(no subject)

[garote]

Gnahahaa!! So, I have, like, ten yards of serial cables in this plastic box. Wide cables, thin cables, grey ones, brown ones ... all kinds of little connecters on the ends. A few screwy null modems. Five gender-changers. I've lugged them from place to place, swearing that "I'll use them some day! Oh yes! Far in the future I'll desperately need a serial cable, and this box will save me! Wouldn't I feel like a cheesehead if I threw it away?"

Pbbtt. Well that day has come. I networked my Apple IIgs to my PC, through the wall, with a frankenstein assembly of parts. In a few hours I had a dozen disk-images on the PC, and had thrown TEN POUNDS of 5.25 media into the garbage can.

FREE AT LAST from the BAGGAGE OF OLD MEDIA. I think I'm going to toss the extra serial cables, too. On the way I recovered some real gems from the early 90's, my early days of programming. Here's the victory screen from a particularly sarcastic game my friend was working on:

And here's the victory screen from what appears to be a parody of every D&D-based game ever written for the Apple ][:

Well, the birthday dinner is over. I ate as much cake as I could, though I wasn't feeling my best. I was fatigued all day, and would have actually been happy just coming home and falling into bed. But hey, five people made a great Caesar Salad dinner for me! Couldn't snub them.

Got tickets for Lord of the Rings, 8pm, Wednesday. Sweeeeet.

Also opened the box for the third USB controller today. Had three people playing Gauntlet II. Total old-skool video game action. I'VE NOT SEEN SUCH BRAVERY.

Comments

CABLES!!!

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, man I know all too well about those darned cables and crap! I think it may just have something to do with being in your mid-twenties; I've totally been trying to trim out the excess junk, too.

It's amazing how easily this crap gathers.

So, since you transferred over all of your old GS media, are you keeping the GS? I'm really torn at the moment about that. On one hand, I want to keep my GS just because it has so much sentimental and historical value. On the other hand, I haven't even plugged it in for 8 months. It was probably another year before that. It just takes up space and collects dust.

Wouldn't it be cool to boot it up for the grandkids 40 years from now, though? I guess I'd better not be depending upon floppy disks if I want to be able to do that.

So, it's a tough call. I have an old Apple IIe that I've been keeping for the same reason. It hasn't been plugged in for years.

What do you think? Should I be practical or emotional?

-Android

Re: CABLES!!!

[(Anonymous)]

This brought up something else in my mind:

<TANGENT>
I would *love* to go back to the good ol' days and sit around for hours plotting interesting-looking iterative mathematical functions in 'hi-res'. I would love to go back to trying to figure out how to write a sprite routine in assembly language, and then figure out how to make it *faster*. I would love to write a program that beeps the speaker, and then try to write one that will beep the speaker with two tones *simultaneously*. I would love to go back to learning how the joystick interface works. I would love to figure out how to get a sample into the Ensoniq chip's memory, and then get it to play.

I would do anything to go back to the simplicity we had back then, and go back to the tinkering and endless hours of time that could have been spent doing other things, like *working*. I really do miss that. Computers these days do amazing things, there's no doubt about that. They're inifintely more useful to the average joe now, too. But, it's all so abstract now. I really feel like the geekiness has been taken right out of computers. What's worse is that even if the geekiness was still there, I wouldn't have time to appreciate it. I have a life and a job and obligations now. Things to do. Always things to do. At this very moment, I feel guilty for sitting here writing this because I know there are things I need to get done right now.

</TANGENT>

-Android

Re: CABLES!!!

[(Anonymous)]

Back when we were kids, we once played with a simple program that we had written. All it did was take the contents of one computers' video memory and spew it out over the modem. The program on the other side would receive it, and spew it back to the screen. It sucked horribly. If one byte was corrupted or lost, the whole remainder of the picture was screwed. It was slow, inefficient, had no error correction or compression. But, it was an idea that we had, and we made it work. That was a lot of fun. It's not like I needed or even wanted the pictures- it would have been easier to put them on a disk and hand them to each other the next day at school. It was just fun because it was hacking. It proved to us that we understood how video memory, modems, data transfer, etc., worked, and it made us proud to see it working. We had no previous example or programming courses to tell us how it should be done; we just figured it out from reading the technical manuals and fooling around with it.

Anyway, I miss that. It accomplished nothing, and it wasn't made to impress anyone. It was just something fun for us to do.

Okay, I'll stop now. ;-)

-Android

Re: CABLES!!!

[garote]

Tell ya what. I'll bring my boxes-o-cables to your place. Well dump yours and mine out on the carpet, throw away ALL the duplicates, and then split what's left between us, and I'll take my half home. :)

Ancient Apples: My suggestion is that you immortalize the IIe's chips on some art project somewhere in your house. Pound them into the walls of the garage with a hammer, or something. Then toss that puppy. The IIgs, however, I suggest you keep, in combination with a 3.5" drive and a serial cable, if you've got it. All the software on disks and HD can be burned onto a CD, and written out to 3.5's per demand. Sure, a HD is nice if you wanna boot GS/OS, but you can do that in an emulator -- but GS/OS isn't what makes and Apple IIgs special.

Re: CABLES!!!

[garote]

Arrex and Beatings and I spent a couple days doing the modern version of this in Pasadena. Mr. Beatings broke out the Apple IIgs and wrote a sound-wave generator in BASIC, then we transferred them from Apple to Mac to PC to look at the spectral analysis. Arrex browsed Gnutella on his laptop and accumulated a pile of _terrible_ monkey themed songs, and booted into his GS emulator to find software for Mr. Beatings. I ran the PC's Apple IIgs emulator on the television set, and played Shadowgate for a while. We also recorded some of our dialogue. It's pretty geeky. :) "No, KIT-TY, these are MY CHEESY POOFS!"

So the geekiness remains :)