Why am I bringing this up?  One, to remind my two loyal readers that there’s no lack of ventures any one of us can choose to be involved in.  There may not be much going on in software or hardware development these days, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do.  The Apple II community these days is a civil place filled with smart, knowledgeable people willing answer any questions, and I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t welcome another helping hand with whatever project they’re working on.  All you have to do is ask.

The second reason I’m writing this is to remind myself that I need to post here more often.  I have a basement full of Apple II projects just waiting to be started.   (My wife would likely point out that some of those projects are beginning to creep upstairs and into the living room.)  Briefly, my to-do list looks something like this:

- Repair or cannibalize the Franklin ACE 2100 damaged in the shelf collapse.

- Break out my new, still unopened soldering iron and start to re-learn soldering.

- Clean and re-align a handful of Apple Disk III drives.

- Troubleshoot and repair two dead Apple IIIs.

- Learn Apple II assembly language and Pascal, and refresh myself on Apple Logo.

- Finish at least two partially-complete articles for upcoming Juiced.GS issues.

- Figure out how to get myself to KansasFest this year.

- Finish several on-going scanning projects for apple2scans.net.

- Finish the Apple IIe Card set up in my Macintosh Color Classic.

So here’s my little kick in the butt from me to you (but more to me): get involved, do something.  The late Ryan Suenaga used to say, if you’re a programmer and you come to KansasFest without something to show, you suck.  I’m going to modify that slightly and say, if you’re an Apple II user and you’re not actively involved in your chosen hobby, you suck.

What does your Apple II to-do list look like? And how many items have you already crossed off your list?

Apple II Forever!

The dates for next year’s “Summer Camp for Geeks”, KansasFest 2011 were announced today.  The annual celebration of all things Apple II will once again take place at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri.  Make sure you mark off your calendar for July 19 – 24.  No further details have been announced yet – hey, it’s still 11 months away – but stay tuned!  KansasFest has happened every summer now for more than 20 years and is still going strong, and as an Apple II hobbyist and lover, you really have no excuse not to be there.

Prices haven’t been posted, but if KansasFests past are any indication, saving for registration will cost you just over a dollar a day, if you start  putting your pennies away now.  And really, what can you buy these days for a dollar?  Not much, that’s what.  Where else will you have the opportunity to rub shoulders with your fellow Apple II geeks and luminaries past and present?  Nowhere, that’s where.  So start saving today, so you won’t have to come up with empty excuses next July.

Need more convincing? Take a look through the KansasFest Photo Galleries for a peek at what you’ve already missed.

To paraphrase one of my favorite Apple II geeks, there won’t always been a KansasFest, so make sure you get there!

You know, I need to hire a full-time assistant to follow me around all day whose only job would be to intervene whenever I forget who I am and try to volunteer for public speaking, interviews, or anything that might involve interfacing with more than two people at a time.  All he or she would have to do is politely interject whenever such an opportunity arises and remind me that I’m a terrible public speaker and will probably regret it in the morning.  Case in point: my KansasFest report with the guys over at RetroMacCast.  Now recorded and posted for posterity, the latest RetroMacCast podcast includes a ten-minute discussion with myself and the hosts James and John, during which I basically forgot everything that goes on at KansasFest.  In a voice that grows increasingly strained with tension and higher in pitch as the interview wears on, I also skip most of the things and people I wanted to mention.  Epic…

Suffice it to say, between the interview and the recent Apple /// presentation debacle, my communications with the retrocomputing public will be restricted from here on out to this blog (which no one reads, fortunately) and the occasional error-filled post on comp.sys.apple2.  Assuming I can keep my mouth shut next time someone asks for volunteers.   Yeesh…

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…