Programming an Apple ][ outside of Integer BASIC or AppleSoft was a real challenge as you had to change of diskette (140k...) all the time. I still have AZTEC C and Merlin8/16 assembler somewhere...
The original BASIC for the Apple ][ was called "integer BASIC" which was coded by hand by Steve Wozniak. Applesoft BASIC was a much improved language developed by Microsoft (back when they were all friends).
Everyone is avoiding mention of the LISA. With good reason I guess.
PE
By early 1982, the Macintosh was beginning to be acknowledged as a significant project within Apple, instead of a quirky research effort, but it still remained somewhat controversial. Since the Mac was sort of like a Lisa that was priced like an Apple II, it was seen as potential competition from both groups. Also, our leader Steve Jobs had a habit of constantly boasting about the superiority of the Mac team, which tended to alienate everybody else.
Before anyone could respond, the door was flung open, and in strode Rich Page, the systems wizard who was one of the main designers of the Lisa. (...)
"You guys don't know what you're doing!", he began to growl, obviously in an emotional state of mind, "The Macintosh is going to destroy the Lisa! The Macintosh is going to ruin Apple!!!"(...)
"Steve Jobs wants to destroy Lisa because we wouldn't let him control it", Rich continued, almost looking like he was going to start crying. "Sure, it's easy to throw a prototype together, but it's hard to ship a real product. You guys don't understand what you're getting into. The Mac can't run Lisa software, the Lisa can't run Mac software. You don't even care. Nobody's going to buy a Lisa because they know the Mac is coming! But you don't care!"
As soon as he seized the reins from Jef Raskin in January 1981, Steve Jobs galvanized the Macintosh team with an extreme sense of urgency. One of his first acts as head of the project was to bet John Couch, the executive in charge of the Lisa Division, $5000 that the Macintosh would beat the Lisa to market, despite the fact that Lisa had more than a two year head start, and we had barely begun. The Mac team always had incredibly optimistic schedules, because Steve would never be satisfied with more realistic estimates (see Reality Distortion Field), as if he could make it happen faster through sheer force of will.
Enter Steve Jobs "wisdom" and "genius":Twiggy was a fairly ambitious project, more than quadrupling the capacity of standard floppy disks by doubling the data rate (which required higher density media) (...)
The Lisa was designed to include two built-in Twiggy drives, so it made sense for the Macintosh to use Twiggy as well. (...)
Meanwhile, the Mac team was beginning to panic. We were using a single Twiggy drive as our floppy disk, and we didn't have a hard disk to fall back on. It looked like the Twiggy drive was never going to be reliable or cost effective enough for the Macintosh, but we were stuck without an alternative. If we couldn't find a suitable replacement quickly enough, we'd have to slip the entire project indefinitely
(...)
Fortunately, we were aware of Sony's new 3.5 inch drive that they started to ship in the spring of 1983 through Hewlett-Packard, their development partner. George Crow, the analog engineer who designed the Mac's analog board, had come from HP prior to working at Apple and was sold on the superiority of the Sony drives (...)
Steve Jobs was finally ready to acknowledge reality and give up on the Twiggy drive. When he saw the Sony drive he loved it, and immediately wanted to adapt it for the Mac. But instead of doing the obvious thing and striking a deal with Sony, Steve decided that Apple should take what we learned from Twiggy and engineer our own version of a 3.5" drive, working with our Japanese manufacturing partner Alps Electronics, who manufactured the Apple II floppy drives at a very low cost.
This seemed like suicide to George Crow and Bob Belleville. The Mac was supposed to ship in less than seven months, and it was preposterous to think that we could get a 3.5" drive into production by then, if we could do it at all, given the disk division's dismal track record. But Steve was convinced that we should do our own drive, and told Bob to cease all work on the Sony drive.
Everyone is avoiding mention of the LISA. With good reason I guess.
PE
I had a so called Big Mac, the 500k Mac that I got in 1984. Later I added a daughter board with a math co-processor and 4 Megs of memory. Even later I used it as a server for my hard drives and several Apple computers until around 2000. It was slow but it still could work as a data server. Do not try this at home with a circa 1984 IBM computer or clone.
I am really surprised that no one mentioned the Commodore 64 (or VIC-20)! I learnt BASIC on that.
Cheers,
Flavio
Hi Flavio
My first computer was an Atari 8-bit computer and i started with that. Commodores were "the competition", i never got to play with one sadly.
I got my first Mac in 1995, when Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy. Never looked back.
Apple...Bankruptcy!? Goodness, you wouldn't know it from the Apple machines virtually everywhere at the time. Everybody wanted an Apple, and when they got it, cars were adorned with one or more Apple rainbow logos.
Good luck on your endeavor!
But, I don't know how this thread turned from trying to develop Kodachrome to talking about vintage computing haha.
You're the exception! You can be anything you want. You've earned it, and we're lucky to have you.You think I don't have reason to be exasperated? With a dash of humor of course!
PE
Kodachrome is film, and that's what we talk about here. Those who have a problem with it could do us all a favor and stop with the exasperated posts.
Voldemort will be summoned!! Careful with the K-word!!
Algol 60 was full of surprises. Read the old articles by D. Knuth in the 1960's issues of CACM or ACM Journal (which are online).
For example, people didn't realize a statement could be passed as a parameter.
As an embedded firmware engineer, I love assembly languages (originally IBM 360 and have gone all the way to ARM). I've also written microcode to control specialized processors.
My main language is C - I've never liked C++'s overloaded syntactical constructs. My current favorite is Python: an extremely powerful and elegant language.
In case anyone wants to see the finished project (if you didn't know I was asking the question for a chemistry project), here's the link:
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