We had the Hayes Micromodem II which consisted of a huge board plugged inside the computer plus an external box with even more stuff inside it hooked to the phone line. So for a mere $13 per hour to Compuserve plus something like $.50 a minute for long distance I could download the walkthrough for Infocom's Zork or read up on the 84 Olympics at something approaching 30 characters a second. Needless to say my parents decided the online revolution was not hitting our household yet and the modem collected dust. I think they still have it in the attic.
CB Emmons, Tim wrote: > I know this is probably way off topic and off the beaten path for this list > but I have to chime in here. I know I haven't written or contributed in a > while because they've worked our email addresses around but I wsaw this and > had too. I started out with an apple 2E, in fifth grade, and remember seeing > the apple 2 plus at a summer program in Pensacola. Nick Dotson, who you may > or may not have seen on other lists taught that class, with the apples. I had > the chance to see one of the older modems, the one like they had on War Games > that he had dialedinto his house with to do different things, so it was a > very interesting time indeed. To think that started accessibility for us then > was an awesome thing. I used mine all the way through highschool, and college > where I wrote plenty of term papers before it gave up the ghost and died > after ten years or so of working like mad. The image writer printer I used > worked with the Braille and Speak for years after that and got me through > graduate school in Library science, so those products were made to last > believe it or not. I'm fascinated by the development of os10 and snowleopard > and can't wait to see where that goes. I have a lot of patrons that are going > the way of the Apple and I am working towards that myself. Hopefully I can > get my hands on a good Macbook or mac book pro. I may have to settle for a > mini to begin with but I prefer the whole laptop thing. Anyway, thanks for > listening and I'll hush before Cara and the mod crew hunt me down, Lol. Take > care and thanks again for listening. Talk to you soon. > > -----Original Message----- > From: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com > [mailto:macvisionar...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Chris Blouch > Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 3:05 PM > To: macvisionaries@googlegroups.com > Cc: g...@blindwisdom.org > Subject: Re: Golden Apples > > > 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. >> >> >> > > > > -- > This message has been scanned for viruses and > dangerous content by MailScanner, and is > believed to be clean. > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
