Being a primary school kid and being poor has enabled me to acquire vast amounts software for the Apple II. It was much more cost effective to buy a few boxes of disks than the actual software. And because of that I "experienced" everything the II series had to offer! It didn't matter that we'd play with it or actually use it or not. The goal was to be the first to acquire it and pass it on. Once in a while we'd come across something useful or a game we'd play over and over. But you know how it goes.
There were cool games, and nice Atarisoft ports. We really did believe Atari had some sort of MAGIC or knew about some hidden graphics chip in //e that no one else was aware of. This sparked many a debate of which chip it was or what part of the circuit. By the time the Atarisoft games were out, we had upgraded to a //e, so the debate always surrounded the MMU or IOU or CPU, with the roms always being a vague mystery. We knew they held BASIC and the MONITOR and other things like keyboard characters. We always thought they had some other funky secret function. The ram was no mystery, for that's where the programs were loaded into!
Once thing we always did agree on, was that the bigger the chip the smarter it was! The more brainlike it was. So you can imagine my surprise when we got a hold of an Amiga 1000, that 68000 cpu was a monster! First time I'd ever seen so many big chips in one computer!
Or how about those games from Gebelli or Sirius Software, and Br0derbund - all great stuff and the ignorance of youth. Made for wondrous times indeed.
You can understand that because our "user groups" and meetings were "arranged" by our parents and we had to absolutely make the most of a 4 hour "copy session". We'd even structure the "get togethers" to ensure everything flowed smoothly. There was time for copying and time for playing games.
One thing I wished we had back then, in 1977-1981, was the file handling and cataloging capability like we have today with the simple Windows Explorer, and a USB drive perhaps. I tried a database using PFS: but it was tedious and a nightmare doing it with one computer. Oftentimes we'd just resort to index cards and chronologically stacking disks on top of each other. It got better with AppleWorks and a 2nd computer equipped with a Sider though; and we developed a work style not unlike a dual monitor configuration of today.
Despite having equal access to Atari 400/800 and C-64 (and to lesser extents Ti-99/4A - CoCo-1 - A500/1000's - Adam, Beeb, Zx-81, Vic-20) we only went balls out on the II series. Though libraries of Atari and Commodore stuff were amassed as well.
To a 10-year old, all the above is sophisticated stuff. Black magic. Heady, futuristic, and it made you feel like a god! Especially being unofficial curator of the neighborhood waREz depot. And I didn't even touch on the BBS'ing aspects and how that was an integral part of the early computing experience. To us, Apple II computing was WAreZ & Games. Nothing else mattered until we discovered modems. Moonlighting as a SYSOP made you feel like a special agent. Conducting nefarious operations that no-one else (especially parents) understood was really the Cat's ass!
There were times when we'd get the Radio Flyer out, and tie it up to our bikes. Making the journey a mile away to the "bigger-kids" houses, the ones with elite 0-day connections, and parents in professional positions, you know. And we'd have the wagon filled till stuff fell out! Apple II+ and a Trinitron monitor and 2 Disk II drives + a small box of hookup wires and cords and "stuff" like modem connectors, and TG joysticks and paddles that perpetually got tangled, and drive extension cables. You know, things! -- like what ever else you pack in your laptop case.
Blasting through the neighborhood, always the red wagon bouncing noisily and somehow sometimes on 2-wheels through the sidewalk turnpike! -- We'd get so excited when we got wind that somebody had gotten a box of disks with "new stuff" on it.
We had stuff to offer too! Like a Wildcard and some modified firmware and cracking roms. Disk II's with a nice big potentiometer for speed adjusting. Or one that had a track readout on 2 7-segment displays. That was our "currency". Trading time on our hardware for exchange and access to stuff not yet posted on the AE and Catfur lines. And we guarded the stuff to high heaven. I still have my EF cracking rom, it's a 28 pin DIP EPROM with pin 28 busted off - from all the insertions and removals. I later soldered a strand of wire to the minuscule stub and mounted it into a socket, thereby regaining use. Since I was good with a soldering iron I put some zif sockets into other folk's computers and burned more of these crack roms.
It was especially cool when, that we'd make the trip in morning and by late afternoon it started raining and was overcast. Parents, sometimes being lazy, didn't want to take the time to haul all this shit back in the family sedan, oftentimes made arrangements by phone for an impromptu sleepover.
I truly believe it was only the 8-bit systems that were really pushed to the limit. These systems were pushed and used and abused till you couldn't get anything more out of them. Absolutely nothing, there was only so much capacity and performance increase you could wring from these things. Thrilling! Then and only then did we move on to another platform. This type of "full-usage" product cycle was kick ass. Ever since the hybrid 8/16 IIgs, every computing platform and hardware iteration has had its life-cycle artificially ended prior to discovering its maximum capabilities. This was in full swing as 286-386-486 era came to pass. And has been forcefully maintained by modern marketing departments. Now the Atari 2600 is different. It actually died and was resurrected by the community right here. But that is a topic for another thread.
Take the DISK ][ drive as an example. Things we dicked around with were half-tracking, quarter-tracking, and spiral tracking. Or the addition of a custom DOS and perhaps tacking on track $23 and in some rare cases $24. I personally liked the spiral recording. You could cut the single concentric track into 4 segments and space them .25th's a track farther apart. And you could do this and read data continuously in one stream. Stepping the tracks in 1/4th's meant faster access time. You could increase density a little bit and with some experimenting we managed 162K bytes per side. Just one of the things we fucked around with. Pure analog recording with a microphone and speaker/amplifier was another, though the amount of time was really limited and made for amusing sound effects. We replaced the pulse shaping circuitry with a "real op-amp" and a microphone and the stepper motor with a "real motor" and gearbox. And we used it like a tape-deck. You had to start the spinning motor and the head motor at the exact right time, because we didn't have any way to make the head follow the "audio track". Just think of this as a CD player that uses a magnetic "laser" to read and write the audio signal.
As the scene died down. I began packing everything all together, in 25+ Rubbermaid tubs and haven't opened them since, other than to inspect and re-arrange the contents for space efficiency and layout.
Fast-forward to today, the present. My software acquisition activities consist of keeping track of payment receipts and license key codes. It's either that route or (increasingly) freeware alternatives. I do find carefully selected freeware and stuff from Source-Forge to be far superior to their commercial counterparts.
If we were kids again and tried to do waREZ today like we did back then, I would safely say we'd need a whole warehouse-sized building! Not to hold the wareZ, but the staff needed to gleen it all from the internet!! I am envisioning huge racks of hard disk servers and petabytes of stuff, every version of every program! Back in the day, when there was not a lot of software, it was indeed, ALMOST, I repeat ALMOST possible to have every piece of software ever written for a platform.
Anyways, here are two nice articles for Apple II enthusiasts - Not about WaREz but about some of the early design philosophy of the II.
http://www.filfre.ne...9/the-apple-ii/
http://failuremag.co...iak_interview/#
--and other tidbits--
http://www.radioflye...-red-wagon.html
http://www.dataswamp...ips-closeup.jpg
http://www.stockly.c...Cut%20Edges.jpg
Edited by Keatah, Fri Sep 23, 2011 9:51 PM.
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sack-c0s, on Fri Sep 23, 2011 3:32 AM, said:
