While we're geezing about Apple IIs, I remember there was a shift-key
mod for the II+ where you would jumper the shift key to one of the game
controller buttons since it didn't really work otherwise when you did
the lower case text chip mod.
Beagle Bros had a little program that would alternate running two floppy
drives (for those so lucky) to sound like a steam train starting up.
The joy of cassette tape storage was you never really knew if your saved
copy was actually good. Only sure way to tell was to load it back into
the computer, which wiped out your previous work in memory. So if your
tape didn't write correctly you now had no copy on tape and your copy
in memory was gone.
The Apple II made sounds by accessing a certain memory address which
made a click. Do it fast enough and you got a tone of a certain pitch.
So you could search through games to change $C020 to $C030 which made
the clicks go to the cassette port. From there you could hook up your
boom box and get much better sound than the built in speaker.
The IIc had a button right on the top of the case to switch the keys to
Dvorak layout. I guess that never really took off :)
The IIgs was amazing for its time with the 32 channel Ensoniq sound chip.
CB
Gary W. Kelly wrote:
> 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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