Hi,
Some of us were around even before the Echo and Cricket. My first
Apple was an Apple II-I--from 1977, and I was already out of undergrad
school and working before Apple began.
Anyone remember the Vocoder, or early Votrax?
Yes, I do remember Mountain Hardware, and owned one of their
products. The card was a graphics card that handled sprites, did
large print, and did have a limited speech capability. That came out
in the 1980's after we had floppy drives, and were no longer loading
from a cassette tape! Back in those days, one wrote all programs of a
special nature oneself--often in Apple Basic, which came out in the
late 70's. The first basic was an Integer Basic, which is why the II-I
was called a 2-I. It had no floating point basic. Bill Gates wrote
the basic for Apple, and Apple had the good sense to buy it from him
outright. The old machines came with 48K of RAM! We did a lot with
them.
It was very exciting to get fancy new hardware with 1980--the Apple II
Plus, had 64K, floppy drives!--and even a modem that was 300 baud, as
opposed to the older ones of 110. Dennis Hayes was a young professor
at Georgia Tech then, and just getting started.
Visicalc was written for the Apple in the early 1980's, and started
the real revolution to the PC. I remember being excited to get a
chip for my old Apple that let me have upper and lower case, so I
could better do word processing with it--with a product called Tedit,
and later Apple Writer [], called Apple Writer 2.
My first printer was an old ASR-33 teletype, that only wrote in
uppercase. It was so loud, that we either left the room when
printing, or put the thing out in the hall to print. I put wheels on
it, to wheel it outside of the door!
I was highly productive in those days. While many of my colleagues
were laborious writing out their papers and proposals in longhand,
Remember that art?--[grin]--I could write my papers on the Apple, edit
them, and print the rough draft on that old ASR-33! I could give a
ready draft to my secretary, so it could be typed into a final draft--
ready to go. I was more productive than my peers.
It was an exciting time. Advances came along all the time--and major
ones. There were a number of other Apple products that flopped, and
the Apple was the cash cow for Apple. The Lisa, the Apple 3, came and
went before Jobs got the Mac worked out.
The difference between then and now was that leaps in computer tech
came as more revolutionary than evolutionary. The mouse arrived then,
and it changed the world.
There was a portable Apple II called the IIc. The Apple II-E
followed the II plus, and was the one most people know. The IIgs came
in 1986--I still have mine. It has an old Slotbuster, which was made
by Randy Carlstrum, of RC Systems--the precursor to the LiteTalk and
DoubleTalk you know.
I have 2 LiteTalks, and a DoubleTalk, too. I liked the Slotbuster, as
it ran well with AppleWorks, which I used to write my thesis in grad
school. By then, Macs were dominating the
scene, as the Apple II Forever died in 1988, while Jobs left to form
Next Computer.
By then a younger Larry Schutchan wrote Proterm, and his first
software for the Apple II. He quickly moved off to the PC, and the
excellent work on ASAP.--No, he is still around--at A{PH, and is the
creator of things you know, like Bookport--now extinct, and the
Braille Plus, which many of you do know.
AppleWorks was an amazing creation, in that it was one of the first
Suites of software. It had a third party developer--there were many
then working on Apple Products, called Beagle Brothers. Their
enhancements put AppleWorks at the top of what one might do then.
Back before the IIgs, there were music cards--one of the more notable
was the ALF music card, which had an exciting sound for that time.
The IIgs supplanted ALF.
I did use an early edition of Outspoken for the Mac--the OS then on
the Mac LC was 4.5, as I recall. It was upgradable to 7.5, and I
believe that is what is still on it. I found that old Outspoken very
difficult to use, and admit I chose the easier route of Word Perfect
5.1 on a PC with ASAP.
The old LC is still in a box, and last I knew, it still runs. I did
have my IIgs up this past year pulling off some old files of the 64mb
HD I added to it, when I added the zipchip of 8 mhz. It took PC's
until the 400 mhz processors to be as fast as an Apple II with my
zipchip.
AppleWorks had a PC reincarnation in DOS days--called SuperWorks, it
was an analog of AppleWorks on a PC. It never worked as well with
speech.
One has to wonder how the world would be different if the Waz had
pushed for the 32-bit 6502, and a IIgs that carried on the Apple II
tradition. The open architecture of that day helped to make it an
exciting era. It might make for a great SF novel of an alternate
reality.
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