Apple II Bits

I’ve never been a particularly crafty person (except perhaps in the mwahaha sense). Knitting, crocheting, quilting, or even basic sewing are arts I’ve never taken the time to learn, let alone master. Even if I did grasp the basics, I doubt I would have the creativity to design anything terribly impressive — unless I had the right inspiration.

What inspires artist and iOS developer Glenda Adams is the Apple II. She’s taken the 8-bit computer and used it as a basis for a impressive variety of needlework. From Karateka to Ultima and more, she has painstakingly adapted these iconic images into her own miniature tapestries, currently on display in her home and on her Twitter.

Adams, a games developer since 1988, has a savvy and relevant social media feed, tweeting on the occasion of KansasFest and demonstrating a wicked sense of humor in line with Apple Inc.’s latest developments.

Through a very insider source, I have the scoop of #WWDC18, the unannounced session,"Xcode ][ – Modern Development Tools for the Apple II" pic.twitter.com/rgVfSvIZ2r

— Glenda Adams (@glenda_atom) May 30, 2018

Although her work is currently not for sale (nor is she accepting commissions), you can check out her #nerdstitch hashtag for more examples of her work, which expands beyond the Apple II to include Mac software and classic arcade games. Read more about her creative process at Cult of Mac.

Steve Wozniak has given many interviews about the old days of inventing the Apple II and working with Steve Jobs. But back when the old days weren’t yet old, Woz was interviewed by Michael Harrison, who hosted the Harrison’s Mic talk radio show on KMET in Los Angeles, 1975–1986. Harrison has since transitioned from radio to podcast, and he’s now re-aired this 1982 interview as an episode of his podcast, The Michael Harrison Interview. The episode is 33 minutes long, with the 1982 interview beginning at 4:49. It’s a fascinating opportunity to draw parallels between Woz’s observations and predictions, and the culture that eventually arose.

Woz wastes no time in sharing his insights into how the Apple II created a new generation of entrepreneurs:

It’s really amazing to find how many 16-year-olds in high school right now are making more money than even anybody’s parents in the schools are making… They’ve gone and written a program for a personal computer, like a game, a popular game, or a Rubik’s cube program, or a chess program, and they’ll market it through some of the companies that have sprung up to sell these programs, and good ones sell like hotcake… I don’t know a single one that’s as old as I. I’m 32. All the very popular names that are coming up, they’re almost all 16, 18.

This echoes Tim Enwall at Misty Robotics, who recently attributed the success of the Apple II to this third-party innovation:

Apple didn’t create or find VisiCalc. Based on the Apple II providing a relatively affordable, sufficiently powerful, and easily enough programmed platform, VisiCalc found it.

Woz also predicted the ubiquity of personal computers:

Harrison: Do you see that spreading to all of society in 10–20 years, where we’re all going to become electronics freaks?

Woz: Oh, no. No. Not at all… We all have TVs. We all have Hi-Fis. And we’re not TV freaks or Hi-Fi freaks or car freaks. But there’s going to be a lot more exposure to it. It’ll be commonplace.

This is the same thing Leigh Alexander meant during GamerGate when she wrote, "‘Gamers’ don’t have to be your audience. ‘Gamers’ are over." — not that an audience or culture was dead, but that it had become so pervasive as to be meaningless. We can all enjoy a good game, computer, or recipe without being a programmer, engineer, or chef; you don’t have to understand what’s happening under the hood to appreciate the results.

Speaking of electronic games, Woz expressed some concerns about this emerging medium:

It’s great when it’s fun and it’s a game, but you can get very intense into it, just like some people get into football very intensely and wind up hitting the TV set. When you take a game very seriously, it can be very addicting and result in a lot of negative behavior… We don’t have any evidence, but we know it. We know that it’s a problem.

I was surprised and disappointed to hear Woz take such a strong stance while admitting there’s no evidence to support it. We live in a society that often ignores or contradicts scientific evidence when it contradicts our "common sense". Of course, at the dawn of personal computing, there was little evidence one way or the other; nowadays, I hope any opinion Woz has now was arrived after reviewing the available resources.

Did you learn anything new in this interview? Was the Woz of 1982 much different from the Woz of today? Leave a comment with your reactions below!

(Hat tip to Talkers)

Earlier this year, I interviewed Joseph Bein of Out of Sight Games. As a visually impaired gamer, Joseph finds some games more accessible than others; but as a game developer, he encounters other challenges I’d never even considered. Are game development tools themselves accessible? How do we make them so?

Interviewing Joseph made it apparent that computers can cause problems for those seeking easy access to technology and media — but another podcast showcased how they can also solve a lot of problems. The Apple II was one of the pioneers in that department, courtesy the Echo II speech synthesis expansion card. One early beneficiary of the Echo II was Dr. Robert Carter, a podcaster who himself was recently interviewed on the podcast Background Mode, a publication of The Mac Observer.

From the show notes:

Dr. Robert Carter is a Ph.D. Psychologist at Texas A&M, a long-time Apple enthusiast, and the co-host of the Tech Doctor podcast. He’s very well versed in assistive technologies, having been blind since birth. Robert tells an amazing story about he’s coped with his disability through the years. It started with using a portable typewriter in grade school, discovering the Apple II at age 18 and a speech synthesizer plug-in card, and ultimately using Apple’s extraordinary VoiceOver technology on the Mac—and now iPhone.

The Apple II connections in this podcast extend to both sides of the mic: host John Martellaro was the editor and publisher of Peelings II, "The Magazine of Apple Software Evaluation", back in the early 1980s.

I’d love to examine the accessibility features of the Apple II — both historical and modern — in a future issue of Juiced.GS. After listening to this podcast, I’m adding Dr. Carter to my list of primary resources!

When I was on the KansasFest committee, I performed much of the outreach to parties outside what we commonly think of as the Apple II community. That included recruitment of keynote speakers, which was always one of the most important steps in organizing each annual convention. Once we had a keynote speaker to headline the event, we could open registration — which meant brainstorming and solicitation of speakers began very early.

While most candidates responded to our emails, not all of them were able to accept our invitations, for a variety of legitimate reasons: usually that they’d moved past the Apple II, or that we couldn’t sufficiently compensate them for their time. When they did respond in the affirmative, it wasn’t unusual for several rounds of questions and clarifications to occur before they’d agree to attend. None of this was unexpected or unfair; on the contrary, we recognized that an Apple II convention in the middle of the country at the height of vacation season was a hard sell.

All this made it all the more shocking when the keynote speaker we thought most likely to say no was the one whose enthusiastic acceptance arrived the fastest. Given that the sun has still not set on the legend of John Romero, I never expected such a luminary of the gaming industry to come to KansasFest. That preconceived notion served only to demonstrate how little I knew him. He was friendly, generous, timely, and delivered one of the best KansasFest keynote speeches I’ve ever witnessed.

More evidence of John’s benevolence is apparent in the latest episode of Jason Scott‘s podcast, Jason Scott Talks His Way Out of It (which I back on Patreon). Over the course of Jason’s 24-minute monologue, he recounts his own personal interactions with John as well as John’s many contributions to gaming and the Apple II community.

I’m tempted to call John’s appearance at KansasFest a homecoming. But John never left the Apple II community, celebrating it in 1998 by hosting his own reunion of renowned Apple II developers and publishers, as documented in this landmark ZDNet feature by Steven Kent. John recreated that event almost 20 years later when he and partner Brenda Romero, herself of Wizardry fame, hosted another Apple II reunion in 2015. Both events reunited John with his peers from the days well before his Doom and Quake fame, when he created such classic Softdisk and UpTime games for the Apple II as Dangerous Dave.

John Romero is one of my favorite people in the gaming industry, not only because of the software he’s created but because of how he conducts himself as a person and the respect, enthusiasm, and support he shows others — such as by showing no hesitation about being an Apple II keynote speaker in Missouri in the middle of July.

Five years ago this month, my tenure as an editor at Computerworld ended. But that wasn’t the end of the story: the many colleagues I’d worked with extended an invitation to continue freelancing for the publication — an invitation I gladly accepted.

While Computerworld was happy to publish Apple II articles when it came for free from a staff writer, it’s harder to justify paying a freelancer by the word to cover a 40-year-old computer. So my articles in the last five years explored other topics, including an annual tradition that I inadvertently began: a slideshow of tech luminaries we lost.

It was October 2011, and Steve Jobs had just passed away. I was on the features team — a group of editors who met biweekly to discuss big ideas for stories. Compared to the daily news grind, a feature could take at least a month to write and was almost always farmed out to a freelancer. Several websites were disgruntled that Steve Jobs’ passing had gotten more publicity than that of Dennis Ritchie, who created the C programming language and co-created Unix. I thought this a good opportunity to shine the spotlight on other overlooked industry veterans, so I suggested we publish a feature in time for Halloween that asked the question: "Who’s next?!" What other aging founders were we likely to soon lose?

The features team leader politely said, "Ken, that’s a really terrible idea… but there may be a good idea we can get out of it."

Thus was born the annual end-of-year slideshow that looked back on tech luminaries we lost in that calendar year. For the next several years, including during my transition from editor to freelancer, I watched other writers assemble the slideshow. In 2014, I was honored to assigned the story, finally being given the opportunity to execute the concept I’d proposed years ago.

That first year, I included Bob Bishop, whom I’d had the pleasure to meet and photograph at KansasFest. I skipped 2015 but wrote the slideshow in 2016 and again just last week for 2017. This latest lineup was the first time I got to choose which luminaries to honor, instead of having them assigned to me. It made it much easier to ensure a diverse cast when that virtue was baked in from the beginning. It also allowed me to include luminaries who might not otherwise have made the cut at Computerworld, such as Keith Robinson of Intellivision fame.

While there were no Apple II legends in this year’s roundup, Apple Computer Inc. was doubtless influenced by the heroes we lost in 2017. It was Robert W. Taylor who conceived of the ARPAnet, which became the Internet — but he also worked at Xerox PARC, from which Steve Jobs got the ideas for GUI, mouse input devices, and more. Charles Thacker was another PARC alumnus who helped develop the Xerox Alto, the early computer that embodied these concepts.

Writing this slideshow is a morose way to lead up to the holiday season — but I take heart in my ability to carry the legacies of these early innovators and ensure their stories are known. For everything they did for the Apple II and its users, I salute them.

On April 1, Apple Inc. turned forty. From humble beginnings sprang an empire, born of the genius and passion of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. While the company and products have long been celebrated, and Steve Jobs’ legacy has been lauded with books and movies, Steve Wozniak has not gotten his fair share of credit and attention.

Madame Tussauds, the famous wax museum, aims to fix that by adding Woz to the collection, alongside Jobs and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Over 350 measurements were taken by the Tussauds staff to create as accurate a representation of the Apple co-founder as possible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqkgMjvIxzk

The final figure was revealed last month at Silicon Valley Comic-Con:

The decision to create a wax Woz was made by fans. "Wozniak earned the highest number of votes when the public was asked to choose who among the Bay Area tech innovators should be the next figure to be immortalized in wax," reports Menchie Mendoza. "Other finalists in the voting include Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX, Edwin Catmull of Pixar, Marissa Mayer of Yahoo, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, Larry Page of Google, George Lucas of Lucasfilm, Marc Benioff of Salesforce, Jane Metcalfe of Wired Magazine and Frank Oppenheimer of Exploratorium."

Meeting the Woz’s waxy double is no substitute for the real thing — for that, you need to go to KansasFest and hope for the best. But it’s good to see at least one medium grant the Woz the same recognition Jobs has earned.