Apple II Bits

Ever since I set up my Apple II in my cubicle, I’ve wanted to put the classic computer on the workplace network. I’ve never had an Apple II with broadband Internet access, and it seemed the best way to demonstrate the machine’s usefulness in a modern work environment.

Doing so would require some additional hardware, which Sean Fahey of A2Central.com generously sold to me at KansasFest 2010: an Uthernet card, a somewhat hard-to-find Ethernet expansion card for the Apple II. I installed it as soon as I returned home from that event but encountered some challenges with configuring the card, the software, and more. The fault lied not in the stars: it had been too long since I’d added new hardware to my Apple II, and I’d forgotten some basic steps. It occurred to me later what else to try, but I never got around to making a second attempt.

I was recently motivated to do so after talking shop with Peter Neubauer during the Open Apple podcast. He informed me that the Uthernet significantly improved his floppy transfer rate using ADTPro. I’ve been working on a floppy preservation project for months and decided that some up-front investment in getting my Uthernet working would pay off in the long run.

Courtesy ADTPro developer David Schmidt’s excellent configuration walkthrough, I was able to get my machine online in no time flat. My first attempt at connecting my Apple II and MacBook directly failed, but putting it on the network was almost effortless. The speed improvement of transferring disk images over Ethernet compared to serial isn’t as jaw-dropping as I’d hoped, but Peter was right that it is significant and thus well worth my time to have set up — and also gave me the experience necessary to get Marinetti, the TCP/IP stack for the IIGS, working.

But putting an Apple II on the Internet isn’t just about being efficient; it’s also about being cool. The Uthernet has made available a range of applications, allowing me to do things with the Apple II that during its heyday I’d never have dreamed possible. What should I do with this machine next? As far as Internet-enabled, non-commercial programs go, I can think of four, off the top of my head:

• • SAM2 email client
• • SAFE2 FTP client
• • SNAP news reader
• • Samurai IRC client

The first three are, unsurprisingly, the brain children of Spectrum developer and telecommunications genius Ewen Wannop, while the last is courtesy Ninjaforce. Additional TCP/IP utilities are also available from Ryan Suenaga, though these NDAs seem primarily designed to complement an existing telecom suite.

How do you recommend an Apple II best be put to use at Computerworld?

Steve Jobs, a survivor of pancreatic cancer who in 2009 underwent a successful liver transplant, is currently on medical leave from Apple Inc.

Many would argue that Apple’s health is directly tied to that of its co-founder and CEO, as evidenced by the company’s floundering without his leadership from 1985 to 1997. To commemorate that perspective, Computerworld recently published a gallery that highlights 12 noteworthy innovations rolled out under Jobs’ leadership at Apple. Though Jobs’ role in the design of many Apple products is questionable, we circumvented the issue by simply saying that these were products launched while he was CEO — a rather inarguable fact.

I was assigned this story by the publication’s chief news editor, Ken Mingis, who selected the contents of the gallery. It was originally proposed to cover only those products launched since Jobs’ return to the company in 1997 and not any of the releases from his first tour of duty, from the company’s founding in 1977 to when he was ousted in 1985. I had no issue with that — an article has to be focused, lest it try to cover all of existence — but we were challenged to explain to the readers how or why we could omit such milestones as the Apple II and the Macintosh. We compromised by adding those two products to the original ten, resulting in this final, chronological lineup:

Apple II (1977) Macintosh (1984) iMac (1997) Power Mac G4 Cube (2000) Mac OS X (2001) iPod (2001)

iMac G4 (2002) Mac mini (2005) iPhone (2007) MacBook Air (2008) iPad (2010) iPhone 4 (2010)

Had it been up to me, I would’ve omitted different models of the same product, such as the iMac G4 and the iPhone 4, and maybe included more failures, like the Apple III and Apple Lisa (the latter especially being notable for its pre-Mac GUI). But even without those changes, it’s a pretty thorough gallery. Still, I still expected Apple fans to be more contentious in the selection, yet the article has thus far produced little discussion and feedback. What about you — what products would you have added or removed?

I was encouraged to be “witty” with each product’s headline, so I relied heavily on this list of Apple advertising slogans. Although it might’ve been clearer to use the product name and release date instead, editor Mike Barton, who also selected the photos, instead bolded the product name in its brief description, allowing us to be both witty and clear.

I hope everyone enjoys this brief review of Apple’s history. Whether or not you like Jobs, he and his company deserve to be in good health.

(Hat tip to Arnold Kim)

Last week, I belatedly reported that Christie’s auction house would be selling an Apple-1 on Nov. 23. On that date, by the time I remembered what day it was, the lot had already sold and Christie’s had closed. I was at work at Computerworld and mentioned the occasion to the news chief, who suggested I write about it, as the reporter responsible for Computerworld‘s auction’s pre-event coverage was on holiday. I was already planning on blogging about it for this site but didn’t have any details about where the computer had gone, so I questioned the potential for my article to be newsworthy.

But thanks to a blog comment by Eric Rucker, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at KansasFest 2010, I was able to take the story in the opposite direction by examining where this particular Apple-1 had come from. A quick trip to IRC, and I had the retrocomputing expert on the line, helping me get my facts straight.

The resulting article, which got some love on Google News, is now posted on Computerworld.com:

Christie’s auction house in London today sold an Apple-1 computer for £133,250, or $213,600.

The lot, which went up for auction at 9:30 a.m. ET today, had an estimated value of between $160,300 and $240,450.

Two hundred Apple-1 computers are estimated to have been created and sold for $666.66 before Apple Computer Inc. was founded in 1977. Once the Apple II, the company’s first official product, was released, many of the Apple-1 models were reclaimed as trade-ins. Only about 50 are still known to exist, many of them indexed by hardware developer Mike Willegal.

Read the rest of this story at Computerworld.com »

Some of my favorite Juiced.GS articles are the anthologies. Roughly annually, the staff and I choose an Apple II-related topic and solicit community members to contribute brief essays that I assemble into a single collage. I love the variety of perspectives and voices, and the collaborative nature of being able to work with such a diverse yet ephemeral team.

In my time as editor of the magazine, I’ve overseen four such articles: where were you when the Apple IIGS was released; favorite memories of KansasFest; how did the Apple II influence your career; and favorite memories of Joe Kohn. (Naturally, that last one was the least enjoyable; I would’ve preferred not to have needed to publish it at all.) My favorite of those was how the Apple II impacted our jobs:

Wherever you live, no matter your age, today’s economy is a difficult one in which to either find or keep a job. Fortunately, the Apple II has long served as a strong foundation, teaching its users programming languages and critical thinking skills that have shaped their professional careers. We asked Juiced.GS subscribers, “How did the Apple II bring you to the career you have today?”

The answers were nothing short of inspiring. When else could Juiced.GS readers find Australian mainframes, digital libraries, and chicken coops, all in one article?

More mundanely, the Apple II also led me to my current job at Computerworld. In return, I try to bring my hobby to my workplace, not only by setting up the actual machine in my cubicle, but by covering the retrocomputing scene for Computerworld’s readers. Although I’m careful to not be pigeonholed as “the Apple II guy”, my editors are have been pleasantly surprised by my stories proving major traffic drivers for the site each of the last two Augusts.

Recently, another professional who is where he is today because of the Apple II had a run-in with Computerworld, though this time, it was one of our dozens of international counterparts. Computerworld Australia this week published an interview with Mr. Simon Hackett, founder of both telecommunications carrier Agile Communications and Internet service provider (ISP) Internode. Staff writer James Hutchinson’s very first question to Mr. Hackett, “What caused you to get into telecommunications in the first place?”, produced an answer that would’ve been right at home in Juiced.GS:

While I was at high school, around 1981, an Apple II turned up on loan from the Angle Park Computing Centre (an SA Government initiative which was a catalyst for a number of future IT Entrepreneurs in South Australia). Other students started playing with it to see what games it seemed to come with. But I picked up the book that arrived with the machine, containing the ROM Monitor manual and 6502 assembly language guide, and started writing little programs in machine code for fun. It seemed easy, because nobody had told me that it was supposed to be hard.

Some years later, I took on a job at Adelaide University right when AARNet (the university precursor to the commercial internet in Australia) was being created by the university sector. It was the first (and last) job interview I’ve ever had with anyone! As part of that team of people, I picked up the way the internet and TCP/IP worked just as I had picked up Apple II machine code — by rolling up my sleeves and getting my hands dirty and just… doing it.

It became clear to me that my professional future was going to be intertwined with the use of networks to get computers to do useful things for people in the real world.

Practically on the other side of the planet from where Steve Wozniak cobbled together his brainchild, a career was shaped and made manifest. How many others learned from the Apple II the foundational skills and knowledge that they transferred and applied to their dreams? How many other careers, from enterprise IT entrepreneur to iPhone programmer to helpdesk technician to tech writer, have been influenced by this 8-bit machine?

How have you?

Steve Wozniak, who this month turned 60, recently spoke at the Flash Media Summit in Santa Clara, California, in his role as chief scientist of solid-state drive company Fusion-io. In his closing keynote speech, entitled “Driving Innovation with Solid-State Technologies“, Wozniak reflected that hardware memory has played a pivotal role in all his designs, from the earliest to the latest. The IDG News Service reports:

“The biggest decision I made in most of the projects of my life was what memory to use that’s the exact right, smallest, simplest, and more importantly, the cheapest there is,” Wozniak told the audience in a packed auditorium.

Even the first major commercial product he designed with co-founder Steve Jobs, the Apple II, was defined largely by memory. Facing the problem of how to refresh the characters on the screen fast enough to keep up with a microprocessor that could do a million operations per second, he came up with the idea of devoting some of the computer’s dynamic memory to the display, he said.

You know what my favorite part of that passage is? Not the technical details, or the acknowledgement of the Apple II, or even the genius of Woz. It’s the “packed auditorium”. Twenty-five years after he left the company he founded, Steve Wozniak is still a superstar. It’s not just his appearance on Dancing with the Stars that has put him in the spotlight. Engineers, programmers, designers, and geeks across the globe recognize the brilliance and courage that has continuously allowed Woz to work magic.

Although he was no longer with Apple Computer Inc. by the time the “Think Different” campaign was unveiled, Woz is nonetheless the embodiment of that advertisement.

“When you’re in school, you’re always taught that the right answer is the same answer everyone else has,” Wozniak said. It’s a lesson he’s learned several times in years of engineering. “Clear out your mind of the way the world is today,” he said.

Everyone has many roles, and I have two that I am constantly struggling to balance: marketing director for KansasFest, and associate online editor of Computerworld.com. I enjoy bringing retrocomputing coverage to the normally enterprise IT-focused Computerworld, but my involvement in the Apple II community creates a potential conflict of interest that prohibits me from providing a reporter’s perspective on the annual Apple II convention. Fortunately, Computerworld‘s editors have worked with me to find ways to cover the event that don’t allow much opportunity for bias. In 2007, I wrote a pair of blog posts; in 2008, several photos from KansasFest appeared on Computerworld.com while the event was in full-swing; and in 2009, over 250 pictures of Vince Briel’s four-hour Replica I workshop were distilled into a photo gallery.

The Computerworld features team and I need to be creative to find ways to showcase KansasFest without conflict and without repeating past formulae. Fortunately, when the KansasFest committee announced that the Apple iPad would be at KFest 2010, the features team was enthusiastically receptive to my pitch: comparing and contrasting this revolutionary device to Apple’s previous tablet device, the Apple Graphics Tablet. Though entirely different in function and purpose, the idea of putting these two “tablets” side-by-side was a fun and intriguing one. They gave me the go-ahead.

An unlikely pairing approved by Computerworld.

The shoot took place at KansasFest late on Saturday, after we’d returned to Rockhurst University from a late-night showing of Inception. Loren Damewood provided the iPad, with Tony Diaz‘s graphics tablet nearby. Loren and I snapped several photos of the two that I then provided to features editor Val Potter. By the time I got home from KansasFest, her fresh eyes had revealed what my Inception-weary ones had failed to notice: I’d overlooked shooting several key features and angles. We had enough pictures for a photo gallery, but it would be a bit weak. Unfortunately, reuniting the two pieces of hardware for additional photos seemed impossible.

It took me awhile to realize the solution to this dilemma. Tony was making a week-long drive home from KansasFest with Mark Frischknecht, who had his own iPad. Maybe at one of their nightly hotel stops, they could do their own comparison? The pair were happy to oblige, and combined with some photos Tony had taken in March for an aborted Juiced.GS feature, and a few more pictures by Computerworld news editor and Mac aficionado Ken Mingis, we had everything we needed.

As with last year’s Apple-1 image gallery, the final story was published on what is for enterprise IT news the slowest day of the week (Friday) of the slowest month of the year (August). As a result, “Face-off: 1979 Apple Graphics Tablet vs. 2010 Apple iPad” has been getting some generous traffic, further aided by Slashdot.

But both Computerworld and /. readers include a number of detractors among their commenters: “They really thought it was necessary to compare two technologies that were more than 30 years apart?” or “where can u see the fun in this article? compare a dolphin with a dinosaur next time. they both start with d.” Fortunately, those who “get it” are more eloquent: “This is a quick ‘then and now’ look at how some things have changed and how others have remained similar, if not the same, in Apple’s design philosophy, user interface design, packaging, and marketing. Even without those aspects, the article still has nostalgic interest and value to those of us involved in computing since the 70s.”

The image gallery isn’t your typical post-KansasFest wrap-up — there are plenty of traditional sources for that — but it accomplished my dual mission of providing Computerworld with great, original content, and putting the Apple II before a larger audience than is normally possible. I’m open to any ideas of how I might continue to do so, whether it be for KansasFest 2011 or at any other time of year!