Apple II Bits

As I write this blog post, I am simultaneously proud, relieved, and shocked. The reason: I just delivered the March 2017 issue of Juiced.GS to the printshop.

Note: it is not March.

On all 84 issues of Juiced.GS that have been published to date, every cover has displayed the date of publication. In the 44 issues I’ve edited, only four of the year’s 12 months have been represented on the cover: March, June, September, and December, aligning with the end of each quarter.

I took those months to be the deadline by which I had to deliver the issue to the post office. Sometimes this meant mailing an issue on March 31, with it not arriving in readers’ hands until April.

But if you look back at earlier issues of Juiced.GS, you’ll see different dates on the cover: February, May, August, and November. Former editor-in-chief Ryan Suenaga published midway through each quarter so as to avoid conflicting with other crunch periods, such as the holidays. I tried to follow his example, but on my very first issue, I slipped a month and never regained it.

But this year, the first issue of 2017 presented the opportunity to get back on track. One article held back from December gave us a head start, but it wasn’t just that. I don’t normally assign articles until after the previous issue has shipped — but I was able to solicit the author of this month’s cover story, Mike Whalen, last fall, and he diligently worked through the holidays so that his submission would be ready as soon as we began work on the March issue. Our other staff and freelance writers, including Chris Torrence and Ivan Drucker, were also very timely with their contributions.

It all added up to us being able to print the magazine with a February date: as long as I got the magazine to the post office before Wednesday, we could accurately say the magazine shipped in February. But it still wouldn’t be delivered until March, and although I’ve cut it close before, this approach felt dishonest, somehow.

So we’re sticking with our traditional March date by shipping the issue on March 1. Honestly, it seems the best of both worlds: for possibly the first time ever, every subscriber should receive the issue in the same calendar month, without the staff rushing to meet an end-of-month deadline, whatever month that is.

Will shipping on the first of the month become the new standard? I don’t know. At the least, it presents our staff with some leeway — a one-month buffer with which to get the June issue published.

Regardless of what this spells for the future, it’s a relief to look forward to a month that’s full of conventions, vacations, presentations, and milestones, knowing that I’ve already given Juiced.GS my full attention.

Juiced.GS is an Apple II print magazine that magically arrives in subscribers’ mailboxes every quarter. The time in between each issue might seem restful before the staff makes a mad dash to the finish line. But the reality is that Juiced.GS production occurs in every month of the year.

Each issue gets three months, and each month gets put to good use:

1. Write the articles.
2. Edit and lay out the articles.
3. Publish the magazine.

There is some overlap between issues — for example, assignments for the December issue are usually doled out in August or September, so that once the September issue ships, writers can immediately start working toward the next deadline.

For next month’s issue, writers were given a deadline of Friday, November 11. I intended to read their submissions while on the ten-hour round-trip bus ride between Boston and New York City, where I was attending GaymerX East. Unfortunately, that mode of transit didn’t prove conductive to editing, pushing my work out to the following weekend.

So, this past Saturday, I finally read six Juiced.GS articles. Each one took about an hour to undergo this process:

1. Print the article in hardcopy.
2. Read it once without touching my pen so that I can focus on large questions: Did the writer understand the assignment? Does he answer the questions the article set out to address? Does one section flow naturally into the next?
3. Read it again with red pen, addressing mechanics (word choice, punctuation) and scribbling questions into the margins.
4. Transcribe all annotations into Microsoft Word using Track Changes.
5. If there are still questions or areas that need revision, send back to the author for a second draft, due one week later.
6. Upon receiving the second draft, or if the first draft had no questions, send the article to Andy Molloy for a second edit.

Once I get Andy’s revisions, I lay the content out in the Juiced.GS template using Pages v4.1. Once I have a few articles done, I send a PDF to the entire staff for review and commentary. After incorporating their feedback, I then send each article to its respective author for one last review, to ensure no errors were introduced during editing or layout.

Once all content is in place, it’s off to the printshop. If I deliver the PDF by Tuesday morning, I can pick up my order Wednesday night. Some friends and I have a stuffing party, with the assembled magazines being mailed Thursday morning.

But I need to prepare more than just the magazine for that party; the mailing envelopes are their own beast. So this weekend, I checked my supply of catalog envelopes and Avery labels; if I was short on either, I’d order more from Amazon.com. If I needed more return address labels, I’d order those, too. All this needs to be done a month in advance, to allow time for shipping to my house.

I also need to get stamps. At the time of this writing, an issue mailed within the USA costs $1.36, or two 68¢ stamps; to Canada or Mexico, it’s $2.71, which is $2 + 68¢ + 3¢; everywhere else, it’s $4.16, or $2 + $2 + 10¢ + 5¢ + 1¢. I need so many of each that many post offices don’t appreciate me clearing out their supply, sometimes outright refusing to fulfill my shopping list, despite having the stock with which to do so. This weekend, for the first time, I ordered the stamps online. (Except the 5¢ stamps, for which the online minimum order is 10,000 stamps. Juiced.GS‘s subscriber base is somewhere south of that.)

Once all that’s assembled, I recruit friends or relatives to a labeling party, where we combine the envelopes, address labels, return address labels, stamps, and "DO NOT BEND" rubber stamp.

And all that is just what’s happening on the editing and publishing side; it doesn’t take into account the research and wordsmithing that all the writers, both staff and freelance, do.

But it’s all worth it. This past September, I took a draft of Juiced.GS with me on a weekend getaway. As I read the brilliance that so many community members had volunteered to share in our magazine’s pages, I stopped and said aloud: "I’m so lucky I get to do this."

Juiced.GS is a lot of work — and a lot of fun.

I attended my first KansasFest in 1998. It was the year that GSoft BASIC debuted from The Byte Works, and also the year that Eric Shepherd founded the HackFest contest. I married the two and attempted to write a Boggle game in GSoft BASIC while at KansasFest. It didn’t go well, but I was encouraged by The Byte Works president and fellow attendee Mike Westerfield, who made changes to GSoft BASIC in response to my experience and feedback. It meant a lot to me, KansasFest 1998’s youngest attendee, so receive that kind of support from a community luminary.

This past July, Mike posted to Facebook:

I know people have had trouble recently getting some of the old Byte Works products. I’m looking at a number of options, and wanted to gauge interest.

All of our products that were produced at the Byte Works, and thus the ones we have clear copyright to, are on a CD called Opus ][. This includes ORCA/C, ORCA/Pascal, ORCA/M, and all of the support programs and so forth, but not ORCA/Modula 2. There are two disks, one with the executables and another with the source. These have been selling for $99 each or $195 for the set.

I’m considering offering these as downloads. They would be one-off sales, which would take some of my time for each one, so I would need to charge for them. I was thinking $25 each or $40 for the pair. You would have to move the individual files to your Apple IIGS or Apple II yourself.

This would mean the only way to get an individual language would be to buy the entire CD, but then, the CD would cost no more than the individual languages do now, anyway.

So, is this interesting to anyone, or does it really matter anymore?

I emailed Mike that same day, offering the Juiced.GS online store as a vehicle for distributing Opus ][. It wouldn’t be the magazine’s first collaboration with The Byte Works: our December 1998 issue (Volume 3, Issue 4) included a 3.5" floppy disk containing a free trial version of GSoft BASIC, allowing readers to follow along with Eric Shepherd’s six-part GSoft tutorial that debuted in that issue.

To my delight, Mike was enthusiastic about revisiting that collaboration. The only hesitation was on my end: how do we make this product a natural fit for the Juiced.GS store? The magazine had no history of selling software or other people’s products. How could we make Opus ][ a good fit?

Our Concentrate line had the answer. These PDFs collect thematically related content from past issues of Juiced.GS into a single file. With transcription help from Ewen Wannop and Paul Zaleski, I’d begun producing out a PDF of Sheppy’s six-part series back in 2011 — but the effort of laying out 49 pages of code was daunting… especially when The Byte Works’ own Learn to Program in GSoft BASIC was available for free. The opportunity to work with Mike was the incentive I needed to revisit and finally finish that project, which is now available for free with the purchase of Opus ][: The Software or Opus ][: The Source.

Since releasing these products on September 1, sales have been strong, with dozens of customers buying the compilations in download, CD, and USB formats. The demand for these products is evidence of a vibrant and supportive Apple II community, even so many years after Opus’ original release 15 years ago.

It’s an honor to work with so esteemed and storied a developer as The Byte Works and to release a product desired by so many. Juiced.GS and I look forward to many more opportunities to serve the community!

Growing up with the Apple II, I learned to program in BASIC. Its line numbers, GOTOs and GOSUBs, and spaghetti code were unlike anything I would encounter later in my education. Perhaps for that reason, I never mastered a language like I did BASIC. While I was able to grasp Prolog and FORTRAN, the "pointers" of C++ were so incomprehensible to me that I eventually had to change majors to get away from it.

Had I continued down that programming path, I doubtless would’ve faced many other challenging concepts as I attempted to master yet more languages, like C Sharp, Perl, PHP, Ruby, and more. By some estimates, there are over 20,000 languages in existence, only a fraction of which I ever could’ve learned on the Apple II. Some are more practical than others, while others are of more historical significance.

The BBC attempts to scratch the surface of those historical languages in a recent limited-run podcast series, Codes that Changed the World, hosted by Aleks Krotoski.

The podcast, which debuted this month and ran for all of five episodes, covers four languages: FORTRAN, COBOL, BASIC, and Java, with a fifth episode discussing how so many different languages are able to coexist.

Of course, you can’t discuss the rise of BASIC without the role the Apple II played, and vice versa:

BASIC enabled computing as we understand it today. When Apple was a two-man band building this thing called the Apple II, there were no other computers out there like it. So they had to put something on it that would allow individuals to program it themselves. Apple just wouldn’t exist without BASIC. And Microsoft! The first thing that Microsoft did as a company was selling BASIC to run on other people’s computers. The two biggest names in modern computing, Apple and Microsoft, both wouldn’t’ve happened if it wasn’t for BASIC.

BASIC celebrated its 50th birthday last year, earning it a cover story in Juiced.GS:

While researching that story, author Steve Weyhrich (who also pointed me to this podcast) delved into the resources available at Dartmouth College, where BASIC was invented. As part of its "BASIC at 50" commemoration, Dartmouth produced a free 38-minute documentary, Birth of BASIC:

If you want to learn more about other programming languages, Codes that Changed the World is available in iTunes. While it’s unreasonable to expect all 20,000 languages to be covered, I do lament that the podcast’s scope was limited to only five episodes, as I rather enjoyed these 15-minute encapsulations of technical topics for a lay audience. If the BBC or Krotoski ever produce more, I’ll be first in line to listen!

This past weekend, a handful of Juiced.GS subscribers received a surprise in the mail: a French language edition of the September 2014 issue. The content was translated from the original English not by Google Translate, but by Antoine Vignau of Brutal Deluxe, a polyglot contributor to the magazine.

This collaboration was inspired by Andrés Lozano, who travelled from France to attend KansasFest 2014. While there, he hosted a live Google Hangout so that his fellow patriots could attend KansasFest virtually.

It was during that video chat that I spoke with Antoine Vignau, who I’d previously interviewed for an audio podcast but had never spoken to in video before. Seeing him, Andrés, and many other attendees in the chat reminded me what a presence the Apple II has in France. A few hours later, I emailed Antoine with this unsolicited proposal: "If you’re willing to translate the entire September 2014 issue of Juiced.GS, I’ll see about publishing it in French. Just as a one-time special — not every issue!"

The result is Juiced.FR, which shipped a week after Juiced.GS. The timing was tricky, as I had to wait until the English edition was done in its entirety before handing it to Antoine to translate. While an issue may be assembled piecemeal, it isn’t until every article is laid out that the staff really pulls apart the draft, looking for typos or clarifications. I wanted to have that level of quality in place before Antoine began translating. Even then, Antoine had his work cut out for him; given the technical nature of some of the pieces, it seemed some of the content might be "untranslatable"! But Antoine persevered, producing an issue that I can’t read but which I assume is excellent.

While Juiced.GS again met its deadline of shipping in the month listed on the cover, French subscribers’ issues were not mailed until a week later, in October. I felt bad about delaying the receipt of their product, but the feedback I’ve gotten so far is that it was worth the wait.

I don’t expect to repeat this promotion in French or other languages — it was a fun but unique experiment, akin to the 5.25" demo disk of Drift that we shipped two years back. It might be fun to translate each issue of a volume into a different language and then package it as the "Babel Bundle", but the audience for such a product would be small.

If you are a French speaker who isn’t a subscriber to Juiced.GS, or you’re someone who just wants to practice a foreign tongue, you can buy this individual issue of Juiced.FR. We’ve never sold single issues before, and I expect this one will never be back in print after the original run is sold out, making it a truly limited edition. Show Antoine your appreciation by making sure we sell out!

The latest issue of Juiced.GS shipped this weekend, and it’s already arriving in subscribers’ mailboxes on both coasts, as reported on Facebook and Google+. It’s gratifying to know all the last-minute work is now being enjoyed. I was at the printshop as soon as they opened on Saturday morning to collect the quarterly bounty. I then hauled the issues to a corner of the USPS, combined them with the stamped and labeled catalog envelopes I had with me, and handed the set to the clerk.

The postmaster was nearly crushed by the avalanche of Apple II magazines.

This issue marks my 23rd as publisher of Juiced.GS. In that time, the magazine has always been mailed in the month printed on the cover; not once has that deadline been missed. But sometimes it’s been close, and I wonder why I do it to myself — why couldn’t I have built more leeway into the schedule?

To be fair, sometimes it’s not me doing it — writers have been known to miss their deadlines, leaving the layout to the last minute! But planning starts at the top, and I hold myself responsible for delays or conflicts. For example, this fall was my first juggling both the annual MS Challenge Walk and teaching at Emerson College. With both events commencing within days of each other, there were two straight weeks when almost all the content for this issue of Juiced.GS had been submitted to me and I did nothing with it. Surely I could’ve seen that coming — both were scheduled at least six months out.

But I wonder if things would turn out better, or even any different, if Juiced.GS were prepared further in advance. Sometimes the best work is done under pressure, and it isn’t until all the pieces come together that the issue can be evaluated as a whole. That’s when the entire Juiced.GS staff pores over the pages, knowing that if we don’t all pitch in now, the readers won’t get the quality publication that we all put our names on.

Whatever our standards, even if Juiced.GS is the best Apple II publication currently in print, I’m always looking for ways to make it and its workflows serve its constituents better. Each issue is a new opportunity, and I’m already looking forward to December — and beyond!