MarkW wrote:
I grew up with Apple II's in high school and college. I've decided to pick up one on Ebay for nostagia reasons and basic programming. My question, because of space reasons I want to be able to share my pc's vga/dvi monitor with it. Is it any way to do this? Also, how do most of you get software? I know there is some available on the net but obviously I can't log on with the Apple and I don't have access to dial up, only cable internet. Can I download to my pc and in any way use a USB 5 1/4" drive to write disks that the Apple II can read?
First a basic pointer so you can get more information... The Apple// groups generally have the "2" character after the word "apple". I have crossposted the reply to comp.sys.apple2 for maximum results. You probably want to subscribe to that group as well. The comp.sys.apple group was created for PC users and Mac newbies who don't realise Apple made other machines before the Mac. The idea was to reduce the "noise" in the comp.sys.apple2 group. Unfortunately there is mixed success.
To answer your first question... In a word yes but it's going to cost you. There were two VGA cards produced for the Apple//. They are fairly hard to find. *IF* you can find one then a KVM switch should work, The VGA cards don't support all the Apple// resolutions so you'd be better off with a colour composite monitor for the early Apples or the Apple IIGS RGB monitor if that's the machine you have.
In terms of getting software... This is a bit more tricky. If your PC runs some form of *NIX (Linux, BSD, etc.) this makes it a whole lot easier. If you have any terminal software, you can connect your Apple to your PC and directly transfer the files. There are other methods but I'm in a bit of a rush today so I'll let the others give you the details.
Later Mike