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.
