My photos from KansasFest 2010 are now available to view in my Picasa Web Album. The images are from Friday and Saturday. Also, my report on Friday’s activities at Rockhurst is up over at A2Central – you can read it here. I’ll try to do write ups for the rest of the convention over the next few days.
Okay, as promised the Apple III presentation I gave at KansasFest is now available at the KansasFest website (it’s in the downloads area, along with a link to my pictures and a bunch of other goodies). I should probably clarify a few things, the most important being that I am a horrible public speaker. Even the thought of getting up in front of any amount of people to talk to them is enough to keep me up nights. My brain has a tendency to freeze up and even simple answers to audience questions leave me a stammering mess. In fact, there’s a video of me “giving my presentation” (by which, I mean babbling incoherently for half an hour) on the web now as well, but I’m not going to link to that. You’ll have to find it yourself.
Anyway, as a result of my deer-caught-in-headlights panic, I managed to leave out large portions of information I had intended to give. Since this blog gives me my own small soapbox, I’ll take this opportunity to fill in what I missed or just got plain wrong.
5V vs 12V
I remember being asked why Apple didn’t just go with a lower-powered 5V system from the beginning, instead of introducing the 12V Apple III and then later replacing it with the 5V revised version. I think the answer that came fumbling out of my mouth might have been close to correct, but I can’t be sure so I’ll address it here. The simple answer is the price of RAM at the time. 5V RAM chips were still very pricey when the Apple III was under development and it was deemed too expensive, so the engineering team went with the older 12V RAM instead. By the time Apple got around to fixing the numerous flaws in the original III, 5V RAM had become cheap enough to be economically viable in the III. So, as part of the redesign, a 5V memory system was introduced. In fact, 5V and 12V boards are interchangeable in the various Apple III iterations – with a few simple modifications, a 5V memory board could easily work in a 12V system. It’s apparently trivial to switch the entire Apple III from 12V to 5V, and in fact the steps are outlined in the Apple III Technical Procedures document. During the time that Apple was replacing or fixing bad III’s like crazy, dealers who serviced any 12V Apple III were, as part of the procedure, required to convert the machine to 5V.
6502A vs B
Someone asked me about the difference between Synertek’s 6502A processor, which shipped in early versions of the Apple III, and the 6502B, found in the “revised” III and III+. I think I mumbled some nonsense about opcodes. The only difference between the A and the B is speed. The A is rated at 2 MHz, though on the III, it runs closer to 1.8 MHz; the B was SynerTek’s next version of the chip, and could run at 3 MHz in systems designed to handle the additional speed. It’s really academic in the case of the Apple III however, as both the A and the B were clocked to 2 MHz.
Edit: It’s probably also worth mentioning that the same is true for the original 6502 that appeared in early Apple II models: it’s functionally identical to the 6502A/B – just operating at 1 MHz.
Brief history
I’d meant to cover this quickly at the start of the presentation, but forgot not only to mention it, but to even put it in the PowerPoint file.
By 1978, Apple was worried that they had a year, maybe two before sales of the Apple II line fell off and they needed a replacement. Macintosh and its progenitor Lisa were still years away and the executive board felt they needed to move ahead with something sooner. A group was put together to come up with preliminary designs for a new machine and Apple even brought in 6502 creator Chuck Peddle to help out. The group, consisting mainly of marketing types, wanted a machine that was more powerful than the II to give them a foot in the business marketplace door, but still maintained contact with the II and II+ in the form of software emulation. Apple had intended first Peddle (who returned to Commodore a short time later after he and Apple couldn’t come to satisfactory terms on his employment) and then Woz himself to head up the engineering team that would design the electronics and build this new computer.
When it became apparent that Woz wasn’t interested in doing more than some basic design work, Apple turned to Dr. Wendell Sander. Dan Kottke was also brought in to be Sander’s technician – as Sander handed diagrams and schematics off, Kottke would come in and build and troubleshoot the hardware, spending long nights wire-wrapping boards and fixing previously unseen flaws. Rumors began to fly of an new personal computer being designed by the Evil Empire, IBM. Apple panicked (much in the way I did) and pushed the engineering team to hurry up the release. As often happens when a committee gets together, individual members had a hard time agreeing with each other on what the final product should look like and the engineering team ended up with a constantly changing sheet of specifications around which to design. The engineers did the best they could but warned that there were problems and that thorough testing was needed before the Apple III could be released. Their warnings were ignored and the QA process – which could have saved Apple millions – was cut short. The resulting product was a disaster.
And it goes from there into my presentation.
There’s probably more that should be addressed, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to watch the presentation video. Maybe someday…
This is a bit weird, to say the least. As I was swimming through the intertubes today, as I often do, I came across this blog entry, titled “Where Apple’s Go To Die”. The blog belongs to a Lebanese photographer who lives (or lived) in Kuwait and though the page is dormant now (the last blog entry was made in November 2005), it’s still available for perusal. Mostly routine photography stuff, centered on his life in Kuwait. One entry in particular though caught my attention. It’s an apparently-abandoned Apple Store. And I’m not talking one of the new, shiny places that sell you iPads and a copy of the latest version of Aperture. No, this place has been there for quite some time. It featured the rainbow Apple logo and the old Garamond font from the days before King Jobs returned to reclaim his throne and expunge the company of its past.
Stranger still is that whomever owned the place looks to have simply closed up shop one day and never returned. “Think Different” posters still hang in the windows; shelves of shrink-wrapped software lie undisturbed under layers of dust. There are even a few old Macs still sitting there. It’s like one of those bad horror movies where the protagonist awakes one day to find his city completely, suddenly devoid of human life.
One of the commenters points out a promotional poster for a G4 Quicksilver visible in one shot, which means that the store was open at least into 2001.
The blog entry itself is dated January 2005, and I find myself wondering about that store. Is is still there, untouched like some weird monument to Apple at the turn of the millennium? Who owned and/or operated the store, and most importantly – what the hell happened there?
Be sure to visit the the photographer’s other page of images, where you can see more photos.
Edit: Looks like this story made the rounds back in 2005 in all the usual places (Gizmodo, TUAW, Cult of Mac, etc). Not sure how I missed it, but there you go. More info on the place can be found here.
Second edit: The store has re-opened. This is also old news.
I’ll start off with the disclaimer, so that the uninterested can tune out now. This has nothing to do with vintage Apple gear, though I suppose these days, an iPod from 2006 could be considered retro. No, this is here because I haven’t written in a while, and I like to write. When I’m in practice I’m pretty good at it, too. It’s also here because I don’t have anywhere else to put it and since no one reads this blog, there isn’t going to be any psychological damage.
At any rate, iTunes crashed while updating my iPod, and apparently took my beloved music player with it. No error message, no warning of trouble. iTunes just closed mid-file transfer, and I found myself staring at the desktop. It took me a minute to realize that it wasn’t coming back on its own, and the iPod had slipped into an endless reboot cycle. I’d get the glowing white Apple on black background for a few seconds, the a dark screen and then the shiny Apple again. Lather, rinse, repeat.
My first thought was that the hard drive had given up the ghost – apparently this is a fairly common killer of older iPods, and a guaranteed revenue stream from upgraders for Apple. A quick web search for replacement 1.8″ hard drives revealed that they were out of my price range – a drive comparable to the one in my unit costs nearly as much as a new iPod. Desperate to save my coins for my upcoming journey to retro-Mecca, I started looking for troubleshooting tips. Various hard reset methods were tried, but still no luck.
As a last resort, I stopped by the local Apple temple… uh… retail store and hit the Genius Bar. This iPod is well out of warranty, but they’ve always been friendly and have been willing to lend a hand for a few minutes even if it’s for stuff on which they’re not supposed to work. After a few minutes spent repeating the steps I’d already tried, the girl at the counter reached the same conclusion: a dead hard drive. Any attempt to plug the iPod into a machine with iTunes up and running quickly and invariably crashed iTunes. We did learn, however, that when the device is started in “Disk Mode“, the endless rebooting stopped. I could plug it in and browse the iPod’s file system, transfer stuff back and forth and in general do everything I was supposed to be able to, other than actually boot it and listen to music.
Hmmm. When I got home, I plugged it into my wife’s laptop (she has a Motorola Droid and doesn’t use iTunes) and loaded her copy of doubleTwist, DVD Jon’s cool iTunes clone for those not blessed to own an iPodPhonePad. doubleTwist saw the device and allowed me to sync a few files. I began to doubt my initial prognosis and loaded chkdsk, Windows’ file system and storage media diagnostic and repair utility. The initial check came up with no errors, so I ran it again with more thorough tests. Still nothing. Finally, an overnight surface test of the drive also came up suspiciously clean.
Perhaps the iTunes wasn’t the problem – strange, I know. The quality of the Windows version of Apple’s media player and sync application is no secret. I wondered if the iTunes crash mid-transfer hadn’t caused some corruption of the operating system on the iPod itself. As I wasn’t sure how much of the iPod system is stored on the HDD versus internal firmware, and lacking confidence that I could do a complete restore manually, I ruled out formatting the drive and trying from scratch. The thought of driving across Kansas in the July heat without my favorite podcasts to accompany me was more than I could bear and if I could rescue my little friend, by god, that’s what I was going to do, dammit!
iTunes has a pretty cool function that allows you to wipe your device clean and restore it to factory settings – a sort of panic-button, if you will – but it’s not much good when iTunes crashes the instant you plug in your iPod. Someone on a forum suggested that I track down one of the old iPod Device Updater programs that Apple used to release before they integrated that functionality into iTunes. Fortunately, people smarter than I have archived and made these available on various forums and file repositories. But there’s a snag (isn’t there always?). It seems that if you already have iTunes installed, these updaters refuse to function and instead insist that you use iTunes. No amount of removing the myriad services and applications Apple sets up when you install iTunes could resolve the problem. So, barring major Windows Registry and system file surgery, that method was out.
I found another program on ipodwizard.net, one of those all-in-one diagnostic utilities that frustrated users seem to be so good at producing. From the look of it, the iPodWizard app could reload my firmware and a bunch of other neat stuff. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to use it, and the info in the forum thread where I found it was less than clear. In the end, it needed that iPod Updater program which would no longer run for me.
I was reaching my wit’s end here, which usually isn’t very far away on any given afternoon. Was it really this difficult to restore an iPod to its factory settings without iTunes? Then, in the midst of my preparations for Hari-kiri, a thought occurred to me. Wasn’t there an alternative bootloader and OS that you could load onto your iPod? Rock… something or other. Don’t you hate that? Trying to remember the name of the product you tried that one time way back when. I’ve probably got it bookmarked somewhere, but searching through the thousands upon thousands of virtual “I was here” markers that I make as I troll through the web and then never visit again, was a daunting challenge. More than I was up to – yes, I’m lazy. Shut up.
Rockbox! Yes, that’s the one! I remember trying this thing once, years ago. While I admire the skill and effort they’ve put into an open-source alternative to the iPod’s OS, I found its user interface to be unfortunately unwieldy and hard to use. There’s just no substitute for the elegance of Apple’s click-wheel and menu system. If there’s one thing you can say about the Fruit of Silicon Valley, it’s that you can’t beat them when it comes to the end user experience. It’s why the iPhone ran away with the cell phone industry in less than three years, easily beating long time incumbents like Motorola and Nokia, and it’s why touchscreen computing sucked until this April’s iPad rollout. But, back to the problem at hand.
The one thing I did remember from my brief interlude with Rockbox was that it could replace the default iPod bootloader, the bit of code that launched the UI when the iPod was restarted or powered up. Perhaps this was the solution. With fingers crossed, I downloaded and installed the program and fired it up. It saw the iPod and loaded itself without a hitch. I was back in business! Almost. Unfortunately, the intervening years since last I’d seen Rockbox hadn’t been too kind – the software was faster to load and no longer suffering the lag that made using it such a dreary experience, but it’s look hadn’t improved at all. It was still ugly and hard to navigate. The whole “files” vs “database” thing is an irritation, and I found myself pining for the good old Apple interface I’ve come to know and love.
I was skimming through the Rockbox manual when I came across a button-combo procedure, one I’d forgotten about, to allow you to boot to the Apple UI instead of Rockbox. I tried it, and presto! Life is good again. Well, mostly. iTunes still crashes when I plug the player in, which is frustrating because, as bad as it is, iTunes is pretty sweet when it comes to managing and automatically updating your podcasts, which I listen to almost exclusively these days. And, Rockbox has been a one-way journey – uninstalling it sends the iPod right back to the reboot cycle. But, at least I’ll have something to listen to on the way to KansasFest. And that’s really the most important thing, right?
It’ been a while since I’ve checked in here, and I’m sure the two of you who still bother to stop by here now and then are beginning to wonder if this blog would ever be updated again. Good news!
Today, I dug the Newton eMate 300 out of storage with a mind to upgrade the battery and apply the 2010 patch. I was able to locate the eMate itself, but the box containing the AC adapter, manuals and accessories seems to have gone into hiding. So, I’m left with a dead eMate and a PCMCIA modem without a dongle. It looks like the AC adapter can be had on eBay for a few dollars, though for the same $35, I can get an entire system and accessories. In fact, there’s quite a glut of eMates on eBay at the moment. In the meantime though, my Newton ambitions are on hold.
In other news, I was given a couple of vintage computers this weekend – one more related to this blog than the other. Up first, we have a Macintosh Classic from 1991.
It’s dirty and didn’t come with a keyboard or mouse; the letters “HD” are written on the top in black marker, leading me to believe this is the higher end model with the hard drive and extra memory. The AppleSerialNumberInfo website didn’t recognize this number and Chipmunk.nl identified it as an iPhone 3GS (I wish), so I don’t really know much about it. I’m not much of a Mac collector, so short of powering it up once or twice and poking around a bit, I doubt I’ll do anything with this. Maybe someone at KansasFest 2010 would enjoy it more than me.
The other item, a Franklin Ace 2100, is of much more interest.
For those unfamiliar, Franklin was a computer company in the 1980’s that specialized in cloning Apple II computers. They were so good at it, in fact, that Apple sued them and eventually won, bringing an end to the line of clones and setting an early precedent for copyright infringement in the young computer industry. Interestingly, Franklin Electronic Publishers continues to operate, though these days they’re not in the PC industry any more. The 2100 is part of the 2000 line of Apple IIe clones, and it seems likely that one of the reasons Apple went after Franklin is that these machines were consistently better than Apple’s. This one, for example, came with 384K of RAM, a 65CS02 processor and an RGB interface out of the box, all expensive add on options if you went with Apple’s offering. I didn’t get the monitor with this one, but it looks like I can use a standard composite monitor.
And finally, for my remaining Apple /// fan, I haven’t entirely abandoned my efforts there. The ProFile directory structure is still corrupt and I’ve instead turned my attention to getting the CFFA 2.0 up and running. I’ve gone as far as installing the card and partitioning it (I think), but I’ve stalled at selecting which OS and program launcher to use. BOS? SOS? Catalyst?
I’m sure that the two of you who come here on a regular basis have by now decided that this blog is exclusively dedicated to the Apple III, so here’s a little reminder that I haven’t completely abandoned my Apple II roots.
The upcoming issue of Juiced.GS will include my review of the new(ish) iDisk for Apple II. If you’re an Apple II fan and you haven’t yet subscribed to the last remaining Apple II publication in print, you should definitely consider it. And not just because you love my writing.
This turned out not to be as bad as I’d thought. The first Catalyst disk I tried (which I’d made from an image I stumbled across somewhere in the dark recesses of the net) immediately popped up a Drive Not Ready error. Since the activity light on the ProFile didn’t blink, I suspect that this particular copy was configured to look for a ProFile controller in a different slot. Catalyst doesn’t do any kind of automatic slot scanning, and there’s no menu option to reconfigure this – you have to go in with a sector editor and make some changes to the disk itself if you want Catalyst to look somewhere else.
As I couldn’t be bothered to load up the sector editor (I’m old and tired) or open up the /// and manually move the card, I took the easy way out. I had better luck with Dave Ottalini’s disks, as Catalyst recognized the ProFile and loaded the program list from the configuration file it found.
I poked around a bit in the application configuration options, before diving in and running a few applications.
Here, my luck ran out, as almost every application failed to start, a number of somewhat cryptic error messages popping up:
I decided to take another approach, and as I was browsing the ProFile directories with the System Utilites disk, I ran into the real problem:
I don’t have one of the ProFile low level format kits (available on eBay for a mere $300 or so… sheesh), but the drive passes the inital diagnostics that run at power up, so I’m hoping I can reformat and install a new set of programs. The existing data, unfortunately, is probably lost but that’s how it goes sometimes. I learned that someone wrote an Apple /// driver for Rich Dreher’s excellent CompactFlash for Apple card, so I may just shelve the ProFile for now and continue playing with the Apple ///’s mass storage capabilities in a different area. I wonder if Catalyst can be made to work with the CFFA…
So, it’s back to the Apple ///. Hey, it’s been calling – what can I do? I just can’t leave a problem unresolved. Anyway, I’d like to thank Dave Ottalini from Washington Apple Pi for providing me with working Quark Catalyst disks so I could try to get to the data on the ProFile drive.
My concern here, though, is (if I understand the manual) once you load a program onto the ProFile with Catalyst, it’s “branded” with the Catalyst’s serial number, so that files loaded with one serial number can’t be accessed with a copy of Catalyst that has a different serial. Which would have been a major inconvenience 20 years ago, if your Catalyst disk went bad and you didn’t have a backup. And since the Catalyst disk is apparently so heavily protected, that scenario probably isn’t so uncommon, especially these days with more and more floppy disks lost to the ravages of time. True, Quark included a complementary back up floppy with the package, but if you’ve lost it or it’s dead, you could be out of luck.
WAP has a disk image for a program that apparently deserializes Catalyst, and another to make a back up of your existing disk, but I don’t know if that allows you to access programs that have already been installed by another Catalyst that hasn’t already been deserialized.
Stay tuned!
A bit of personal trivia. The Quark headquarters building, which Google maps tells me is about 10 miles from my house, is located at 1800 Grant Street in Denver. In the mid-1990s, I worked for Kaiser-Permanente, building databases to help them index their extensive library of medical publications and articles. The Kaiser offices were located in this building, several floors below Quark. On my lunch breaks, I used to ride the elevator up and talk tech with whomever happened to be around that would listen to me. I wonder what they’d say if I walked in with a copy of Catalyst, asking for technical support… Actually, I know what they’d say: “Security!”
I played around with Photoshop’s Photomerge tool to create this panorama of the machines currently set up in my office. What you see here represents maybe 20% of my collection. I’m posting this because I like it, but also because it’s been more than a month since I’ve done anything on this blog.
L to R: IIgs, IIe, Macintosh 128K, Macintosh IIcx, IIc Plus, Macintosh XL, Apple III
The IIcx developed a last-minute bout of stage fright and refused to power up for the photo.
Notice was posted to comp.sys.apple2 and the KansasFest mailing list this morning that Joe Kohn, proprietor of the long-running Apple II software store Shareware Solutions II, passed away on Tuesday after a battle with cancer. Joe was a respected member of the community, writer for the the Apple II publication A+/InCider and KansasFest regular during the 1990’s. He will be missed.
A2Central announcement.
KansasFest.org announcement.