Apple II Bits

Years after the last Apple II rolled off the production line, there was still a lot of commercial and shareware software being developed for the IIGS. In the heyday of the GEnie online service, I somehow fell into a group beta testers of new programs for companies such as InTrec and Seven Hills.

One developer I especially enjoyed working for was Eric "Sheppy" Shepherd. His website of eponymous SheppyWare lists many programs I got to try before they were ready for prime time, such as gsAIM, Lemonade Stand, Shifty List, and WebWorks GS.

But the beta I most enjoyed was that for Wolfenstein 3D. The port had been a long time in development, with many parties involved: id Software, Logicware, Burger Becky, and Ninjaforce, to name a few. It was Sheppy who developed and project-managed the final release of this first-person shooter that had been so popular on my friends’ MS-DOS machines.

But I’ve never owned a desktop computer that wasn’t an Apple II, so Wolf3D had been something I’d only been able to envy without playing. Gaming was my Apple II niche — I got my start with Juiced.GS writing a review of Silvern Castle — so I was eager to finally dive into the heralded game.

Perhaps too eager. The Apple IIGS emulator of choice for Mac OS in the mid- to late 1990s was Bernie ][ the Rescue, so I booted up Bernie on my Wall Street and promptly launched Wolf3D.

CRASH! The game failed almost immediately. I was disappointed to not get my hands on the game, but also excited to contribute to the beta-testing process. I was certain I had acted so swiftly that no one else could’ve yet encountered this blocker of a bug. Without checking to see if that was true, I reported back to the testing group: "Hey, it crashes Bernie!"

In my haste to submit my first bug, I had completely ignored the release notes that had accompanied this version of Wolf3D, indicating that it was incompatible with Bernie ][ the Rescue. 🤦🏼‍♂️

Just a few months later, in the summer of 1998, I attended my first KansasFest. It was my first time meeting Sheppy and my fellow beta-testers, such as Ryan Suenaga and Dave Miller. We were celebrating the successful release of Wolf3D for the IIGS earlier that year, with Sheppy hosting a post-mortem of the game’s development, giving all KansasFest attendees a peek behind the scenes.

It was there, at my first KansasFest, in front of all my friends and heroes, that I was stunned to receive a certificate of acknowledgement for my significant contribution to the development of Wolfenstein 3D.

Sheppy wasn’t singling out the new guy, though — every beta tester got their turn. As reported a month later by Ryan Suenaga in in The Lamp!:

Sheppy also presented the _Wolfenstein 3D Beta Tester Awards_, for those of us who had gone through the intense last few weeks of beta testing for the most eagerly anticipated Apple IIgs game in history. The history behind these awards is too long to go into here–use your imagination:

• Dan Krass: The Web Banner Plaque of Honor
• David Miller: The ProTERM Mac Can Do It Citation
• Ken Gagne: The "Hey, It Crashes Bernie" Certificate
• Kirk Mitchell: The "Boy, Is This Fast on My G3" Award
• Ryan Suenaga: The Floppy Disk Loaner Citation of Valor
• Tony Diaz: The Last-Minute Crisis Award of Merit
• Tony Ward: The Custom Scenario Proponent Citation

Perhaps I should’ve been mortified to have had my youthful exuberance enshrined in such a public and memorable manner. But instead, I was and am grateful to Sheppy for the wonderful opportunity to test Wolfenstein 3D and for being including in his community — not only of beta testers, but of friends he could count on to take a joke. I found everything I hoped for at KansasFest 1998; it’s thanks to memories like these that I’ve been a part of KansasFest and the Apple II community ever since.

From 2007 through 2012, I covered KansasFest for Computerworld, a magazine and website of which I was an editor. When I left that position in early 2013, I did so on good terms, leaving open the possibility of freelance work. I solicited suggestions from other Apple II users for how I might pitch coverage of this year’s KansasFest in a way that Computerworld hadn’t done before. Eric Shepherd proposed a series of attendee profiles, in the style of my previous coverage of BostonFIG. My editor loved the idea but asked that, instead of photos and writeups, I produce short video interviews.

I’d long wanted to shoot video at KansasFest, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so. Andy Molloy helped me vet a list of attendees with unique, discrete roles who would exemplify the Apple II community. Throughout the week of KansasFest, I cornered a dozen people: programmers, historians, artists, gamers, and more.

Computerworld published eight of the videos in the slideshow, "Who goes to an Apple II convention in 2013?", which went live last Friday. This morning, KansasFest’s official YouTube channel published an additional three. That makes eleven — the unpublished 12th video was one I shot of myself, as a proof of concept. No one needs to see that.

My thanks to all who contributed to this project! I hope the below videos serve as an example of the wonderful friends you can make at KansasFest. Click the thumbnails for an introduction!

The Artist

The Founder

The Speaker

The Historian

The Podcaster

The Gamer

The Emulator

The Rebel

The Inventor

The Old-Timer

The Profiler

The Programmer

KansasFest 2011 is over — and thus begins my annual coverage of the event for Computerworld.com. Each year, I find a way to bring the Apple II to this enterprise IT site, giving both our retrocomputer a wider audience and Computerworld some diverse and fun content.

But the Apple II has been represented in many other articles during my four-plus years at Computerworld. Members of our community are IT professionals with staggering amounts of institutional knowledge, and as helpful as they are in-person at KansasFest, they have always been willing to be a resource during my research into related topics. I thought it’d be fun to index who has appeared as a source, or who has provided content, to Computerworld.com:

• Tony Diaz
• The cure for a hungry, sleepy laptop— Tony provided some technical advice for an issue I was having with my laptop. I don’t remember what his exact contribution was, as I didn’t tell him during that IM conversation that I was going to use his words in this blog post.
• Anatomy of an Apple IIc — I’d sent Tony a link to the PCWorld story "Anatomy of an Icon: Inside the Apple IIc", with which he then took technical issue. With his permission, I adapted his email response into this blog post.
• Sold on eBay: New-in-box Apple II, never opened — Tony offered a quotation as to why the Apple II is still enjoyed by hobbyists today.
• Face-off: 1979 Apple Graphics Tablet vs. 2010 Apple iPad – Computerworld — This was my KansasFest 2010 article, but Tony provided many of its photos, as did Loren Damewood and Mark Frischknecht.
• Steve Weyhrich
• Sold on eBay: New-in-box Apple II, never opened — Dr. Steve provided a historical look at what made the Apple IIc a successful model.
• Tony Ward
• CompuServe, Prodigy et al.: What Web 2.0 can learn from Online 1.0 — Tony Ward, former file library manager on Genie’s A2 RoundTable, is a modern-day Delphi community manager. His perspective on how Delphi has survived into the present day was surprising and useful.
• Eric Shepherd
• CompuServe, Prodigy et al.: What Web 2.0 can learn from Online 1.0 — As a former GEnie sysop, Sheppy provided valuable insight into why GEnie was popular and what ultimately killed it.
• Mike Willegal
• Apple-1 goes for $213K in Christie’s auction — Mike’s Apple-1 index was cited for information about other known existing Apple-1 machines.
• Eric Rucker
• Apple-1 goes for $213K in Christie’s auction — I cornered Eric in IRC, where he pointed out some of the qualities of the Apple-1 that was being auctioned. The final story quoted him.
• Peter Watson
• Linux Air: Hitting the road with the Eee PC — By the time Peter got his hands on this netbook, Computerworld had already published its own review and couldn’t commission Peter to write another one. But he did anyway, which we happily published as this complimentary blog.
• Mike Maginnis
• PalmPilot, BlackBerry, iPhone: A history of conquerers — Here’s a blog post that Mike wrote and which Computerworld published.
• Ryan Suenaga
• Ryan never directly appeared in a Computerworld article, but when I was presented with a list of companies to profile, knowing Ryan motivated me to choose his employer, Kaiser Permanente.

I look forward to other opportunities to put Apple II users’ names in lights!

With the latest issue of Juiced.GS now in the mail, it’s only a matter of time before someone asks if a PDF version is available. The staff and I continue to explore ways to make our magazine’s content available online — but for the latest news and reviews, it’s hard to justify establishing a presence in a medium where we’d compete with the excellent A2Central.com.

Just as Juiced.GS is primarily a feature-driven publication with a smattering of news, A2Central.com, run by Sean Fahey, focuses on daily news updates with the occasional longer piece. In the latter category, its most recent offering is a series by site founder Eric Shepherd:

Over the coming weeks (or maybe months or even years), I’ll be posting a series of articles introducing you to the glorious, glamorous world of assembly language programming for the 6502 series of microprocessors. While, sure, there are plenty of other languages out there, and in this day and age, assembly is something of a line of last resort among “modern” computer programmers, on the Apple II, assembly remains the optimal way to build software for the best possible performance.

Sheppy, who is the former publisher of Juiced.GS and still a regular columnist for that print publication, enjoys several advantages by writing the above series for A2Central.com. He can write at his own pace instead of a quarterly one, and at any length he likes instead of trying to fill a page. He can also make his content as accessible or esoteric as he wants, whereas Juiced.GS, which publishes several programming-related tutorials, is nonetheless more often aimed at the consumer.

The only downside to Sheppy’s series is that it’s published in a chronological blog format powered by WordPress. As such, as more news is reported, his posts will scroll off the homepage, with no tags or links from new installments to prior ones. One can choose to filter content by programming, but then you’ll also be presented with news about new Apple II utilities.

I expressed this concern to site administrator Tony Diaz, and he quickly implemented my suggested solution: filtering by author. It’s now easy to access <a href=”http://a2central.com/author/EricShepherd/” title=”A2Central.com – Your total source for Apple II computing. ” Eric Shepherd”>an archive of all content written by Sheppy in reverse chronological order. Just scroll back to the series’ start on June 18th, 2010, and you can find all his entries in this tutorial. Thanks, Tony!

The impact of A2Central.com’s newest feature is measurable, as it’s already inspired former HackFest winner Peter Neubauer to offer his own complementary article. Just as he wrote that winning entry in Macrosoft, Peter’s tutorial shows how to write HELLO WORLD using the Mindcraft Assembler.

You can meet Peter, Tony, and Sean at this month’s KansasFest, or read about the event at A2Central.com, courtesy the live reporting of Sean, Andy Molloy, and Mike Maginnis.