News today about another Apple II book that is in the works. Here is the press release, as posted at the VintageComputer forums:

Lincoln, IL – Apr. 20, 2012 – David Finnigan and Mac GUI Vault announce today the first paperback book exclusively about the Apple II to be published in over a decade.

The New Apple II User’s Guide, which is to be self-published on Amazon.com as a trade paperback book, includes over 650 pages. It is intended for all Apple II users, from the absolute beginner to the experienced veteran. The purpose of the book is to serve as a guide to all models of Apple II, and explain the basics of setup, programming, networking, and other specialized topics.

The first chapters deal with identifying each model of Apple and common peripherals and accessories. The next chapters are a complete introduction and coverage of how to program in BASIC. Further chapters detail advanced programming topics such as screen formatting, graphics, sound, and printing. The later chapters complete the book with specialized topics including the disk system, networking and the Internet, using the low-level machine monitor, and subjects specific to the Apple IIgs.

Many appendices hold miscellaneous information of use to programmers, including a summary of all BASIC and disk commands, error messages, ASCII charts and other tables, repair and troubleshooting tips, and how to use software to transfer disks to a modern computer. The book includes a full glossary and index.

No publication date is set, but Mr. Finnigan, the author, hopes for a May date. The book is expected to sell for around $28.

The official book web site is offered in English:

http://macgui.com/newa2guide/

and in French:

http://macgui.com/newa2guide/fr/

Mac GUI Vault, the creation of David Finnigan, is an online source for retro Apple II and Macintosh enthusiasts. It features a fully cataloged and searchable database of software files, pictures, text and PDF files, and Usenet posts. The site has become a popular destination, having over 100,000 visitors and over 50,000 files downloaded last year alone. The New Apple II User’s Guide is its first physical product offering.

Mr. Finnigan may be contacted by email: df@macgui.com

It sounds like a great book! Go get it; watch the count down at MacGUI.

Just had to post the link to this great story in Wired. Jordan Mechner, author of Prince of Persia recently discovered his old disks of source code, and utilized the service of master Apple II collector Tony Diaz (to recover the data from very old floppy disks), and master archivist Jason Scott to put the code on Archive.org for all to see. See the story here.

Jason Scott, Jordan Mechner, and Tony Diaz - Photo credit: Wired

I’m obviously late to the Apple II 35th birthday party. Being busy with life and writing and such drives those calculations right from one’s mind. Hope this bowl of fruit and bag of M&Ms from Wal-Mart helps…

As many others have posted today, this is the 35th anniversary of the First West Coast Computer Faire, at which Apple Computer, Inc. made its grand introduction of the Apple II computer. Harry McCracken has been the most prolific, with no less than three well done posts about this event:

• Fourteen Ways To Celebrate The Apple II’s 35th Birthday  – which mentions my humble web site in the number 1 position; thank you Mr. McCracken!
• Photos: The Apple II Turns 35 - includes my famous VisiCalc screen shot.
• Apple II Forever: a 35th-Anniversary Tribute to Apple’s First Iconic Product – an accurate capsule history of the product

Perhaps this summer at KansasFest we’ll have some additional 35th birthday celebration!

After my last post about the help I got at the Apple Store in recoving files lost when Microsoft Word misbehaved, I have had at least five additional episodes of Word causing disk errors on my boot drive. I tried doing my editing on a flash drive; still had it happen. Put a partition on the hard drive and worked with me file there; still had it happen. After about seven restorations of my files from a Time Machine backup after Word trashed my hard drive, I learned that if the “Always create backup copy” and “Save Autorecover info every xx minutes” boxes are UNchecked, the only error that occurs is an error where Word complains about the file being busy, but then lets me save it with a new name (and an additional error message before it successfully saves it).

As a result, it was not until the middle of last week that I really got going again with revisions. I am still in the Magazines chapters, revising and updating info. I also took a side trip down a path I had not yet documented in this history: The topic of Apple II viruses. That now makes up a chapter of its own in the History, bumping the last chapter up one number. If you’ve ever wanted to know everything there was to know about Apple II viruses now you have it all in one convenient place.

(By the way: The latest update of Word 2011 to version 14.2 does not fix the problem with saving this very large file. That’s okay; at least turning off those backup options has protected my hard drive!)

Microsoft Word 2011 and I were having a tussle this morning, as I was trying to add pictures to the Peripherals chapter. I’d copy an image and try to paste it ino the document at the appropriate place. And then the spinning rainbow ball would appear … and not go away. So I’d have to kill Word, and restart it, an try again. I started saving after each picture was added, just so I would stop losing work.

So while doing this, I’m noticing the Activity Monitor is pegging the top, with lots of red on the little graph. I look at the Activity Monitor window, and there is no activity that is using up even as much as 50% of these dual cores. Odd. So, I restart; it’s been days since that was necessary. And just for entertainment, I press the Command-V keys so I can see the Unix-y things happening. And that “fsck” disk check is going really slow, finding things to fix. Also odd.

And after restarting, I go looking for my Word document to continue … and it ain’t there. Gulp. I have my regular Time Machine backups … at home, on my home network. And I’ve been working on this for about an hour. Hmmmm…

With OS X Lion there is supposed to be local Time Machine backups, right? Let’s see … and there it was! Whew! Problem solved. Or so I thought.

After a half hour, same problem popped up again. Same pegged Activity Monitor. But this time, the restart failed to help. The “fsck” process was unable to resolve the file system errors. And after a restart from my Lion restore partition, same problem – “Disk Utility” took a look, shook it’s head and said, “Sorry, can’t do it. Why don’t you save your files somewhere, reformat, and restore from a backup?” [paraphrased]

All fine and good, but how do I get the files off when I cannot start up from that disk? I’ve got about 90 minutes of work I’d like to recover.

Thankfully, I’ve got an Apple Store nearby, and I make a Genius Bar appointment. And the helpful Genius I had the pleasure to work with got my latest files recovered, and gave them to me on a CD.

So my MacBook is being restored from a backup at home, and I’m posting this from my iPhone. The work will move forward tomorrow.

Thank you, Peter Carter at the Village Pointe Apple Store in Omaha. You’re the best!

(And in the context of this web site, Peter said he remembered the Apple II computers whose pictures were in the files we recovered, from the years his mother was managing computers at the school where she worked.)

I’ve added some additional info about about ORCA/M and other products from Mike Westerfield’s company, The Byte Works on the Languages chapter. The full info that I got in my short conversation with Westerfield recently is available on the Apple II History Spotlight page here.

Thought I’d post an update on progress on the book. I’ve completed revision and updates on chapters 16 & 17 on Languages, chapter 18 on Software, and chapter 19 on AppleWorks. Now digging into Chapters 20 and 21, about Magazines.

In my History editing and revision I am up to the first chapter on Languages. In reviewing additional information about Applesoft that I found, I made two discoveries that I thought were pretty interesting.

First of all: The 6502 floating-point BASIC that Apple licensed from Microsoft in 1977 was, like many products that Microsoft made in those days, marked to put the company’s name within the code. And it was done in such a way as to make it non-obvious to anyone viewing the code with a hex and ASCII dump.

With this information, I wrote an Applesoft program that will take the encoded bytes and print them out. Here is the program:

 100 REM Applesoft Easter Egg Printer
 110 REM
 120 REM The original author of Applesoft put his company name
 130 REM into the ROM, encoded from $F094-$F09D, in reverse,
 140 REM and doing an EOR with $87 (10000111).
 150 REM
 160 DATA 173,9,3,73,135,141,9,3,96,0
 170 S = 768:E = 777: REM $300-$309
 180 A = 61588:B = 61597: REM $F094-$F09D
 182 REM
 190 REM Poke EOR routine into page 3
 192 REM
 200 FOR I = S TO E: READ X: POKE I,X: NEXT I
 202 REM
 210 REM Now get each byte from $F09D to $F094,
 220 REM EOR it, and print the CHR$ of each byte.
 222 REM
 230 FOR I = B TO A STEP - 1
 240 POKE E, PEEK (I): CALL 768: PRINT CHR$ ( PEEK (E));
 250 NEXT
 260 PRINT : PRINT

If you want to just download this and run in your favorite emulator, here are disk images:

EasterEgg.po   EasterEggDOS.dsk

The second, and more interesting bit of trivia has to do with that fateful month, December 1993, when Apple removed the Apple IIe from the dealer price lists, effectively discontinuing the final surviving member of the Apple II family. Other than just spite on their part, finally killing the unloved elder brother in the Apple family, I never really considered the significance of that date. However, with my further reading on Applesoft, I believe I have a very good financial reason for Apple to have plugged the plug when they did.

I had originally believed the license contract with Microsoft for Applesoft was for ten years, and my History for years has stated such. I cannot find, however, any place that clearly identifies the contract length as ten years. However, in the chapter about MacBasic on Andy Hertzfeld’s excellent Folklore.org website, Hertzfeld says the original Applesoft license was for eight years, and was due to expire in September 1985. This is when Bill Gates of Microsoft could have asked for and demanded nearly anything that he wanted for a continuation of the Applesoft license. Apple still desperately needed this for the Apple IIe and IIc product lines, which were financially carrying the company, while the Macintosh was floundering. However, Gates did not demand money; what he wanted and got was MacBasic, which was a major disappointment to the Apple programmer for that product, Donn Denman.

My one supposition here (because I cannot find any absolute proof) is that the license for Applesoft that was renewed at this time was again for an eight year span. The consequences of this license were far-reaching. Had it not been for the relicensing of Applesoft, Apple could not have continued to sell the IIe and IIc as they were (since they had Applesoft in ROM), and retreating back to Wozniak’s Integer BASIC would have been extremely detrimental to the Apple II line, due to the large library of Applesoft-specific software available. Furthermore, there would have been no Apple IIGS if Applesoft had not been renewed.

Finally, if this second contract was indeed for eight years, that span of time ran from 1985 to … (drum roll, please) 1993. According to sales of computers documented on Jeremy Reimer’s blog on 11/2/09, the year 1993 was significant in that the sales of Apple II models was down to 30,000 for the year (it had been 100,000 the year before), and sales of the Macintosh were up to 3.3 million (2.5 million the year before), which was clearly up into the self-sustaining range.

A further renewal of Applesoft in 1993 would have likely been more expensive than the company would want to bother paying, and the decision to discontinue the IIe was an obvious business decision. Obvious now; a sad conclusion back then to an illustrious career for the Apple II.

One glitch I’ve just discovered tonight about creating a book in Apple’s fancy iBooks Author program is that it doesn’t support footnotes. Seems kind of strange for a tool that is supposed to be for textbooks (footnotes, endnotes, bibliography, and index are important features of paper textbooks that I’ve owned or used in my life). So, until that problem is addressed by Apple, I’m going to just focus on a print book. I mean, my conversion from HTML to Microsoft Word is done through the chapter about Peripherals, and I’ve already got 298 footnotes. Until there is some way of displaying footnotes and easily converting them from Word, the iBooks version cannot happen.

What I didn’t mention in my last post was what content has changed (and is then particularly in need of review):

Chapter 9 - Disk Evolution and The Apple IIc Plus – more information about mass storage was added. En masse.

Chapter 12 - The Apple II Abroad & Clones – more info, more pictures, more stuff!

Chapter 13 - Peripherals – whoo boy, is there more here now.

Chapter 15 - DOS 3.3, ProDOS & Beyond – more screen shots, a little more about GS/OS.

And thank you for your support!