This month on Open Apple, Mike and Ken chat with Egan Ford, aka the datajerk, the Apple-1 and II programmer extraordinaire responsible for the Apple II Game Server Online! Egan expertly demonstrates which CPU is faster, the 6502 or 8088, running circles around everyone listening. Laurie Spiegel is an Apple II user you may not have heard of, but extraterrestrials have, thanks to her contributions to Voyager’s Golden Record; we have some of her music for you to listen to. Courtesy Facebook and scanners, we save Don Worth’s magazines from the trash and Softalk from extinction, but we can’t save derelict hardware from abandoned buildings. Will Steve Wozniak be as good a commencement speaker as the late Steve Jobs? Having heard Woz at KansasFest, we weigh in.
(Please also note a correction to this episode.)
Click past the jump for links mentioned in this episode.
- No Quarter podcast
- Small Wonder TV sitcom
- Operation Rainfall: How a fan campaign brought Nintendo to its knees
- Videogame History Museum
- Will Win/Should Win: The NAVGTR Awards Debate, a PAX East 2013 panel moderated by Ken
- Egan Ford’s the jerkwerks
- Aztec C compiler
- Codebreaker game for the Apple-1
- c2d (code to disk) utility
- Apple II Game Server Online! & Disk Server (based on the original Apple Game Server
- π Day: Apple II vs. HP-41C & Rematch
- Which is faster, 6502 or 8088?
- Apple II emulator for iPad
- Bill Budge releases source code for Pinball Construction Set, to be followed by GDC postmortem
- Laurie Spiegel’s Web site
- JPL’s Starship Voyager and its Golden Record
- Laurie Spiegel’s Music Machine
- "The Harmony of the World"
- An interview with Laurie Spiegel
- "The Expanding Universe"
- More music by Laurie Spiegel
- Music Mouse — an intelligent instrument
- David Greelish’s Kickstarter for Vintage Computer Festival Southeast 1.0
- VCF SE 1.0 to feature a "pop-up museum"
- Robert Tinney to keynote VCF SE 1.0
- VCF East 9.0 postponed
- "Brisfest" an Australian Apple II convention
- KansasFest XXV, coming July 23–28, 2013
- Terry Stewart’s Apple IIe video tour
- Abandoned Apples photo gallery by Benj Edwards
- Apple II Enthusiasts group on Facebook and Google+
- Apple II History spotlight on Don Worth
- Softalk on Facebook and Apple II Scans
- Apple Assembly Line
- Begin Computing magazine
- Ewen Wannop releases Phoenix
- Shareware Solutions II archive & index
- Brutal Deluxe’s Apple cassette archive
- Randy Kindig’s FloppyDays podcast
- The Information Diet, by Clay A Johnson
- Steve Wozniak to be UC Berkeley 2013 commencement speaker
- "Stay hungry, stay foolish" — Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement speech
Apple Pickings (1:21:53 – 1:40:38)
- Apple II Processor Cards: The Book
- Steve Weyhrich‘s Sophistication & Simplicity: The Life & Times of the Apple II Computer, from Variant Press
- Apple IIe w/original packaging — rare!
- Apple II (not plus) #6684
- Apple IIGS ROM 03, excellent condition
- Apple IIe, brand new, in original box, never unpacked
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Tags: 8088, abandonware, ActiveGS, Apple Assembly Line, Apple II Disk Server, Apple II Game Server, Apple II History, Begin Computing, Benj Edwards, Bill Budge, Brutal Deluxe, cassette, Codebreaker, commencement, Dan Muse, datajerk, Don Worth, Egan Ford, Expanding Universe, FloppyDays, GDC, Golden Record, Harmony of the World, HP-41C, Information Diet, jerkwerks, KansasFest, Laurie Spiegel, Music Mouse, NAVGTR, Operation Rainfall, PAX, PAX East 2013, PCWorld, Phoenix, Pinball Construction Set, Randy Kindig, Robert Tinney, Shareware Solutions II, Small Wonder, Softalk, SSII, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TechHive, Terry Stewart, VCF, VCF SE, Videogame History Museum, Vintage Computer Festival, Voyager, Wikipedia
7 Comments to 'Open Apple #25 (Mar 2013): Egan Ford, 8088, Voyager, and abandonware'
Mar 12, 2013 10:22 PM
Also available at The Book Depository:
http://www.bookdepository.com/Sophistication-Simplicity-Steven-Weyhrich/9780986832277
(Now owned by Amazon), but if you are not in the US, this is a good way of getting books with affordable postage.
Cheers,
Michael
Mar 12, 2013 11:08 PM
Regarding Apple II (serial 6684) on Ebay.
Although plain Apple IIs were still being produced in 1981, they would have had much later serial numbers. So it is not a late produced Apple II. I think your first impression is right — the original owner replaced the motherboard (now populated w/ applesoft roms) and keyboard at some later date. IMHO, a II+ in a II case. Alas.
Mar 13, 2013 5:38 PM
Congratulations and thank you for this latest podcast.
About my cassettes preservation project, I wanted to tell that I only own 260 cassettes out of the 600 listed in the website.
I wish I had the 600 ;-)
Antoine
Mar 14, 2013 11:16 PM
Latest codebreaker code and source here: http://www.applefritter.com/content/codebreaker-re-released-fixes-mess-and-real-apple-1s-noncontiguous-memory
Latest c2t (code to tape) here: http://asciiexpress.net/files
Mar 15, 2013 2:30 AM
Just a couple of further comments on the A2S1-6684 auction. Andrew above is right. The A2S1-6684 sticker *itself* is very old, but the motherboard that would have been in it originally would almost certainly have had a 1978 date. And in fact, looking at this, there is nothing original on this Apple II except the pan (with the label), possibly some of the RAM chips, and maybe the rest of the case. To be fair, the auction description does lay some of this out: “Looks like the motherboard has been updated and appears not to be original.” It also says that the keyboard was replaced in 1990. Furthermore (not noted in the description), the power supply is essentially a IIGS power supply, maybe also used in the late //es, so it too was replaced. There’s really very, very little that connects this to its standard II roots.
That said, it works, and the disk drive does appear to be original. It has a couple of unusual TG paddles, a little bit of unusual old software, and an accelerator. So, it’s not a worthless system, but it isn’t the kind of thing that goes for $1800. All the mismatching probably hurts the value since serious collectors won’t fight for it. I’d guess in an open auction it wouldn’t get beyond $250 unless somebody’s really not paying attention.
Also, an additional comment about starting up a standard Apple II, since that came up. Without an Autostart ROM (standard in the II+, or provided by a language card or ROM card), the Apple II will either just hang on startup (waiting for RESET) or put garbage on the screen and dump you at a monitor prompt. (The “hanging start” happens under a pretty specific circumstance, it has to be a rev 0 board with no Disk II controller card in it.) The Autostart ROM will display “APPLE ][” and hit RESET for you on power-up, then probe the expansion slots looking for a disk controller to boot from (and will add some editing features as well — ESC-IJKM are provided by the Autostart ROM).
Mar 15, 2013 7:56 AM
“Get ’em while they’re alive!” – Ken
Sage advice which also got a big laugh here.
Apr 16, 2013 1:09 PM
+1 with Egan on your shows notes, they are the best out there!