My Apple IIE: Nearly 30 Years Later (2012)
leucht.com
leucht.com
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. :-)
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).
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. :)
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.
https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/old-rifa-capacitors-and-a...
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.
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
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.)
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.