it was that 2003 book book by David Kushner that inspired the 2005 founding of social news website reddit, as detailed by co-founder Alexis Ohanian:

… this book convinced me to consider starting a company. It just seemed like so much damn fun. Granted, we didn’t end up starting a gaming company (well, I guess we had ‘gamification’ before that was a buzzword: karma, leaderboards, awards, etc) but the idea a few friends could get together in a house and start building something the world had never seen before — having a lot of fun in the process — got me hooked.

Would reddit and its AMAs exist without Carmack and Romero — and thus without the Apple II? Likely not!

Who knows what the next generation of programmers will create and inspire, thanks to the Apple II?

(Hat tip to Steve Weyhrich)

When I left my position as an editor at Computerworld two years ago, I suggested that their Apple II coverage would be no more. That was an exaggeration, of course — while I did contribute offbeat articles interviewing KansasFest attendees and reviewing Apple biopics, the day-to-day coverage of mainstream events in the retrocomputing world were Gregg Keizer‘s bailiwick, with frequent reports of Apple history hitting the auction block.

And so it’s Keizer who put the Apple-1 back on the Computerworld.com homepage last month with news that Apple co-founder and Adventures of an Apple Founder author Ron Wayne‘s historical documents are up for sale. "It includes original working proofs of the Apple-1 manual, Wayne’s original company logo — perhaps the oldest in existence," reports Keizer, "and design renderings of a proposed Apple II case." A phone interview with Steve Wozniak adds some perspective on the widespread interest in Apple’s early history.

Wayne’s lot is listed at Christie’s and is estimated to sell for $30,000 – $50,000 USD. If you want a closer look at the goods in advance of the December 11 auction, Engadget posted over five dozen images of Wayne’s library three years ago.

Image courtesy Engadget

I’m hopeful Wayne, the perennial down-on-his-luck example of a missed opportunity, will see some profit from this sale. It’s a wonder neither of the Apple co-founders shared their fortunes with their former partner — whether because he warrants or deserves it (would Apple exist without him?), or just out of pity.

UPDATE (13-Dec-14): Ron Wayne’s lot sold for $25,000.

(Hat tip to Darrell Etherington and Robert McMillan)

I’ve never been a hardware hacker, but I have enough programming experience to appreciate optimized code. I’ve written some programs that were serviceable but kludgy; had they been meant for widespread distribution and deployment, I would’ve taken more time to reduce the number of lines and variables, and hence, the execution time. It’s one of the challenges I love most about the Apple II: doing as much as possible with as little as possible.

Nowhere is that principle more effectively demonstrated than in the designs of Steve Wozniak. Before he co-founded Apple, he took Atari’s BREAKOUT coin-op and reduced the number of chips by fifty. The brain that mastered this design is still at work, as evidenced by a recent email exchange.

Apple-1 cloner and Vintage Computer Festival East alumnus Mike Willegal recently had some questions about the Apple-1 power supply — so he emailed Woz. Tacked onto the end of Woz’s reply was this remark:

I awoke one night in Quito, Ecuador, this year and came up with a way to save a chip or two from the Apple II, and a trivial way to have the 2 grays of the Apple II be different (light gray and dark gray) but it’s 38 years too late. It did give me a good smile, since I know how hard it is to improve on that design.

How much different a world would the Apple II community be, if this minor change had been made? Probably not very. But it’s good to know that, while many of us are preoccupied grafting modern USB and Ethernet ports onto the Apple II, the original genius is still contemplating how he could’ve laid for us a stronger foundation.

(Hat tips to Luke Dormehl and Greg Kumparak)

For about 18 years, I wore the same winter coat. It may have gone out of style, but it served two more important functions: it kept me warm; and it had pockets.

Pockets! I love being able to carry everything in pockets, from an iPod to a novel to a pack of tissues to a pen — I want to be equipped for any situation, and this coat accommodated.

But in 2013, as I underwent a life reboot, even I had to admit it was time to be out with the old and in with the new. But how could I ever replace such fabulous apparel? A friend I met at an 8-Bit Weapon concert recommended the SCOTTEVEST brand, which looked promising — but I wasn’t sold until I found another endorsement: Steve Wozniak himself.

Woz is a big fan of SCOTTEVEST, having been recorded wearing them in a variety of cinematic-inspired scenarios, from Star Wars to The Matrix:

I was sold. The first SCOTTeVEST coat I bought was the Brad Thor Alpha — and while it did have a lot of pockets, they weren’t labeled for items I was likely to use: passport… dagger… gun?!? I emailed their customer support and asked if all their products were this — tactical. No, they said. This coat is modeled after the thriller novels of author Brad Thor, who was not previously on my radar. I then picked up a Revolution Plus, which boasts 26 pockets for things I’d actually use: wallet, keys, iPad (!), water bottle, eyeglasses, and more. Almost all pockets are labeled, and if you consistently use them for their indicated purpose, you’ll quickly develop a muscle memory of what goes wear, eliminating the need to pat yourself down to find your things.

Speaking of pat-downs, SCOTTeVEST coats are great when being subjected to TSA searches, too. When you get to the airport, just keep everything in your coat pockets instead of your pants or purse. Then just take off your coat and send it through the X-ray scanner. No need to use those plastic dishes, where anyone can grab your stuff.

SCOTTeVESTs also come with permanently affixed cleaning cloths for your glasses and a carabiner for your keys. All pockets are evenly distributed so that you won’t be listing to one side.

Most important, the Revolution Plus is possibly the warmest winter coat I’ve ever owned. It does a great job protecting my torso when deep in a cold New England winter.

I’ve since added a SeV Sterling Jacket to my wardrobe for use in the spring and fall. I had two issues with his coat. First is that the zipper sometimes gets stuck, which customer service addressed by pointing me to their official zipper lubrication video. Second, some of the pockets open up into the coat’s lining, resulting in items slipping out of their pockets and disappearing to somewhere in the coat — you can feel it’s in there somewhere, but you have no idea how to get at it! Customer service responded:

Due to a sophisticated internal pocket design, we have given the name the “Secret Pocket” to a compartment in our vests and jackets where some items may get ‘lost’. This pocket is accessible but not necessarily meant for use. Our items are designed with that internal inning so that weight is distributed evenly, you can wire your garment (PAN), and so that the internal pocketing layout is separated. I know it might seem confusing, however it’s a must for our design and technical team when putting together these complex garments.

Otherwise, I’ve been very satisfied with SCOTTeVEST’s customer service. Since the coats are sold online only and can’t be tried on prior to purchase, they make it easy to buy multiple sizes and return the one that doesn’t fit. And when one of my coats had a slight tear, SCOTTeVEST will reimburse up to $30 in repairs by your local tailor or seamstress — wow!

The coats are expensive, ranging from $150–200, but a coupon will knock 20% off a new customer’s first order. If it’s good enough for Woz, it’s good enough for us — but if you’re not convinced, listen to Open Apple #33 starting at timestamp 1:30:24:

or check out the photo gallery below:

(Photo “Autumn” by Barbara)