Apple II Bits

The annual Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, was held last week in Los Angeles. This convention invites members of the electronic entertainment industry to bear witness to the innovations that will grace home computers and consoles in the coming year.

The Kinect, a peripheral released for the Microsoft Xbox 360 last November, is proving a versatile platform for playing games without any contact or manipulation of a physical controller — “Your body is the controller”, says the advertising. Here’s a recent tech demo from E3:

Although the particular application and technology of Kinect may be new, the concept is not. Thirty years before Microsoft set out to redefine gaming, Tom DeWitt had demonstrated a similar tool, Pantomation:

According to astrosmash, "The mini-computer they talk about in this video is the PDP-8/L, not an Apple II, although the system was later ported to Apple II in the early 80s."

Although Pantomation may not have made it out of the lab and into consumer applications, it’s still a fascinating (and unsurprising!) example of the potential of the Apple II to redefine history.

(Hat tip to timothy)

There have been many attempts over the years to bring the USB interface to the Apple II. Most, such as the iDisk and even Vince Briel’s upcoming A2MP3 card, focus on the storage possibilities of the interface. But what about the variety of other peripherals modern computers have access to via USB? Even something as basic as a keyboard has eluded Apple II users.

Ironically, Andrew Filer’s approach goes in the completely opposite direction, turning the Apple II into a USB peripheral. His hack turns the Apple II Plus into a keyboard for a MacBook Pro. This hack is made possible by Keyduino, an application of the open-source electronics prototyping platform Arduino.

An Apple II Plus as a USB keyboard? Sacrilege!

Filer says it was “surprisingly easy”, but his brief blog post on the subject addresses few of the technical concerns he must’ve addressed to accomplish this feat. For example, KansasFest alumnus Rob, who first pointed me to this hack, asks, "How does he handle shift keys? Does he properly implement the game port shift key modifier?"

Regardless, it’s neat to see the variety of modern uses that are still to be found in classic hardware — even (or especially) if it’s not what we expected.

(Hat tip to Brian Benchoff)

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?

One of the first blog posts to Apple II Bits was old news even when it was published: a hardware hacker had gutted a Disk II drive and replaced its innards with a Mac mini. It was a creative marriage of new and old tech, reminiscent of the many unnatural monstrosities of Ben Heck.

More recently, John Bumstead has decided to make his own go at such a conversion. Due to not wanting to permanently damage his hardware, he aborted the process halfway through, but his video tour of the Disk II still provides some insight into how one would go about inserting a Mac mini inside this Apple II peripheral’s case.

What other combinations of new tech with a retro look — or vice versa! — can you imagine?

Depending on your definition, computers have been around much longer than the Apple II. For example, Charles Babbage’s analytical engine was documented in 1837, demonstrating a mechanical means of computing and converting data.

But such devices weren’t always so pragmatic; starting in the late 19th century and peaking in 1924, another sort of computer was the player piano. By “reading” a spool of paper, the machine could interpret the data encoded onto those sheets and translate it into aural tones.

Although player pianos have waned in popularity, there was a brief period in which their manufacture was aided by the Apple II, itself a musical machine. This video shows an Apple II being used to create spools of music for player pianos:

(Hat tip to IonFarmer)

Last month, we saw two reviews of the Apple IIGS, but it’s this model’s less powerful siblings that tend to garner more media attention. Two different Apple IIc computers selling on eBay for four digits in the last three years proved sufficient for Matt’s Macintosh, who provided one of the previous IIGS reviews, to turn its attention back to the pre-Mac era with this review of the Apple IIc:

The Apple IIc was a powerful and revolutionary computer. As Steve Weyhrich of the Apple II History site told me for another story, “The Apple IIc was to the Apple II platform what the PowerBook was to the Power Mac: a more portable version of a desktop computer — not as elegant as the PowerBook, but pretty good for 1984.” Yet its lack of expansion slots that so defined the rest of the Apple II line has often left it overlooked by peripheral developers. Could the recently announced CompactFlash interface give the model some much-needed love?

(Hat tip to Mike Maginnis)