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The wonderful part about this is the continuity — the childhood drawings, the original disk initialization date, the packaging & stickers, and the manuals. Amazing to have held onto it all this time.
Still have my Apple ][ with manuals, etc. (also in my attic), but I'm not sure what would happen if I powered it up.
Btw, not a typo above. Not ][+, not //, not //e. Apple ][, serial number 79. IIRR, it even has the floating point ROM card in one of the slots. :-)
Apple IIs are surprisingly hardy but with one exception: there's a Rifa-branded line filter capacitor in the power supply that tends to blow but it's easy enough to replace (some say you can even just remove it).
That's exactly the capacitor that blew for the author in the article.
Article is from 2012, so nearly 40 years later. Wonder if the author still has it.
As my HN username suggests, I spent a lot of time on the Apple IIGS with nearly the same experience as the author. The article brought back a lot of memories.
I kept my IIGS for 15 years, but need money for school. In 2001 I put it sale on eBay. Someone from Apple bought it off me as gift to a colleague who was retiring. I was happy for it to go to someone who worked on it at Apple. Now I’m wondering if it’s still around too.
They paid me something like $600 for a 15 year old computer plus another $700 for shipping (from Canada to California).
I learned to program on an Apple IIe, at probably 9 or 10 years old.
One thing about computers those days was that learning to program was often considered part of using the machine. Like the Apple IIe came with manuals that taught you Apple Basic, and I remember my Dad trying to learn it, with some minor success (although not as much as me).
It was kind of assumed that to be making full use of the machine as a consumer, you'd have to learn to program. I guess because the OS/UI were "closer to the metal".
Middle school "computing" class, which all students took, also involved teaching programming, although on Commodore 64s.
Another thing I'd note about the OP is that most of the game splashscreens shown have "cracked by" attributions added to them, which goes without comment in the OP. :)
The Apple II is a sweet machine to learn how computers work. It's extremely simple in architecture, with nothing "smart" but the CPU, and its software, both the BASIC in ROM and DOS, are easy to wrap one's head around.
That's lovely!
I was always jealous of folks who had Apple (or Commodore) computers in those days. In the hayseed backwater of my youth, the only outlet was Radio Shack, and so my experience in that generation of computing was the TRS-80 Color Computer.
I think I only ever saw one 8-bit Apple "in the wild" ever (a //e a friend of mine's dad -- a college professor -- had). The next one I saw was a Mac a friend bought just before leaving for college at Rice. Everything else was Tandy.
On request from Apple, YouTube took down the Apple II commercial this fan-blogger embedded into their post. /sigh
The comment about the mouse was odd. While mice were somewhat rare on the 8-bit II line, the IIgs was very mouse centric, and in the late 1980+s there were plenty of mice that worked on II+/e/c via 9pin RS232. There was even the Apple Desktop, a look alike of the mac/IIGs finder ported to the IIe/c.
It would also be a good idea to check every capacitor for leakage or bulged top and replace them. It's usually the capacitors that go bad after many years (read also: Capacitor Plague https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague), they contain electrolyte that deteriorates over time.
Yeah, it is however often the RIFA RFI supression capacitor that goes pop.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/old-rifa-capacitors-and-a...
I have three Apple IIe's and they all needed the mains RFI caps to be replaced. However none of the other caps have failed.
As an electronic serviceman I'm certain that the Capacitor plague story is a myth. Yes, there was a batch of bad caps produced for a short time, but the effect was limited.
The myth is largely peddled by ebay sellers who sell kits of replacement capacitors. My experience is that more devices have been destroyed by inexperienced enthusiasts waving a soldering iron around, than those which actually had faulty capacitors.
The Apple ][ predates that problematic area and for a lot of electronics replacing the Capacitors (Condensers) is vital.
Check out Mr Calrsons Lab on YouTube which covers a lot electronics repair - Old Radios in particular have 1920's era capacitors which can cause some nasty failures
The IC sockets are what tend to cause grief in an Apple ][. They used the cheapest ones they could find, not the nicer machined-pin parts.
Not sure if the //e still used sockets at all. It shouldn't have, if it did. (Well, OK, maybe for the 74LS259 that drove the annunciators on the game port. I went through a few of those back in the day, and was certainly grateful for the socket at the time.)
I have a faint memory of opening up the Apple ][ plus to push on various ICs when the computer went wonky.
Yes. And we cannot afford intel memory and have to use the not that good Japanese one. Keep on pushing to avoid crash.
The garfield is quite impressive for a kid, I suspect most people would have just drawn it in paint program, and bload'ed it off disk to the second graphics page, or similar trick to avoid manually computing all the vector points.
That said, I guess it comes from looking at games like KQ where (presumably to save disk space) they draw a vector outline and then flood fill the areas to create scenes.
A lot of Apple ][ software (including from Sierra, the publishers of KQ) used a package called "The Graphics Magician" for the graphics. The Graphics Magician stored graphics as a series of vector lines and fills, leading to the classic "picture drawing itself" nature of a lot of Apple ][ adventure games.