Apple II Bits

Last week was my dad’s birthday, and someone asked me: had I ever gotten him a gift for the Apple II?

In fact, I had! It was one Christmas in the 1990s, and Dad was in his second decade of using AppleWorks on the Apple II to run the family business. We’d just upgraded our version of AppleWorks — one of many purchases we’d made from Quality Computers. Although I was still a minor at the time, it was not unusual for me to receive a QC catalog in the mail, call them to order something, and tell them to charge it to dad’s credit card, which they had on file. If the purchase was a game or something else that couldn’t be written off as a business expense, I would reimburse my parents from my allowance.

Even at that age, I’d already caught up to and surpassed my father’s familiarity with the Apple II and its capabilities. I thought I should use that experience to benefit his AppleWorks experience, so I bought AfterWork, a screen saver specifically for AppleWorks.

Screen savers are still ubiquitous, but primarily as an artifact of an earlier time when they served a necessary purpose. Today’s LCD monitors don’t run the risk of burn-in, but on a CRT monitor like the AppleColor RGB monitor on our IIGS, my dad stepping away from work for an hour to play Tetris could have disastrous results. AppleWorks 4.0 would blank the screen, but with AfterWork, fun animations would flood his display until he came back to his spreadsheets.

I don’t know that my dad appreciated receiving the gift as much as I did giving it. Most of my family see computers much like I see cars: a vehicle to get you from point A to point B. They don’t enjoy tinkering or playing with it or making it do fun, cool things for the sake of it. But I was nonetheless proud to give my dad something that integrated seamlessly into his workflow. I wasn’t trying to get him to use the Apple II in a different or "better" way — I just wanted his work day to be a little more amusing, and to give back to him a small part of the wonder and joy he’d given me by getting me into the Apple II in the fist place.

It’s been decades since I’ve seen AfterWork in action: I don’t have it installed in Sweet16, and there appear to be no screenshots or YouTube videos of it. What I can find online is a 1995 review of AppleWorks 5.0 by now-Juiced.GS staff writer Andrew Roughan, in which he states, "AppleWorks now includes the AfterWork screen saver and five sample modules. The full AfterWork package which has 21 modules is available separately." I’m left uncertain which Christmas I bought AfterWork or for what version of AppleWorks. But I’ll always remember it as a gift that represented something my dad and I had in common.

Most Apple II geeks aren’t shy about their passion; they wear their hearts on their sleeves, proudly displaying logos, license plates, and hardware where friends, co-workers, and strangers can see and inquire about them.

One of my favorite ways to demonstrate my heritage has been to use an Apple II-inspired screensaver on my MacBook Pro laptop computers. Alas, when I updated to Snow Leopard a few years ago, that particular saver stopped working, and I couldn’t remember where it came from to see if there was an update. But when the Apple II turned 35 earlier this week, Paul Horowitz included that same screensaver in his celebratory roundup. No wonder I couldn’t find it before: it’s one of 200 screensavers in a single archive!

The screensaver features many customization options.

Even cooler, the package comes with a VT100 terminal that emulates the display of the Apple II, "complete with screen noise, random color flickers, a permanent caps lock, and other peculiarities unique to technologies of a bygone era." I have tested the screensaver and the utility on both Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and Lion (10.7), and they work great.

Apple II Bits has never been more beautiful.

So what are you waiting for? Put your Apple II on your desktop for all to see!

UPDATE: You can also get this screensaver from the Mac App Store. Hat tip (again) to Paul Horowitz.