Apple II Bits

The crux of KansasFest are the daytime sessions that educate attendees on a variety of important topics. At KansasFests 2010 & 2011, I filled gaps in the schedule with "Know Your Meme", a session that introduced the audience to pop culture phenomena that have appeared and spread throughout the Internet. The 2010 session featured such wonders as "Double Rainbow" and "Old Spice Guy", whereas 2011 presented a more coherent narrative that deftly wove together Keyboard Cat, Nyan Cat, and "Can’t Hug Every Cat" into one (in)coherent package.

Besides the tradition of this session, I’ve also emceed KansasFest’s annual Friday night banquet, which historically has been a roast but lately has evolved to provide a variety of entertainment. The memeification of KansasFest began in 2009 with the presentation of LOLgeeks:

This year, we again united our memes and banquet. The hit of the evening came from Steve Weyhrich, who was celebrating his first KansasFest as a member of the event’s steering committee. Steve presented a montage of opening sequences for CSI: KFest, with Steve in the role of Horatio Caine:

My own contributions were "Strutting Leo Comes to KansasFest" and an iPhoto-inspired take on "Totally Looks Like":

It’s the beard.

But the centerpiece was supposed to be a spoof of the (in)famous song "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen:

This video has been remixed using footage of many individuals — everyone from Barack Obama to Lt. Commander Data. So I spent the week at KansasFest shooting other attendees and splicing their clips together. The result hasn’t been published online because it wasn’t as impressive as I’d hoped, which I blame on my shooting and editing skills.

But again, Steve has saved the day, finding some nugget of value in my efforts. He recently came across this Carly Rae Jepsen–Apple II mash-up — which, for some reason, did not want to post this on his own site! I instead offer it here:

Ah, Oregon Trail — is there anything it can’t do?

On Saturday, July 21, I gave a presentation at KansasFest 2012 about Kickstarter. I reviewed what the crowdfunding site is and how it works before presenting and analyzing examples of various campaigns. After reviewing successful projects (Double Fine, Leisure Suit Larry, Diaspora, TikTok, Pebble) and some unsuccessful or poorly designed ones (Rolling High, What’s Where in the Apple, MULE), I identified three qualities that lend themselves to meeting one’s crowdfunding goal: the fame, reputation, or track record of the artist (Jason Scott, Penny Arcade, Andrew Plotkin); a convincing pitch video (Huck Finn, Nataly Dawn) that doesn’t necessarily need to be expensive to produce; and attractive rewards (Pebble; Joulies).

Due to both the previous session and my own running long, after we watched Kickstarter pitch videos and dissected their strengths and weaknesses, I didn’t have as much time as I’d like for my presentation’s interactive component: brainstorming Apple II projects to launch on Kickstarter. I started by asking the audience what products we’d like to see that would require a financial investment, then who in the community has the reputation to attract a funding audience, followed by what the reward levels for such a Kickstarter campaign would be. As with all brainstorming sessions, I wrote down every idea regardless of feasibility. We then conducted an informal poll to narrow the choices to those bolded in the below table.

Projects	Sponsors	Rewards	Donation level
VGA card	Ken Gagne	Contributor credit on Web site	$10
Bluetooth / Wi-Fi card	Vince Briel	Access to contributor-only blog	$25
Accelerator card	Rich Dreher	USB adapter	$50
Ethernet card	Tony Diaz	USB adapter & name in manual	$75
Magazine PDF archive	James Littlejohn	Two USB adapters	$90
Buy rights and inventory from ReactiveMicro	Woz	Limited-edition model	$150
System 7.0		Apple II t-shirt	$250
USB input device adapter		10 adapters	$450
Buy the copyright to something		Silkscreen greet on the board	$500
Spectrum Internet Suite (SIS) update		Lunch with the designer	$1000
Full-color Juiced.GS
Ad-free RCR
Open Apple merchandise
Retrocomputing video podcast
Mark Twain clone
KansasFest scholarship
Open-source programming language
Woz action figure (with 9 points of articulation)
KansasFest FOREVER

Note that the first two columns do not line up with each other or the other two columns, but the third and fourth columns line up with each other. Also, some reward levels (access to contributor-only blog) include the previous rewards, whereas others (two USB keyboard adapters) do not.

Of all the bolded projects, we deemed the USB adapter the most affordable and thus the most likely to be funded. The proposed adapter would not only work with keyboards, joysticks, and mice, but it would adapt them to multiple platforms: Apple II, Commodore 64, and more. As the Battle Chess Kickstarter campaign demonstrated, limiting your product to only one audience (in that case, Windows) diminishes your chances of getting funded: more potential customers equals more money, as evidenced by the success of many old franchises that are being revived for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android.

A wide audience requires a creator with exposure and recognition beyond the Apple II community, for which reason I nominate Vince Briel. The inventory of Briel Computers, from the Replica 1 to the Micro-KIM to the ALTAIR 8800micro, appeal to retrocomputing hobbyists of many ages and interests, and Briel’s track record as a businessman, from shipping products to offering customer support, is unparalleled. Briel has the reputation that could get a Kickstarter project funded.

Briel was in the audience for this brainstorming session but did not actually drive this proposal. But if he were to accept it, I would be first in line to give him my money.

For more advice on how to run a successful Kickstarter campaign, check out Nelson De Witt’s A Kickstarter’s Guide free e-book and Tyler York’s "How to succeed on Kickstarter" blog post.

UPDATE (Oct 21, 2015):: Courtesy Kay Savetz, here is a video of my KansasFest session.

Last month, I expressed concern about my ability to maintain my level of output in the Apple II community. As Brian Picchi commented to me on Open Apple: "Wow, Ken — you have basically no work/life balance!"

I sought advice from the readers of Apple II Bits, asking them to rank eleven activities in terms of their value to the community. The rest of this lengthy post offers the results of that poll, which received 28 votes before the one-week deadline (and one vote after, due to a security hole on my part). I could offer a more granular breakdown of how many votes each item received at each rank, complete with pie charts and line graphs — but more practical is the final ranking of each item from most to least valuable. I’ll present them in that order, with a brief analysis of each.

Read the rest of this entry »

Being in Denver this summer, I’ve been eager to meet people and make friends. One way to do so is to seek out those with common interests, so I immediately took myself to the Denver Apple Pi user group’s summer barbecue. As I introduced myself, they welcomed me into their fold — though I was surprised to discover for a few people, I needed no introduction. Tammy, the resident Apple II collector, recognized me by name as "the KansasFest guy", and Elissa, the group’s secretary, knew of KansasFest, even though no one in the group had attended. In fact, since I would apparently be the group’s sole honorary representative, would I be willing to come back from KansasFest and present to DAPi on everything they missed?

Wow! Only a few weeks in Denver, and already I was being invited to be a guest speaker!

The presentation occurred last Tuesday, immediately after Jeff Gamet of Mac Observer presented the new features of Mac OS X Lion. I chose to expand my topic to cover not just KansasFest, but the history of the Apple II, what its modern community is doing with it, and what additional resources exist for viewers interested in learning more. My media, as is my wont, was mostly a a slideshow, preferring images instead of text with which to complement my speech. I’ve compiled the many links I referenced into a document of show notes (PDF).

The quality of the facilities and equipment were surprisingly good. A lavaliere mic boosted my volume but didn’t pick up the audience voices as well, which may be for the best. Although ClarisWorks and AppleWorks, for the Mac and Apple II respectively, were once simultaneously marketed by Apple, some audience members insisted that they were both Apple II programs. I found this a bit stunning, since their disagreement was with not only me, but fellow attendee Randy Brandt — who I think would know better!

The full video in which I present the Apple II to DAPi is available for viewing or download under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license.

https://vimeo.com/28073228

My thanks to Martin Haye, Peter Neubauer, Steve Weyhrich, and Andy Molloy for their help in preparing the slideshow. I hope I did my bit to evangelize the Apple II and spread awareness that it is alive and well. If nothing else, the presentation gave me an opportunity to connect with some of the kindest and coolest Mac users this side of the Continental Divide.

I’ve been at KansasFest only a few days, and already I’m reminded of how generous Apple II users are. Sean Fahey and James Littlejohn, at the expense of their time and money, have brought a literal busload of wares to freely distribute. Carrington Vanston and Dean Nichols, responding to a passing comment I made on the discussion list, brought some software I’ve long longed for, donating it to me with no favor expected in return. Martin Haye, knowing I was playing the role of the welcoming committee, made me a sandwich so I could have lunch without abandoning my post. Scott Miller lent me his USB-to-AC adapter, to replace the one I forgot to pack for my Kodak Zi8 digital video camera. Peter Neubauer and Andy Molloy went to Walgreens to get soda for the Juiced.GS pizza reception so that I could be here to receive the delivery from Waldo. And yet others have provided their traditional services, such as Kirk Mitchell slaving over a hot grill for the annual cookout, and Carl Knoblock coordinating and participating in the Peikop Endropov.

Have an Apple cookie, courtesy Chan Miller.

KansasFest is what reminds me that the machine is what attracts the community, but it’s not what makes us a community. It’s the support we give each other that keeps us together, and I’m heartened to know we are as close as ever.

Last Wednesday, I delivered the final presentation of my graduate student career. The course was in the theater education department of Emerson College, and the subject was non-profit grant-writing. Most of my classmates knew as much about theater as I do about computers, so I enjoyed the opportunity to be the most technically literate person in the crowd. Nonetheless, it also made me constantly mindful of my audience when presenting information.

My presentation was on the need to preserve the history of KansasFest. I started off with a brief overview of how Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded the company in their garage in 1977, with titles such as Oregon Trail and Visicalc making the machine a success in educational and business markets alike. I then traced the lineage that modern software owes to the Apple II by putting up a slide of the first-person shooter Call of Duty, which is derived from Wolfenstein 3D, which in turn was based on the Apple II game Castle Wolfenstein.

Most of the students recognized at least one of these titles, so by playing to their familiarity, I was able to keep them engaged — though one student seemed more enraptured than even I expected, with a face-splitting grin on her face at the screenshot of Castle Wolfenstein. I asked her later if she’d played that game. “No, but I grew up with King’s Quest, so to see an old game like that was great,” she enthusiastically replied. Ah! A retrogamer in the crowd. I followed up by emailing her a link to AGD Interactive.

Watch as Ken presents the hell out of the Apple II.

The rest of the presentation went smoothly, due I believe in part to my M.O. when planning such events: I use as little text as possible. More often, my presentations could be better described as slideshows. Besides the fact that I’m a visual learner, I also didn’t want to bore people by reading text off slides or by burying them with facts, statistics, and graphs that I may find interesting but which they do not. With a photo or screenshot, they can quickly absorb a visual complement to my speech without distracting them as they try to interpret the media.

The Q&A section was brief. One person asked if Apple Inc. still has an involvement in the Apple II and would be interested in participating in the preservation and continuation of KansasFest. Without trying to explain the Apple II downloads page of Apple.com, I told her that yes, Apple used to come to this event, but they hadn’t been seen since my first year attending in 1998. Another student asked a question tangential to my proposal: have we figured out a way to put the Apple II online? In this, I momentarily forgot my audience by replying, “Sure — we’ve had dial-up modems since they were 300 baud.” A few shrugs indicated that this reference was lost to them, so I moved on: "There is an Ethernet card for the Apple II, and just last week, I put the Apple II in my cubicle on the company network. Now I just need to install the Twitter client … It’s pretty slick," I added, to their laughter.

Overall, it was a fun evening, especially since I was presenting on a topic I’m both knowledgeable and passionate about. I don’t get many chances to present about the Apple II outside KansasFest, so to let my inner geek proudly shine — and, I hope, get an ‘A’ for it — was a great sendoff to my time at Emerson.