Apple II Bits

Five years ago this month, my tenure as an editor at Computerworld ended. But that wasn’t the end of the story: the many colleagues I’d worked with extended an invitation to continue freelancing for the publication — an invitation I gladly accepted.

While Computerworld was happy to publish Apple II articles when it came for free from a staff writer, it’s harder to justify paying a freelancer by the word to cover a 40-year-old computer. So my articles in the last five years explored other topics, including an annual tradition that I inadvertently began: a slideshow of tech luminaries we lost.

It was October 2011, and Steve Jobs had just passed away. I was on the features team — a group of editors who met biweekly to discuss big ideas for stories. Compared to the daily news grind, a feature could take at least a month to write and was almost always farmed out to a freelancer. Several websites were disgruntled that Steve Jobs’ passing had gotten more publicity than that of Dennis Ritchie, who created the C programming language and co-created Unix. I thought this a good opportunity to shine the spotlight on other overlooked industry veterans, so I suggested we publish a feature in time for Halloween that asked the question: "Who’s next?!" What other aging founders were we likely to soon lose?

The features team leader politely said, "Ken, that’s a really terrible idea… but there may be a good idea we can get out of it."

Thus was born the annual end-of-year slideshow that looked back on tech luminaries we lost in that calendar year. For the next several years, including during my transition from editor to freelancer, I watched other writers assemble the slideshow. In 2014, I was honored to assigned the story, finally being given the opportunity to execute the concept I’d proposed years ago.

That first year, I included Bob Bishop, whom I’d had the pleasure to meet and photograph at KansasFest. I skipped 2015 but wrote the slideshow in 2016 and again just last week for 2017. This latest lineup was the first time I got to choose which luminaries to honor, instead of having them assigned to me. It made it much easier to ensure a diverse cast when that virtue was baked in from the beginning. It also allowed me to include luminaries who might not otherwise have made the cut at Computerworld, such as Keith Robinson of Intellivision fame.

While there were no Apple II legends in this year’s roundup, Apple Computer Inc. was doubtless influenced by the heroes we lost in 2017. It was Robert W. Taylor who conceived of the ARPAnet, which became the Internet — but he also worked at Xerox PARC, from which Steve Jobs got the ideas for GUI, mouse input devices, and more. Charles Thacker was another PARC alumnus who helped develop the Xerox Alto, the early computer that embodied these concepts.

Writing this slideshow is a morose way to lead up to the holiday season — but I take heart in my ability to carry the legacies of these early innovators and ensure their stories are known. For everything they did for the Apple II and its users, I salute them.

In mid-November, John Romero shared with the Apple II community some sad news: Bob Bishop, co-founder of Apple’s R&D department and KansasFest 2011 keynote speaker, had passed away. The news came in time for me to include Bishop in my Computerworld slideshow of tech luminaries we lost in 2014; along with Patrick McGovern and Ralph Baer, Bishop was one of three luminaries I’d had the honor of meeting among the 23 in the article.

It is all well and good to honor the legacy of those who have gone before, but it takes more than mere platitudes to ensure their contributions are not buried with them. Thankfully, Romero was more than the bearer of bad news, as this past weekend, after a tip from on a tip from Gary Koffler, Romero had an encouraging update to share on Facebook:

Prepare for a mindblast. Today my wife and I went to the late Bob Bishop’s estate to rescue whatever we could from the giant dumpster outside the house — everything will be thrown away today (Saturday). We were able to save all historical items of note.

One of the items we got was this black Apple II+ which you will note is NOT a Bell & Howell. We believe it is the prototype for that edition. The lid easily pops off like normal, and the date is 1979. Bob also had an Apple II serial number 13. The family will be auctioning that one off.

We filled our van full of stuff. I can’t believe the amazing amount of stuff we got that’s collectible.

… To clarify, there was no dumpster diving involved. The dumpster sat silent and empty, waiting for today when everything left in Bob’s houses would be tossed in. We went through all the rooms of his houses and picked everything of value we could find.

The resulting thread is extensive, with postulations as to the nature and origin of some of Bishop’s rarer hardware, and questions of where similar collections might be found or donated. The Computer History Museum of Mountain View, California, and the Strong Museum of Rochester, New York, were frequently cited, with a representative of the latter chiming into the thread. I can vouch for both institutions, as both are actively archiving Juiced.GS for scholars and future generations of retrocomputing enthusiasts to reference.

There are many components to preserving our digital legacies: ensuring software for legacy computers can still be executed; preserving the original hardware; making our personal digital data collections accessible. I’m grateful that we have people like John Romero and Jason Scott, and institutions like the CHM and the Strong, actively working to keep alive the memory and accomplishments of heroes like Bob Bishop.

Courtesy Mike Maginnis‘s interview with Bob Bishop (currently available in a free sample issue of Juiced.GS), everyone knows that it was nine Apple II computers that powered the television game show Tic Tac Dough. For some readers, this information comes thirty years after the fact, lending the Apple II a status as something of an unsung hero, working behind the scenes to power an industry. Did it ever get the recognition it deserved?

As a matter of fact, it did. The Apple II was not just an invisible workhorse but was also occasionally the grand prize. In this April 1981 episode of The Price Is Right, one of the many rewards offered to competitors was Steve Wozniak’s most famous personal computer:

The pilot episode of Starcade, one of the first organized video game competitions, also featured an Apple II alongside an Asteroids Deluxe coin-op arcade machine as the ultimate prizes.

Other combinations of this hardware and genre also existed: game shows for the Apple II. Here’s an example of the Apple II version of Wheel of Fortune:

Jeopardy was also released for the Apple II, but I always thought there were many more such opportunities than were realized. Twenty-five years ago, I would’ve liked to have seen an Apple II adaptation of Press Your Luck, for example.

Where else have you seen the Apple II intersect the game show industry?