Drop /// Inches is a podcast devoted to Apple’s other 8-bit computer, the Apple ///. We cover the history, the people, hardware, software, literature, usage, tricks, repair, and even news.
The podcast Drop III Inches is created by Paul Hagstrom & Mike Maginnis. The podcast and the artwork on this page are embedded on this page using the public podcast feed (RSS).
As August 2017 draws to a close, here is an episode we recorded in May with a lead-in we recorded earlier in August. It’s been a busy summer. Topics include: Martin Haye’s Satan Mode disk, Reactive Micro’s universal power supply, Paul Rickards’ WiFi232, Big Mess o’ Wires’ Floppy Emu, John Morris’ Applesauce, Great Plains Hardisk Accounting.
Here are some of the links that relate to the stuff we talked about.
Cult of Mac article: Today in History, Apple Introduces the Doomed Apple ///.
Martin Haye’s HackFest 2017 entry (“Satan mode” boot disk)
Reactive Micro’s universal power supply kit for Apple ///
Toshiba FlashAir WiFi-enabled SD card
FlashAir SD card developers site
Floppy Emu
John Morris’ talk about Applesauce at KansasFest 2017
Apple ///s crunching election data
Apple Orchard scans on yesterbits.com
Great Plains Hardisk Accounting and related links
[A couple of these links are I.O.U.s, like the Apple Orchard and Hardisk Accounting links, which will come later, but we just wanted to get this episode finally posted.]
We’re back, with an episode that was three months in the making. Mike and Paul talk (in November 2016) about the state of things in our Apple /// worlds, and then speak at some length with Don Burtis (in December 2016), who designed (among many other things) the Microsoft SoftCard III.
Don Burtis, who is probably most prominently associated, in the eyes of the Apple II and III enthusiasts, as the designer of the Microsoft SoftCard, a Z80 coprocessor card that enabled the Apple II series computers to run CP/M software. As Paul Allen indicated in his book “Idea Man,” this was strategically important for Microsoft early on, as VisiCalc was beginning to take off on the Apple II for businesses, as it would allow Microsoft’s existing software to run on the platform without the delay and investment of porting the software to the 6502. Microsoft had a run at the project internally but was having trouble with the design, and Don Burtis (of Burtronix) was called in to design the board. And later, the SoftCard III for the Apple III, as well as several other peripheral cards for the Apple III (including the Floppycard III, Protocard III, Printercard III).
If you’re here just for the conversation with Don Burtis, it starts at minute 52.
But before we talked with Don, we talked about several of the following things:
Apple Orchard
Apple National Account Program brochure (April 1982)
Universal PSU from ReactiveMicro
Apple /// (to /// plus) upgrade
Axlon RAMDISK 320
Gibson Light Pen system, manual scans
Apple /// SAM
Chris Zuhars’ homebrew Apple ///
Quinn Dunki’s Veronica
Hantarex CT 2000 monitor
Charles Mangin (Retroconnector) news:
A few Apple III images from Ian
Taylor Pohlman interviewed by Computer History Museum
And here, finally, are links to many of the things that came up in our conversation with Don Burtis:
In this episode, Mike and Paul chat about various things that were newsworthy when the recording was made. Replacement power supplies, insights from the last Apple /// product manager, Apple ///-themed iPhone cases, drivers, Record Processing Services, and more.
For those following along in real time, this episode was recorded a long time after the one that preceded it, but even longer before it was actually released. There were some technical issues with the recording that required a fairly laborious amount of reconstruction, and, well, life kept happening as well. But, we’re still here.
So, here are the linky links.
In this episode, we interview Taylor Pohlman, who joined Apple in 1979 and became the Apple /// Product Marketing Manager in 1981, managing the “Reintroduction” of the Apple ///. He is also well known for the series of columns in Softalk magazine (“The Third BASIC”) introducing concepts in Business BASIC programming. Later, he left Apple to found Forethought (the company responsible for FileMaker and PowerPoint), co-founded Regent Systems, managed the development of GS-BASIC for the Apple IIGS, and then returned to Apple from 1986 to 1992, and is currently principal at Rohner & Associates, having worked with Sybase and Autodesk along the way.
We talked with Taylor about the innovations the Apple /// and SOS brought to the computing landscape, the launch at Disneyland, frustrations and missed opportunities with the Apple ///. We also heard about several other things, not specific to the Apple ///, such as the early days at Apple, interactions with Steve Jobs, launching the black Bell & Howell Apple II, using an Apple II to rock a baby cradle triggered by sound, Apple employees storming the Lisa building in Halloween costumes, the short-lived Apple IV, and lots more.
Links:
Mike came across a reference to “The greatest baseball game never played”, a well-hyped simulated baseball game broadcast in July 1982, pitting National League and American League stars of diverse eras against each other in an ultimate fictitious game—simulated using a custom-written program on an Apple ///. The game was later pressed as an LP, and contains not only the game but a description of the mechanics and technology as well.
Other various topics of interest are touched on as well. Chris on the Apple /// enthusiasts group uploaded an Apple /// parts list sourced from the Level 2 service manual, for help in repairs, replacing capacitors, etc. ReActive Micro is contemplating adding Apple /// support to its universal power supply, designed to replace the innards of our aging Apple ones. We talk a bit about the Wico trackball and locating the drivers for it, inspired by Robert’s post on Facebook, and about Apple magazine volume 3 number 1 from May 1982, and about On Three pulling the 65802 replacement kits after discovering matching individual 65802s to individual Apple ///s to be extremely hit-and-miss.
And, we close with Taylor Pohlman’s talk from the Phase /// conference about the history and development of Business BASIC, including a challenge he posed to the community for developing a method for using menus and window overlays, taken up by On Three magazine as a programming contest (announced in volume 5 number 7, entries due by December 1, 1988).
The audio on this talk is not great, but it is possible to hear it. The section of the talk that was incorporated into the On Three contest was quoted in the magazine as well.
Links:
We begin 2016 discussing the “Driv3rs” python script with its author, Mike Whalen, some miscellaneous topics, and a phone interview with Daniel Kottke, from some years ago.
Mike Whalen’s Driv3rs script will take an SOS.DRIVER file and extract information about all of the drivers contained within, and we talk about using the script, finding drivers, the format of drivers within the SOS.DRIVER file, and other related things. Other miscellaneous topics include recapping power supplies, Apple /// prototyping boards, being foiled by copy protection, Monitor /// designs, the TRS-80 Models II and 4P, and probably other things.
Daniel Kottke is surely well known to anyone listening to this podcast, but he was an Apple technician in the very early days, working on the Apple /// project up until about when it shipped (then moving over to the Mac team). Daniel speaks with Mike in a phone interview from several years ago about various interesting features of the Apple /// and its development, and the general atmosphere within Apple before its launch.
Within the episode, various links were promised for the show notes, and they are as follows:
This month, Paul’s Apple /// has trouble connecting with the world outside, so he speculates on possibilities for WiFi connectivity, and Mike’s Apple /// has trouble connecting with any worlds at all. So, we turn our attention to literature, including the full Apple /// patent, a survey of Apple II users, an early interview with Trip Hawkins, and books on the Apple ///. Paul’s gotten himself a Cursor /// and some late-era PFS software, and unexpectedly managed to get a CMC Quick-20 drive working, Mike’s gotten an Axlon 320 RAMdrive. And Charles Mangin has created a miniature Apple ///.
The second half of the episode is an interview Mike conducted over the phone with Wendell Sander, designer of the Apple ///, from a couple of years ago, covering things like the Apple-internal interactions between departments, problems and solutions to initial reliability issues, the RAM design and peripherals. Recorded from a speaker through the air for added retro sound quality, but very interesting indeed!
On this episode, we talk with Martin Haye about his experience writing an assembler/disassembler for the Apple /// as his HackFest entry at KansasFest 2015. Martin is an experienced Apple II programmer, who decided to spend KansasFest familiarizing himself with the Apple ///. After initial forays into SOS didn’t go well, and realizing that in order to write assembly language programs on the Apple /// it would be useful to have a system monitor more like the one familiar from the Apple II, and a mini-assembler for 6502 code as well, Martin dug into the ROM code and wrote M0N5T3R, a small mini-assembler and disassembler for the Apple ///. And it boots instantly, too! Although it’s small, it was written in the space of a couple of days as part of the HackFest contest (and won second place!) at KansasFest. But he learned a lot from the experience, and we learned a lot from talking to him about it. Martin also gave us some first-hand descriptions of his trip to the Stanford archives of Apple documents (which we had discussed a bit in the previous episode). We also talk of one of the first e-books, written on an Apple /// and uploaded to The Source in real time, and an Apple /// found in the woods.
Some interesting links:
We’re back for Episode 11. This time, we talk about really very small advances in booting a /// from a flash drive, the Cursor /// joystick and the history of The Keyboard Company, and a visit to the Stanford archives of Apple materials to get the real scoop on EMI/RFI emissions and the timeline of the /// plus. After that, another talk from the 1987 Phase III conference, this one by Dr. Melvin Astrahan, author of Draw On /// and the Mr. Sandman game, talking about the graphical abilities of the Apple ///.
The trip to the Stanford archives yielded two interesting Apple ///-related documents. More about these on apple2scans.net (link will be retroactively inserted here when it’s ready over there), but here are the documents themselves:
Links of Interest:
In this episode, Paul and Mike talk about the wooden Apple /// sculpture featured on the cover of Apple Magazine v2n2 and an email interview with Tom Eckert, the artist who created it. Other topics include the issues and ultimate success in booting an Apple /// with only an SD-card drive emulator, the feasibility of using alternative CP/M cards, the new firmware for the Floppy Emu to do UniDisk 3.5 emulation, and some preliminary discussion of the variants of the Cursor /// joystick.
Interview with Tom Eckert
Plamen Vasilyov’s SDFloppy II
Nishida Radio’s UNISDISK
Big Mess o’ Wires’ Floppy Emu
BMOW announces firmware update for Apple II compatibility
Back from a long hiatus, Mike and Paul discuss the newly-available cornucopia of games for the Apple ///, and then introduce the next bit of audio from the 1987 Phase III conference. The conference presentation was a panel discussion of the future of Apple III hardware and SOS, with Bob Consorti of On Three and Rob Turner of Apple (but formerly of On Three) as the panelists. Discussion topics include the meaning of “obsolete,” the feasibility of a SCSI card, the problems with creating a slot expander, the availability and support of the /// vs. the IIGS and marketing. There is a fair amount of audience participation in the panel, and the questions and monologues from the audience are not always very easy to hear. There also seemed to be a dance party going on next door.
Games discussed:
Mr. Sandman (Dr. Mel Astrahan, On Three)
Tic-Tac-Toe (John Lomartire)
Apple Chomp (Dan A. Kunesh)
Atomic Defense (Andy Hertzfeld)
Disk images: a3games.zip
Three-part column in Softalk: Hot Rod III (George Oetzel, July-September 1983). Part two is about how to use an Apple III joystick in Apple II emulation mode, which isn’t quite what we claimed it was about in the episode.
We also claimed there would be a link about Woz’s tic-tac-toe algorithm, it might appear here in a little while.
In this episode, we talk with Bob Consorti, who was president of On Three. Among the notable achievements of On Three were the long-running On Three magazine, Desktop Manager, BOS (Bob’s Operating System), a 512K RAM expansion card, device drivers, and many other things. Topics include the founding of On Three, the development of the 512K card, On Three’s internal development environment, emulation, and much more!
This episode consists of a telephone interview with Colette Askeland, the board layout designer who did all of the layout work on the Apple /// motherboard. We learn about the incredible challenges and accomplishments that went into creating this layout, and about the process, the community, and the environment at Apple at the time. Lots of things have been said about the Apple /// board, but mostly those things have been the same couple of critiques repeated over and over again. This interview leaves quite a different impression, one of a major accomplishment and no shortage of innovation and hard work, with a result that was truly impressive. If only. If only.
A couple of notes on what she talks about (spoilers!):
The Apple /// motherboard was the last at Apple to be designed by hand, rather than with computer layout tools. The computer layout tools were at the time unable to do a board as dense as the Apple /// without adding layers.
Wendell Sander, Colette Askeland, and Daniel Kottke worked as a team in the design and prototyping phase of the Apple ///, with Wendell getting all the communication from outside on specifications and doing the design work, then working with Daniel to breadboard it, and then passing it on to Colette to lay out the traces and components. Colette was the only one at Apple doing printed circuit board layout, and quite early in her career as well.
The process first involved creating a layout and routing traces on a drafting vellum, which involved a great deal of pencil work with component templates and electric erasing. By the time the project was done, the vellum for the Apple /// was in fairly sorry shape. After that, mylar versions were created by laying the mylar over the vellum and running miles of tape for traces and stickers for components. Then the mylar is sent to photography, and the photographs sent to the board producers. The vellum and mylar stages are all at double scale, so quite large.
Colette had the vellum framed and donated it to the Computer History Museum. She has photographs from when it was appraised, which we will post here when we get them.
Colette reinforced what we’ve heard before: the Apple /// board was incredibly dense for the time, with everything so crowded together that they had to use new experimental components and do a fair amount of “thinking outside the box” to get the thing to fit inside the box, at the expense of some fairly tricky manufacturing processes.
And plenty of stories about working there at Apple back in the very early days.
The Phase III conference was organized by the Third Apple User Group in Chicago, held October 2-4, 1987. Dave Ottalini located and digitized his audio recordings of some of the sessions at that conference, and provided them to us. We have been cleaning them up as best we can, and will release them here on the podcast feed.
Don Williams had a long history at Apple, which he describes a bit in this talk. He is the author of Desktop/Plan, later sold on to VisiCorp, and was the founder of the APDA (Apple Program Developers Association). He worked at Apple doing software design from about September 1979 until early 1982, and then returned in early 1983 for another year, as National Accounts Sales Manager. The talk here is actually the second talk he gave, a more impromptu reminiscing about the marketing and sales of the Apple ///. Earlier in the conference, Don had a scheduled talk, also about the history of the Apple ///. The audio of that talk will require more work, so it will be posted to the feed later on. As it turned out, Don was not aware of the Phase III conference until he ran into his neighbor, Rupert (Robert) Lissner (author of 3 E-Z Pieces), who was very concerned about what he was going to talk about at the conference. In the end, Lissner did not attend the conference, and Williams went instead, with about two days’ notice. But we are all glad he did, even if it would have also have been nice to have heard from Lissner.
In this episode, Mike and Paul had the opportunity to speak with Dave Ottalini, co-founder of the Apple /// Special Interest Group of the Washington Apple Pi user group. The entire episode is devoted to this conversation. And stay to the very end for an extremely interesting announcement!
A couple of related links:
This month, Paul performs Pascal programming and plays games, while Mike mines the WAP DVD and finds hidden treasure. We discuss the latest MESS emulator developments as they apply to the Apple /// core, music and sound, driver and much more. Join us, won’t you?
In this episode, we talk about some introductory and demo materials, consider some Apple /// “dream systems” and talk with Egan Ford about the work he has done preparing the Apple /// “Ready-to-Run” quick start package for the MESS apple3 emulator.
In this episode, we walk through getting the MESS emulator started with the assistance of Egan Ford’s Apple /// RTR, discuss the System Configuration Program, and the Apple /// Dimensions newsletter.
Welcome to the show notes from the premiere episode of what is undoubtedly the premiere Apple /// podcast on the internet today.
Your hosts:
Links along the way:
Write to us. We are Apple /// users. We are lonely.
En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.