Apple IIe adventures
======================

You might  know that  I am  not an Apple  fan. I  have no  problem with
closed systems -  I have been an  SGI user for ages. Anyway  I have not
found too much parts of Apple philosophy too bad for me.

Still, I do  own a few older  pieces of Apple hardware.  The PowerCD is
cool although it  is not as good as  it looks to be. I like  and use it
anyway. The  PowerBook G4 1.67GHz has  just a few flaws.  And the first
iMac G5 is a fine piece of engineering, too.

The Apple II is something different.  A machine just about year younger
than me but still quite capable.  Simple a limited maybe. But extremely
expandable  and  wildly popular.  People  still  making new  cards  and
extensions for it.

My machine has an Ethernet card, a storage expansion card a serial card
and so on. A modern RAM board is  ready to be installed. There is a Z80
card available and so.

The problem can be  the monitor. I used to use an old  small LCD TV but
it  was not  ideal (it  works wonderfully  with the  Soviet Elektronika
Bk-0010 though). Now I have got a ReActiveMicro screen. A cheap looking
11.6" LCD but tuned for the Apple II. I must say I like it.

I spend an evening  in playing with the Apple as now  it is pleasant to
use. It  is IIe Enhanced  so I can run  here things like  Telnet65 just
like on an actual computer. I also played with the BASIC and even wrote
a short Gopher post on the machine. Too bad there is no Gopher client.

Of  course  it  can  run  just  one  program  at  time.  There  is  no 
multitasking,  no  shared  clipboard  (except inside  of  some  office 
packages) nor other modern things.                                     

Still it is  amazing that the IIe was discontinued  about the same time
(1993) as the 32bit SGI Indigo workstation!

It reminds me  that I should give a  try to the BBC BASIC  port for the
Apple IIe.  I am trying  to use it on  all my computers  (including the
Indigo and my PDP-11 box).

There is still a lot that I can try to do with this machine.



Written on the PSION Organiser II Model LZ.