Working from home on the //c+
gtia.com
gtia.com
The later IIc+ was mostly a cynical ploy by apple to drum up some cash while assuring that the Apple II line didn't compete with the mac. In most ways it was a downgrade from the earlier IIGS. Its only real advantage was a slightly higher clock rate, which could be solved on the IIGS with an accelerator like the transwarpGS. Further, not only was it an 8-bit only machine, its major upgrade was the replacement of the 5.25" floppy with the 3.5". Which meant it didn't run most 8-bit apple ][ software which was overwhelmingly on 5.25" floppies. A number of applications were Prodos based and could be simply copied to 3.5" floppies, but most games were DOS 3.3/etc and effectively bound to the 5.25 format. By the time the //c+ was released, the much less expensive Laser 128 (a clone) was filling the "portable" niche in a much better way. Particularly the 128EX, which was clocked nearly as high but significantly less expensive.
Basically it was a fiasco of a product.
Apple ][ timeline from wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Apple_II_famil...
So, more expensive than a laser 128EX, worse software compatibility due to being 8-bit with a 3.5" floppy drive, and less capable in all regards than an upgraded IIGS. The latter were frequently in use into the late 1980's early 1990's with hard drives, cpu accelerators, multiple megs of ram, math coprocessors, x86 emulators, etc.
Which explains why its considered to be a fairly rare apple II.
My memory could be faulty, but I also don’t recall having compatibility issues between DOS and ProDOS.
The big issue was 5.25” games, which would pull all sorts of low-level hardware-dependent copy protection tricks. Those couldn’t be copied without special hacks.
The //c+ broke all that, you bought it, took it home, and discovered that literally nothing worked. All the software being sold on 3.5" was for the IIGS, and didn't work in your machine, and all the software for the IIe/c/+ came on 5.25".
So, your nice compact standalone machine, suddenly requires you to drive back to the computer store and buy a 5.25" floppy drive. A piece of hardware that was a good 1/3 or so the total size of the machine. No longer was it a "compact" standalone setup.
The few times I actually saw //c+'s in the wild, they were lonely useless machines because the owner never purchased the 5.25" drive. Leaving them with a machine which booted prodos, and maybe appleworks.
A compact IIGS in that form factor clocked at 4Mhz with the 3.5" drive would have been a great product. Heck it would have made more sense to have put a hard drive in it instead of the 3.5". Apple did neither, because they just wanted to milk the II market a bit more so they could release the next mac.
Some more interesting things that I remember:
The packaging of the computer smell to apples and lasted many years.
Lots of experimentation with graphics and colors (with a green monochrome monitor), sound, poke/peek, disk and file formats, etc.
Trying to create a 3D vector game about a robot exploring a haunted house, got to complete a stairway climbing scene.
Playing around with text to speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIejqWEV_8w
Playing some of my favourite games of all time: Wolfenstein (predecessor of the 3D versions), and Bard's Tale.
Testing a self-replicating virus in Pascal from some Polish magazine.
Trying to wire a circuit to the joystick port, causing sparks and damaging the port :d
The guy is running a terminal emulator on the Apple II? Or does it understand vt220 instructions natively?
What is this interface, an editor?
Very cool stuff nonetheless.
It looks like it's exactly that. The zany CHIP computer 'wifi modem' used to connect is itself a more powerful computer than the vintage 'terminal'.
http://podsix.org/articles/pimodem/
However that can be replaced with a plipbox (I believe he has open sourced it and you can build your own).
http://lallafa.de/blog/amiga-projects/plipbox/
You can just plug this into the back of your PC. This is a good demonstration of how it all works.
30 years after it was discontinued, you need a computer many thousands of times more powerful to connect the //c+ to a network. That computer costs $9.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ProTERM
Edit: actually the author said it was modem mgr.
http://www.apple2.org.za/gswv/a2zine/GS.WorldView/v1999/Oct/...
I though about writing a terminal application that would stand between the physical terminal and /dev/tty* to translate a UTF-8 multi-byte character to a predefined ASCII character. It would be confusing, but still less confusing than the mess I get today when I try to see information code d in UTF-8.
iconv is not a good choice because, AFAIK, there are hundreds of code points impossible to be translate to character sets that have 256 possible values.
Any tips?
Along with a “Retrobrite” treatment to remove the yellowing from the ABS case parts and restore it’s original “platinum” appearance:
There was also the original “Apple ][“ and “Apple ][+”. Only the IIe and IIgs were stylised with “II”.
Huge difference.
Still the IIgs might be more rare? I seem to recall the world had moved on by the time that came out.
(I might be mixing up the eras a little. I most remember the Performa but that was the next computer after my 386, to which we upgraded from a Tandy 1000. I still remember writing my first program on the Tandy.)
The IIc+ is actually the last apple II created and wasn't particularly popular because it "split" the market by being a 8 bit computer which couldn't run the newer IIGS's/16-bit software. OTOH, it was clocked faster than the IIGS. In a way it was just apple's response to the laser 128+, which was a much better IIc. The cynical take was that apple didn't want to create another product that would eat into its mac sales like a 32-bit apple II, or much faster IIGS would have done. So they backed the feature set down.
The IIGS continued on as the choice apple product long after the IIc+ came out because people were just buying transwarps/etc, hard drives, etc to create a more advanced IIGS.
I don't have hard data of course, but I've been an avid Apple II and Mac hobbyist for a while, and own every model of Apple II. I think the only Apple II model that's rarer than the IIc+ is the original II, and that might not even be true. (The original II is _definitely_ more expensive, but I assume demand is also much higher.)
The IIgs is pretty easy to come by. It came out two years before the IIc+ and was also on sale for a lot longer than the IIc+. The IIe is definitely the most common. It was in production and on sale for 11 years, and schools bought tons of them.