Apple II Bits

Apple II user Rino Mardo recently shared on Facebook a scene from one of my all-time favorite movies, The Terminator. This 1984 classic with Arnold Schwarzenegger stars a T-800 Model 101 cybernetic organism sent from the future to assassinate Sarah Connor. Despite a nuclear holocaust and the rise of sentient artificial intelligence, Skynet, the computer that created the T-800, still relied on proven, pre-apocalyptic technology to design its chrono-displaced robot: its CPU is a 6502, running assembly programming published in Nibble Magazine.

This Easter Egg isn’t news: it was already well-known by the Apple II community even before Nibble founding editor David Szetela mentioned it during his KansasFest 2007 keynote speech. I then wrote about it a few months later in a blog post for Computerworld, a job I started just a few months before Szetela’s speech.

The Terminator is one of only many movies that the Apple II has graced with an appearance. Starring the Computer, James Carter’s impressive database of computers in movies, lists every Apple II model and the movies and television shows in which is featured. It includes such notable titles as TRON (which turned 34 this month), Hackers (reviewed in Juiced.GS in June 2006), Explorers, Kindergarten Cop, and Lost.

Although that filmography extends to films as recent as Iron Man, the Apple II’s modern cinematic career is mostly limited to historical coverage — such as Welcome to Macintosh, the 2008 documentary reviewed in Juiced.GS and now available to view in full for free online.

What are some of your favorite Apple II cameos on the silver screen?

At KansasFest 2010, Stavros was kind enough to make several issues of Nibble magazine available to any attendees who would give them a good home. Despite Nibble‘s founding editor having been the KansasFest 2007 keynote speaker, I’d never actually read the magazine myself. I’d been an Apple II user since the early Eighties, but did not join the community in earnest until 1992. With Nibble having published 1981–1995, my opportunities to enjoy the platform’s heyday of offline support were few.

I picked up the twenty-year-old Vol. 11, No. 6 (June 1990) and found the 96-page, full-color issue an absolute delight to read. It was like being transported back in time to when enjoying the Apple II put you in the majority, not the minority. In 1990 in particular, the possibilities seemed limitless, despite the writing being on the wall, as evidenced by Mike Harvey’s editorial in which he pounds the pulpit for Apple Computer Inc. to pay more attention to the platform that made them famous. It was a melancholy experience to read that article, knowing how that story would end.

This issue included a 168-line Applesoft BASIC program called Whodunit, a murder-mystery game by Constance Fairbanks. Program listings for users to input were something I remembered well from academic textbooks and even Mad Magazine. I wonder how many budding programmers learned their craft by familiaring themselves with these commands en route to seeing the final product — or did they just enter the lines by rote, with no comprehension of their function, as my class was taught to do in school? Fortunately, Nibble appears to have encouraged the former, as the listing is prefaced by a section subtitled “How the program works”, which breaks down the program’s routines.

Due to its breadth, depth, and budget, a single issue of Nibble probably contains more content than I could ever hope to fit into a full year of Juiced.GS. Although humbled, I am also inspired by the giants upon whose shoulders today’s Apple II print publication stands. I will likely revisit this issue and this publication for more ideas of articles and blog posts.

Oh, and the issue’s original owner? According to its mailing label, that would be one Jim Maricondo. The all-star connections never end at KansasFest.