Apple II Bits

I attended my first KansasFest in 1998. It was the year that GSoft BASIC debuted from The Byte Works, and also the year that Eric Shepherd founded the HackFest contest. I married the two and attempted to write a Boggle game in GSoft BASIC while at KansasFest. It didn’t go well, but I was encouraged by The Byte Works president and fellow attendee Mike Westerfield, who made changes to GSoft BASIC in response to my experience and feedback. It meant a lot to me, KansasFest 1998’s youngest attendee, so receive that kind of support from a community luminary.

This past July, Mike posted to Facebook:

I know people have had trouble recently getting some of the old Byte Works products. I’m looking at a number of options, and wanted to gauge interest.

All of our products that were produced at the Byte Works, and thus the ones we have clear copyright to, are on a CD called Opus ][. This includes ORCA/C, ORCA/Pascal, ORCA/M, and all of the support programs and so forth, but not ORCA/Modula 2. There are two disks, one with the executables and another with the source. These have been selling for $99 each or $195 for the set.

I’m considering offering these as downloads. They would be one-off sales, which would take some of my time for each one, so I would need to charge for them. I was thinking $25 each or $40 for the pair. You would have to move the individual files to your Apple IIGS or Apple II yourself.

This would mean the only way to get an individual language would be to buy the entire CD, but then, the CD would cost no more than the individual languages do now, anyway.

So, is this interesting to anyone, or does it really matter anymore?

I emailed Mike that same day, offering the Juiced.GS online store as a vehicle for distributing Opus ][. It wouldn’t be the magazine’s first collaboration with The Byte Works: our December 1998 issue (Volume 3, Issue 4) included a 3.5" floppy disk containing a free trial version of GSoft BASIC, allowing readers to follow along with Eric Shepherd’s six-part GSoft tutorial that debuted in that issue.

To my delight, Mike was enthusiastic about revisiting that collaboration. The only hesitation was on my end: how do we make this product a natural fit for the Juiced.GS store? The magazine had no history of selling software or other people’s products. How could we make Opus ][ a good fit?

Our Concentrate line had the answer. These PDFs collect thematically related content from past issues of Juiced.GS into a single file. With transcription help from Ewen Wannop and Paul Zaleski, I’d begun producing out a PDF of Sheppy’s six-part series back in 2011 — but the effort of laying out 49 pages of code was daunting… especially when The Byte Works’ own Learn to Program in GSoft BASIC was available for free. The opportunity to work with Mike was the incentive I needed to revisit and finally finish that project, which is now available for free with the purchase of Opus ][: The Software or Opus ][: The Source.

Since releasing these products on September 1, sales have been strong, with dozens of customers buying the compilations in download, CD, and USB formats. The demand for these products is evidence of a vibrant and supportive Apple II community, even so many years after Opus’ original release 15 years ago.

It’s an honor to work with so esteemed and storied a developer as The Byte Works and to release a product desired by so many. Juiced.GS and I look forward to many more opportunities to serve the community!