The Obtronix Apple I reproduction is a kit produced by Steve Gabaly, who occasionally auctions them off on eBay. It is almost an exact replica of Steve Wozniak’s original 1976 version.
The Apple I kit included only the motherboard. You had to supply your own power supply, keyboard, monitor (or TV), and case. It was a true hobbyist computer, but at the time, it represented the most innovative and powerful home computer of its kind.
Apple and the Apple II became a legend in their own time, landmarks in the age of computing they helped create. The Apple lore includes many firsts and fascinating facts. This how it happened.
The Apple III was Apple’s first attempt to move away from the tried-and-true Apple II architecture. It would prove to be the company’s first bona fide failure. Even though engineers repeatedly warned of problems with the Apple III, it seemed that no one in top management doubted the machine’s eventual success.
Apple introduced the Apple IIgs in September 1986. It was intended to be a replacement for the venerable Apple II that was the mainstay of Apple’s revenues for most of the early part of the 1980s. The Macintosh was changing the world and would soon replace the Apple II as the company’s cash cow, but many Apple II faithful still longed for an advanced version of their beloved computer.
This article examines a portion of one of Apple’s Apple IIe owner’s manuals. Apple produced several different editions of the Apple IIe owner’s manual over the life of the computer. This one was not the first nor was it the last. This particular Apple IIe manual first shipped with the Apple IIe in 1984, the same year that Apple released the world-changing Macintosh. Reading through the manual is like taking a time machine back to 1984, when home computers where still relatively new and the Apple IIe drove the majority of Apple Computer’s sales revenue.
In 2005, Kelvin Sherlock released PNG Floyd, a CDA that captures Apple IIgs screenshots and saves them in the standard Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format. PNG is an open, extensible image format viewable by just about every modern graphics application.
The program listed below is a screen saver that generates random vertical and horizontal lines in low-resolution mode. The lines don’t just appear on the screen. They drag slowly across the screen from one side to the other. The program could also be described as a pattern generator. Pressing the spacebar will clear the screen and quit the screen saver. The program makes use of a pseudo random number generator built into Applesoft BASIC. RND is a function that seems to pick numbers at random.
Listed below is the code for a simple paint program I put together using Applesoft BASIC and the low-resolution graphics built into the Apple IIe. The paint program allows you to draw low-resolution pictures on the screen in 14 different colors.
The following information pertains to the Apple II, II Plus, IIe, IIc, and IIgs computers. This is a must read for anyone frustrated by the lack of software commercially available for the venerable Apple II. Three primary file types are discussed: ShrinkIt files, binscii encoded files, and disk images.
Applesoft BASIC is a versatile language. It is possible to design simple games using low-resolution graphics. You won’t be winning any awards for graphics but it is an interesting way to spend an afternoon. Listed below is a Pong program I designed. It uses the up arrow and down arrow to control the paddle (vertical orange line). It is a Pong-type game very similar to swash.
Before Steve Jobs introduced the talking Macintosh in 1984, there was Software Automated Mouth and the Apple II computer. This program allows you to give speech to text on an Apple IIe computer.
Here is a cool program called ][ GIF, version 1.0, by Jason Harper. The program makes it possible to view a GIF on an Apple IIe. The Apple IIe doesn’t have much graphical capabilities compared to modern computers but in its time, it was a quantum leap above many of its competitors.
