Apple II Bits

KansasFest is by its nature attended by eclectic and fascinating people, without exception. But one of the most memorable people I’ve met in my years at the annual Apple II convention has been Jeri Ellsworth.

Jeri made her Apple II debut at KansasFest 2003, sufficiently impressing the then-editor of Juiced.GS enough with her homebrew hardware to earn her a cover story a few months later. She attended KFest again in 2004, when she and I were assigned to be roommates, inspiring her to decorate our door with the infamous Furbfish. (It was a pittance compared to the strangeness she brought into my home a week earlier, when we attended VCF East 2.0 with Ryan Suenaga, Andy Molloy, and Kelvin Sherlock.) At the last minute, she made her final KansasFest appearance in 2006, provoking a karaoke battle.

Jeri’s interests have always been diverse, from computer shops to roller derby and race cars. She had her own Web series, The Fat Man and Circuit Girl, for more than a year; nowadays, her passion is pinball. Running in so many circles has earned her plenty of attention; she is, aside from Bill Martens, the only currently active Apple II user I know to have her own Wikipedia page.

Most recently, Jeri appeared on an hour-long episode of Triangulation, a subsidiary of Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech (TWiT) podcast. The show was recorded on Jan 20, published on Feb 2, and mentioned on the KansasFest list by Dean Nichols on Apr 1. Notable segments include how her youth shaped her aspirations and passions, and the C64 DTV computer-in-a-joystick.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t get in a word about her Apple II history — in fact, there’s nary a single reference to the computer in the entire episode. I’m hoping this is not indicative of her future involvement in the community. I have done my best to lure her back to KanasFest, including by promising a private tour of the Electric Theatre retro arcade, scheduled to open in nearby Independence, Missouri, later this year.

KansasFest is filled with colorful people, and I hope Jeri will again bring her distinctive hue to the event.

With a portfolio that includes games like Baldur’s Gate, Earthworm Jim, and Fallout, software publisher Interplay may be better known to PC and console gamers than to retrogamers. But Interplay, founded in 1983, was a friend to the Apple II for nearly a decade. Over the years, they developed and/or published such memorable titles as The Bard’s Tale, Tass Times in Tone Town, Neuromancer, Battlechess, Dragon Wars GS, and Out Of This World. And let’s not forget the first-person role-playing game, Dungeon Master, which TSR’s Dragon Magazine granted the “Beastie Award” for best Apple IIGS game of 1989.

Many of these titles are thanks in no small part to Interplay founder Brian Fargo hiring as one of his first three employees prolific Apple II programmer Rebecca Heineman, who was recently interviewed on the Matt Chat. This video podcast series is hosted by gamer and historian Matt Barton, author of Dungeons & Desktops. Now, Barton has turned the camera on Fargo, who left Interplay in 2002 but has many fond memories of the company’s humorous titles and the creative geniuses behind them. For a fun reminiscence of early Apple II gaming, check out the entire three-part series.

(Hat tip to Blue’s News)

Steve Wozniak is admirable not just for his inventions or even his stature as a geek role model, but also for his philanthropy. Consistent with his childhood dream to be a fifth-grade teacher, a dream he realized for eight years after leaving Apple, he also founded the Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose — hence its location on Woz Way.

Furthering the cause of creativity and childhood education, on February 1, Woz sat down with CBS journalist Dana King at the Bay Area Discovery Museum to talk about his life, education, and accomplishments. The audio is marred by the sounds of the lunching audience, but it’s worth tolerating for the opportunity to hear Woz speak.

The full interview is 1:05:15 long. Here’s an excerpt from 32:01 into the video, where Woz describes how he introduced color to the Apple II:

One of my favorite questions to Woz was, “What’s it like in your head?” His rather humble reply should surprise nobody. He also makes an observation that will resonate with Apple II users: “I’m glad I had a part in this: Computers are not just the work tools, but they’re fun.”

The full video is available at Fora.TV or after the break.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago, Playboy published an online version of an interview they conducted with Steve Jobs in 1985. With Jobs currently on medical leave, it seems a timely opportunity to review his not-so-humble origins as Apple’s first CEO. Some of my favorite excerpts discuss his relationship with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak:

Playboy: What happened to the partnership [with Steve Wozniak] as time went on?

Jobs: The main thing was that Woz was never really interested in Apple as a company. He was just sort of interested in getting the Apple II on a printed circuit board so he could have one and be able to carry it to his computer club without having the wires break on the way. He had done that and decided to go on to other things. He had other ideas.

Playboy: Such as the US Festival rock concert and computer show, where he lost something like $10,000,000.

Jobs: Well, I thought the US Festival was a little crazy, but Woz believed very strongly in it.

Playboy: How is it between the two of you now?

Jobs: When you work with somebody that close and you go through experiences like the ones we went through, there’s a bond in life. Whatever hassles you have, there is a bond. And even though he may not be your best friend as time goes on, there’s still something that transcends even friendship, in a way. Woz is living his own life now. He hasn’t been around Apple for about five years. But what he did will go down in history. He’s going around speaking to a lot of computer events now. He likes that.

Following suit, Newsweek has also published their own 1985 interview with Jobs. In this article are two themes in particular that I have trouble reconciling with the man who leads Apple today. The first is his prediction of his role in the world and in the industry:

I personally, man, I want to build things. I’m 30. I’m not ready to be an industry pundit. I got three offers to be a professor during this summer, and I told all of the universities that I thought I would be an awful professor. What I’m best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them … I’m probably not the best person in the world to shepherd it to a five- or ten-billion-dollar company, which I think is probably its destiny …I don’t think that my role in life is to run big organizations and do incremental improvements.

Despite that disclaimer, Jobs has made it practically a corporate philosophy to make Apple customers into beta-testers, with first-generation hardware that is rarely up to snuff. Given the "incremental improvements" made each year to the iPhone and soon the iPad — both products being not revolutionary so much as evolutionary — it seems Jobs had a change of heart.

Second, there’s the dejection Jobs expressed at his diminished role in his final days at Apple:

I was, you know, asked to move out of my office. They leased a little building across the street from most of the other Apple buildings. I, we nicknamed it Siberia … So I moved across the street, and I made sure that all of the executive staff had my home phone number. I knew that John had it, and I called the rest of them personally and made sure they had it and told them that I wanted to be useful in any way i could, and to please call me if I could help on anything. And they all had a, you know, a cordial phrase, but none of them ever called back. And so I used to go into work, I’d get there and I would have one or two phone calls to perform, a little bit of mail to look at. But … this was in June, July … most of the corporate-management reports stopped flowing by my desk. A few people might see my car in the parking lot and come over and commiserate. And I would get depressed and go home in three or four hours, really depressed. I did that a few times and I decided that was mentally unhealthy. So I just stopped going in. You know, there was nobody really there to miss me.

For a man who was and is often characterized as blustery, overbearing, and obnoxious, such humble disconsolation seems unlike the legend that is Steve Jobs.

Finally, Apple II blogger Steven Black injects some further humanity into the discussion:

… as a guy in the industry who cut my teeth on, and still have massive affection for, Apple ][s, and who from my early teens took a deep interest in all of the stories surrounding the germination of the personal computer industry in the 70s & early 80s, and who lived through the times that saw its initial genesis, I can’t help putting all of the intellectualism aside and just hoping that this doesn’t signal the end of Steve’s career, or indeed an inexorably downward spiral in his health.

Steve’s an icon and a giant of the industry. This sounds blindingly obvious to say. But for many of us around my age, he is in a very real sense the father of our careers, and the founder of a not insignificant proportion of our way of life. I just hope all of the non-geek Apple customers out there can appreciate what the man has achieved in his lifetime. If & when Steve is lost to us, whenever that may occur, it will really feel like the captain has left the bridge.

(Hat tips to Taimur Asad, Leander Kahney, and Arnold Kim)

As previously reported, Steve Wozniak was on-hand last month to give the press a tour of the Computer History Museum‘s new exhibit, “Revolution: The First 2000 Years of Computing“. The exhibit opened last week, and Todd Miller of the San Francisco Chronicle took the opportunity to speak further with Apple Inc.’s lesser-known founder, learning more about Woz’s motivation to write BASIC for the Apple-1 and how he improved upon the original machine’s design with the Apple II:

Here’s my favorite quotation: “Most of the big companies and — a lot of new thinking went into them. They were risky, and it was difficult to say whether they would work or not — just like the Apple II.”

It’s so encouraging to know that the genius who invented our favorite computer is so welcome to continue speaking about that topic. As Jason Scott recently said in the Retro Computing Roundtable podcast, “The retrocomputing culture is very, very lucky, because … so many of the people who formed what’s important to us are part of the community still. It’s so rare that you’d have someone who’s into old cars, and the guy who invented the cars shows up all the time. We’re so lucky because we get people like Wozniak who show up and are like, ‘Oh, yeah! Yeah, hi! Oh, did you like that? Oh, thanks!’ as opposed to we all dream of what that person must’ve thought.” Thank you, Steve Wozniak, for being that guy.

While Mr. Miller’s videos are new, there were plenty more shot at last month’s press tour. Check out the original blog post for a half-dozen other appearances by the Woz.

The KansasFest 2010 keynote speaker was Mark Simonsen, who regaled his audience with tales of his days at Beagle Bros. In that speech, which is now available as both a podcast and a video, he recalls many Apple II luminaries whose paths he crossed, including Beagle Bros founder Bert Kersey.

Although Mr. Kersey is not one for public speaking, preferring instead to focus on barn owls, he nonetheless recently gave an interview with The Setup, a Web site that looks at the tools and strategies of geniuses across a variety of professions by asking them four questions:

• Who are you, and what do you do?
• What hardware do you use?
• And what software?
• What would be your dream setup?

Bert Kersey’s interview, published in March 2010, is a brief one — only 431 words, including questions. The answers to what technology he uses are rather nondescript; "nothing unusual", he says. But in his answer to the final question, Mr. Kersey engages in a bit of tangential prognostication:

In 1982, I was interviewed by Softalk magazine and I was asked what a dream setup might be for the future. I went out on a limb and imagined:

1. Smaller, less fragile floppy disks (smaller than 5-1/4 inches)
2. The ability to do typesetting on my desktop.
3. Movies on the printed page.

#1 was introduced in 1984 with the Mac. #2 became a reality in 1986 with the LaserWriter. As for #3, I guess the internet is the next best thing.

Developments that align with these predictions continue to be developed. Removable media transitioned from 5.25″ floppies to 3.5″ disks, as Mr. Kersey notes, but from there to USB thumb drives that hold thousands of times more data than Beagle Bros ever knew, for a fraction of the price. Typesetting, layout, and almost all other aspects of publishing have been redefined by computers. And while movies on the "printed page" are not yet a reality, I believe that combinations of E Ink, flexible plastic, and OLED displays may lead to something far closer to what Mr. Kersey has imagined.

It’s no surprise to me that someone with the creativity and innovation to build an industry out of the Apple II should so accurately see what the future might bring.

(Hat tips to Mr. Guilt and Steve Weyhrich)