I’ve got a rare Apple ][e that had the upgraded 80-column display capability, but not the memory upgrade. That lead to a few childhood disappointments after buying games advertised for the ][e, which then told me that they needed a ][e to run. 
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Well apparently there’s a fan group that’s working on software updates so there’s still hope for the old beast.
Plus c’mon the thing had an awesome synth chip on board. It’s just a shame the thing is capped at like… what, eight megs of ram?
Kinda wish the Mark Twain revision had happened since it offered a few niceties (Internal floppy, supposedly end product would be a super drive but the test unit found didn’t have one, internal harddrive (forty meg SCSI,) a faster clock speed natively, and an ethernet card was supposed to have come out along with that could be purchased.) Thing was mainly to give entrenched customers a good basic package. Frankly if they’d pitched it right it could have been ‘timmy’s first computer’ and then sell the mac’s as ‘where real work gets done.’ Probably would have sold as a GS+ had it happened. Ah well. Way to treat the computer line that kept your company floating after two unmitigated disasters (the Lisa, and apple ///,) and the mac’s incredibly slow start.
Hell there was even a third party video card made that would let you use standard VGA displays rather than the weird refresh rate that only the GS monitor supports.
Ah well. A more civilized age, where you had to learn the proper commands and touch typing was mandatory. I just liked the II series because you could open them up and tinker without giving blood offerings to the gods of technology.
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Of course not. If they were running Gentoo they’d still be trying to get them to compile successfully.
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I remember my ][e as being enhanced with a 65c02 upgrade and expanded ram. I started one of my first businesses, around age 12, to pay for a novation Applecat 212. Loved that machine. I miss the game Aztec.
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Oh yeah, a color Radius Pivot, 15", with continuous desktop between both screens. It was awesome.
I’ve got an SE30 which needs a new SCSI controller. I need to remember to fix it sometime.
I never had a GS – when we finally left the Apple ][ world (after upgrading to a 128K //c clone called the Laser 128 for a few years) we moved to PC clones circa 1988. But in emulation I’m impressed with the GS – it basically was as friendly as a Mac in its GUI mode, plus being compatible with the traditional ][ software.
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I believe the Battlestar Galactica basically ran on Apple ///'s. On code written in BASIC too.
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Yeah it could boot up into old school Apple][ OS, or into the GUI ][GS environment. But it never had the tight Apple control over it that we saw with the Mac. For example I had WordPerfect for the ][GS, which first was amazing that WordPerfect ever even published an Apple][GS version, but existed in this weird half GUI world where it worked with a mouse and drop down menus, but it was green text on black background and monospaced columns of characters like some kind of bastard child of DOS and OS4…
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Well, WordPerfect was like that. 5.1 or 5.2. It didn’t do the transition to GUI very successfully. That’s when Word murdered it.
Text + mouse was it’s high point.
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Word Perfect didn’t get a gui til 6.0.
yeah, but WordPerfect for the Mac, while still kind of weird, it looked like a Mac program. On the ][gs those guys were definitely lost out in the woods.
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WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS was the last good word processor. The rest have been pieces of shite that promiise WYSIWYG but only deliver mail-merge with a bunch of crappy menus.
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Clay tablets with cuneiform…everything since has been shite. Accepted any character or drawing, rewritable until switched into write only mode by firing, could be recharged simply by dampening, unlimited resolution, cheap and easily repairable, spell check was unnecessary because only 4 other people could write so your way of spelling was just as valid as any. ah those were the days.
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How about Cray tablet computers? How dope would those be?
Last “word processing” I did last week I used Illustrator + InDesign. It was awkward, but I liked it.
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Did you convert everything to outlines before passing on the document to the client?
No, only the funky “Bauhaus” title. The client, my kid, was happy with the results.
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Pretty dope. Beautiful color and lighting. Interesting solutions for heat management. The only downside I can think of is you’d need one of these to move it:
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It would be cray-cray.
(Yeah, sorry. Couldn’t resist.)
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