In September of 1986, Apple released the Apple //GS. Of course, in 1986 it wasn’t nearly as easy as today to get tech news. I found out about the new machine weeks later when I went to a local magazine shop and saw it on the covers of the Apple // magazines. I promptly bought every one of them and went home to learn about the new machine.

It seemed to have everything I wanted in a new computer. The CPU was a 16-bit version of the 6502, a 65816. It was clocked at 2.8 MHz versus the 1 MHz of the Apple ][+ I had (note that as I write this, 2.8 GHz machines and faster are common). It came with 256Kb of memory versus the 64Kb I had. And, it had a mouse, detached keyboard, 3.5″ floppy drives (external) and an RGB monitor. But best of all, it had much better graphics and sound. The graphics modes were 320×200 with 16 colours or 640×200 with 4 colours so it wasn’t necessarily competitive with the Atari ST or the Amiga but it was a huge step forward from my Apple ][+. The sound though was probably better than anything on the market at the time with a real music synthesizer chip capable of 16 stereo voices. Add in a Mac-like interface and it seemed like the perfect machine.

That winter I started reading everything I could about it. I bought lots of magazines and as usual, Nibble seemed to have the best technical coverage. I also bought a book from Apple called “Technical Introduction to the Apple //GS” and read it multiple times. I had to have this machine.

At the time, the cost of an Apple computer in Canada was far more than buying it in the US and bringing it across the border, paying all the duties even with the exchange rate. As we did every summer, we vacationed on our sailboat in western Lake Erie so we made a quick stop in Sandusky, OH and visited a local Apple dealer. They had a few Apple //GS’s on display and I went right to one. We tried a few applications but the ones we liked best were Bard’s Tale and Instant Music. So, along with those two software packages, we bought an Apple //GS, an external 3.5″ floppy drive, an RGB monitor and a 256K RAM card to bring the total memory to 512K. Our existing pair of 5.25″ floppy drives would work with it so we would re-use those from the old Apple ][+.

Then, I waited until we got home to actually set it up and try out my new computer. It was a long wait but eventually, I got my chance to try it out. I unpacked the boxes and started setting everything up. I opened the computer to add the RAM card and to plug in the interface card for the 5.25″ floppies but found the inside empty. Well, it did have a power supply but there was nothing else. There was no motherboard in the case. I grabbed the receipt and we called the store in Sandusky and told them what happened.

Apparently they had swapped the motherboard to fix someone else’s system who was having a problem and sold us the empty case! Thankfully, they agreed to send us a motherboard by courier. When the courier got to the border, he was having problems bringing it across because they insisted on duties being applied to the value of the part. After getting copies of receipts and documents showing we already paid the duties, and he was allowed to proceed. But it began to seem like someone didn’t want me to have a new computer.

When the motherboard arrived, I installed it in the case, plugged in the power supply and finished setting up the system. Shortly thereafter I had the familiar, reassuring beep to tell me everything was fine and my new computer was working. Many hours playing Bard’s Tale and making strange music with Instant Music ensued.

In the glow of this new computer, the old Apple ][+ clone which my dad and I built started to gather dust. We could still use Visicalc and all our old Apple // software on the new system so it very quickly replaced it. A friend of ours was looking for another Apple and without thinking too long, we sold it to him. A few years later, my dad and I realized we had let go something which was actually quite valuable to us. Compared to the new system, it just didn’t seem worth keeping at the time. But to this day, I would love to have it on my desk next to my current computer(s). It really was a one of a kind. We did go back to the man who bought it from us but he had scrapped it long before. The “Rand X” was gone.

But, I did have this fancy new computer which did do a whole lot more and I really wanted to write programs for it. But Applesoft Basic didn’t seem to be the way to do it anymore.

Within a couple of years of building our Apple ][+ clone, it seemed like almost everyone had a computer. But, almost no one I knew had an Apple ][. My best friends both got Atari 800XL’s. We played a bunch of games on those. I remember playing Conan on the Atari quite alot. Also, one of my friends got a 300 baud modem for his Atari. Sometimes I would watch as he would log onto a local BBS. He would post messages to different boards and I remember he would get into heated arguments about something or other with these people he had never met and didn’t know at all. It all seemed pretty strange but I would see it all again on Usenet a bit less than 10 years later.

Then a computer store opened in our small town. The owner was an Atari fanatic so my friends fit right in. We would hang out there quite a bit and talk about computers. I would get a bunch of ribbing about my Apple from these guys which probably helped to instill a sense of defensiveness about my choice of computer which would often pop up over the next several years. More on that later.

Perhaps looking for more like-minded people, I joined the “London Apple Corps” at some point. It must have been around 1984 or so because I remember someone bringing a Macintosh 128K to a meeting. At these meetings, new software and hardware would be demonstrated, people would ask for help with some problem they were having and just talk about Apple. They sold freeware software and if you knew who to ask, you could also obtain some other not so free software also. Later, I would become the librarian for the user group. This meant that I kept a good supply of the software for sale, making copies of the 5 1/4″ disks as necessary and filling orders.

But more than anything else, people had Commodore 64’s. I hated the C-64. Compared to my Apple, it just seemed slow and clunky. On my Apple, I could draw graphics without incanting peeks and pokes. Just a couple of “HCOLORS” and “HPLOTS” in a Basic program and you could do some interesting things. On my Apple, you can cram 256 characters and tokens on a single line of Basic which was great for making cool and complicated 1 or 2 line Basic programs. On the C-64, you could only have 80 characters on a line which seemed like a serious problem at the time. But more than anything, the performance of the disk drive on the C-64 drove me nuts. I cared because at school, this is what we had.

In high school, we had a grade 11 and grade 12 computer science course. They allowed students who were interested to take the grade 11 course in grade 10 and the grade 12 course in grade 11. However, I was allowed to skip the grade 11 computer science course and take the grade 12 computer science course in grade 10. Oh joy, I get to use a Commodore 64!

For our year end project, we had to decide on something we would write and then code it. I decided to make a “Adventure Writer” and an “Adventure Player”. I created a simple language to describe the locations in an adventure game, the relationship between these places and the objects in the game. The writer allowed you to create these things and save it into a data file. Then, you could run the player, load your data file and play the game you had made. So, I was actually writing two programs for my project, not just one. And, they were the most complex Basic programs I had written and were very long. The disk drive on the C-64 was so slow that the time to load and save the programs was significant. In a one hour period, I would spend several minutes just waiting for my program to load. And if I didn’t start saving it early enough, I would be late for my next class. In the end, I got it done but I did have to go to a friends house one Saturday to work on it.

By 1985 and 1986, things were changing. At the London Apple Corps, there was conflict between all of the Apple ][ users and the new Macintosh users. It seemed more and more time was spent talking about the Mac. Eventually, the user group would split and the die hard Apple ][ users like myself wouldn’t have to worry about the Mac anymore. Also, the Amiga 1000 and the Atari 520ST arrived. At the computer store in town, the Atari fans would extoll the virtues of the ST, deride the Amiga and completely mock the Mac which had no colour at the time and was far more expensive. One of my friends replaced his 800XL with a 520ST and would later upgrade it to a 1040ST. I never met anyone with an Amiga at the time but later in university would meet an Amiga owner.

By 1986, my Apple ][+ clone was just not as cool as it once was. But what would I replace it with. Soon enough I would have my answer.

As I said in my previous article, I didn’t just use my Apple clone to learn programming. There were games to play and work to do. Most of this software was copied, which was the style at the time (to quote Grandpa Simpson) but not all of it was illegal. Honestly, the games we enjoyed the most were the ones we bought so at least the developers of those great games were properly reimbursed.

Among those games which we bought and spent hours playing were the Ultima series. Specifically Ultima III, Ultima IV and Ultima V. To me, Ultima III was the one which I enjoyed the most. It was a simple role playing game where the goal was, in general, kill everything you see. If you need a bit more gold, we would often raid a city, kill the inhabitants and take all the gold. And, if you leave the city and come right back, you could do it all again. It was a quick way to get the gold you need for buying a new ship or whatever you thought you might need next. But with Ultima IV, that all changed. In Ultima IV, your actions and choices affected your ability to progress in the game. Your character needed to develop different virtues like honesty and honour. So, killing the inhabitants of a city and stealing their gold didn’t help anymore. I finished Ultima III (a couple of times I think) but I never got to the end of Ultima IV. I was pretty far along but didn’t get there. I don’t think I spent more than a couple of hours playing Ultima V. My brother, Steve spent a bunch of time playing that one. But it came on a crazy number of disks and I really didn’t enjoy all of the disk swapping which was required.

We also played Summer Games alot. I remember that we would often play a single player game and take turns on the events. My brother was best at some events, I was best at others, our friends best at other ones. Our goal was to try to get the best score possible. But, no one was good at the gymnastics event and it seemed to go on and on forever. So, if someone screwed up their event, they had to do the gymnastics event.

That wasn’t the only olympics style game we had. We “acquired” a copy of Microsoft Decathalon and am I thankful we didn’t pay for it. Firstly, because the game sucked. Secondly, because it allows me to say that I am one of the few people who haven’t ever purchased a Microsoft product (and this is the only one I ever pirated). I remember the shot put event the most. You had to use the joystick to control your players arm. One axis controlled the rotation of your shoulder and the other axis controlled the rotation of your elbow. Try as you might to throw the shotput, inevitably you would end up with your arm in a completely unnatural position and the shotput would go anyway. Truly an awful game but not a bad piece of software for Microsoft. I honestly don’t recall it ever crashing which is something.

It wasn’t just games on our Apple though. I had a copy of Apple Writer which I was using to write essays and other things for school. We bought an Epson RX-80 dot matrix printer and a Grappler parallel interface card to hook it up. So, I could print out whatever I was working on in Apple Writer. But, an Apple ][+ only had 40 columns of text and no lower case (unless you bought an 80 column card or modded it to get lower case, neither of which I did). In Apple Writer, it showed everything as upper case but if you printed it, it was all lower case. If you pressed “escape” and then a letter, that letter would be shown in inverse text and indicated it was actually upper case. Sure enough, it would be upper case when you printed. So, that is how you got upper case and lower case in your documents on a computer which only supported upper case. The printer had 80 columns of text (I think you could get 132 with the right control sequence also) but the screen only had 40. Between the different columns of text and the lack of lower case, it definitely wasn’t WYSIWIG but it was good enough for me.

We also bought The Print Shop from Broderbund. Suddenly, we were printing banner, signs and lots of other crazy things. It was a great little program though and it made it really easy to create a nice simple, reasonably good looking documents. Or, you could use lots of pieces of clip art, turn on all of the different text modes and really create a god awful looking poster. We did that quite often too.

The other neat thing about the Grappler interface card was that it could print directly from the Apple ][‘s graphics screen. Using the right commands, you could print the text screen, the low res screen or the high res screen. So, all of the little programs I wrote to create strange patterns in hi res I could print now. Pretty soon the walls around the computer was covered in paper of different images I had printed.

We had that computer from 1982 until 1987 and it served us very well. In 1982, I didn’t know anyone else with a computer but within a couple of years, it seemed almost everyone had one.

Turns out if you build an Apple ][+ clone in your basement, you can take first prize in your school’s grade 7 and 8 science fair. In retrospect, I (and my dad) assembled a computer from parts but clearly from the look on people’s faces when I showed my project, people thought we had designed it. In the future, I would come to better understand the difference but at the time I was happy to have people think what I had done was somehow very significant.

But, in a way it was. What I had was a computer but no real manuals which came with it. Doug provided us with a Dos 3.3 manual (which is visible in one of the pictures about the construction of the computer) and some photocopies of some other manuals. On the whole though, the machine was undocumented.

He did provide us with a bunch of disks of programs. I would experiment with these programs and figure out how they worked. For example, we had a copy of VisiCalc but no manuals. So, I experimented with it until I understood how it worked. Eventually, I had figured out enough that I helped my dad build a budget spreadsheet for the family.

I didn’t just experiment with programs. Any time I found a BASIC program on these disks, I would load them and read them. I would try to figure out how they worked. If I saw a command like “poke” in the text which I didn’t know, I would try to figure out what it did and why the program did it. I would try to change the program and see what happened.

The other place I was learning was from Nibble magazine. There were other Apple ][ magazines on the rack but Nibble was the only one I really cared about. If I remember correctly, I ended up getting a subscription so I didn’t miss an issue if I didn’t get to the store on time. Nibble was different because it was packed full of useful and interesting programs. They had a one-liner and two-liner contest where people would submit programs which were 1 or 2 lines of BASIC long but did incredible things. In many ways, it was similar to the Obfuscated C Contest because what these programs lacked in readability, they made up for in creativity.

Plus, the magazine had lots of long BASIC and machine code programs. I would type many of these programs in. With machine code programs, it was just a listing of hexadecimal numbers which I would enter into the Apple ][ monitor. Often, my friend Jeff would be over reading the hex numbers to me while I typed away. Often after entering everything and then running it, it wouldn’t work. With machine code, I didn’t really have the skills at the time to do anything except just check the hex digits against the listing. But with BASIC programs, I would start debugging it.

So, from this early stage, I had already learned two key skills which were and still are critical to my work today. First, there is no better way to learn than to experiment with something. Real understanding comes when you see how something works. Secondly, and probably more important for someone interested in software, read other people’s code. For me, I was reading all of the BASIC programs I could find. I would read them to see how they worked. I would read them to see what tricks other people used. And I would read them so I could change them and make them work for me the way I wanted. To develop these skills today, get involved in open source projects. Get the code to a project you are interested in. Figure out how it works. Try changing it. Did it do what you thought it would? If not, why not? Nothing beats getting your hands dirty, especially with someone else’s code.

But, I didn’t just program on this new toy I had. My next story will describe some of the other things I was doing with my Apple ][.

Now that realities of tax, duties and exchange rates had squashed my dream of owning a Timex Sinclair computer, my dad offered an alternative. A good friend of his, Doug Leverton, taught electronics at Fanshawe College but built Apple ][+ clones on the side. He would supply us with all the parts to build an Apple ][+ clone and my dad and I would assemble it.

Visiting Doug’s place one night, I remember he let me play with a completed clone for a while. I played Apple Panic and Apple Adventure. I was completely hooked.

My uncle George was interested in a computer also. So, we obtained the parts to build two computers and started work. When people talk about building computers now, they buy a motherboard, a processor, some RAM, a case and power supply and plug everything together. In 1982, it was different. The motherboard was bare and we soldered components and sockets onto the board, including the 8 slot connectors. All chips were socketed onto the board. We sourced keyboards from a surplus store which used to be part of electric typewriters. These keyboards needed a special interface board to connect them to the Apple motherboard.

The components we didn’t assemble were the power supply, disk drive and the disk controller card. However, the disk drives needed another interface board between it and the disk controller which we built and attached inside the case of the disk drive itself. So, the drive was customized a bit. Also, we built a 16K RAM card for slot 0 which brought the total memory size to 64K. With a disk drive and 32x more RAM capacity than the Sinclair I was considering, this would be a much better computer.

The case was custom also. The sides were wood and two pieces of sheet metal were bent into the correct shape for the bottom and the top of the computer. Everything was connected together. We hooked it up to an old black and white TV set using an RF modulator. All we were missing were the ROMs.

We spent an evening at Doug’s house to burn the EEPROMs. We started with the official Apple ][+ ROMs and changed exactly 8 bytes. We changed the “APPLE ][” string which appeared when the machine boots with a “<RAND X>” string. So, yes, the ROMs were copied from Apple but to me, it didn’t seem wrong at the time.

With the newly burnt ROMs installed, we turned the computers on, one at a time and heard the satisfying “beep” and the whir of the disk drive. My dad and I had successfully built two computers.

But what now?

When I was young, we spent our weekends in Port Stanley sailing. We would travel back to our home in St. Thomas but often we would stop at a small grocery store called “Gifford’s” to pick up whatever supplies we might need. While there, I would often check out the latest issue of Popular Science and often buy it to read interesting articles about technology.

One day, in the fall of 1982, I looked at the magazine rack and saw a headline which read World’s First $100 Computer. I instantly bought that issue and read the article. I knew I had to buy this computer. I had about $100 Canadian in my bank account and started talking to my mom and dad about using it to buy the Timex Sinclair 1000.

It was a tiny thing which came with 2K of memory (which didn’t mean anything to me at the time but 2048 seemed like a pretty big number to me) and would hook up to our TV just like our Atari 2600. But, I was about to learn about exchange rates, import duties and taxes. After talking to my parents, it was clear that the money in my bank account wasn’t going to be enough to buy this machine.

But, my dad had a better idea…