jts wrote:
Good morning, Please excuse any typos or complete illogiciality. (Or the invention of non-words.) I'm not human until my third cup of coffee. I work for a school district as the network administrator. I have personally overseen, helped with, or advised in favor of, the destruction of hundreds of Apple II computers. Room fulls. (Floor to ceiling at one elementary school. Yes, really.) We "recycle" them with a third-party. What they really do with them.... who knows? This morning another load went out. We don't see so many Apple II machines anymore. (They used to be like buffalo in the wild west.) Mostly it was old Macintosh computers this time---powermacs. An Apple IIgs was in there, too. Printer, 3.5" floppy drives. Monitor. Etc. I did, however, rescue an Apple IIe platinum from the pile. We now have two of them in the office here (my co-worker previously rescued one). Mine has the works (printer, dual floppies). I like the little guy. Fun sound effects when you turn it on. Reminds me of the 80s. Secretly, I've wanted one since I was very young. (But I'll probably just keep it here at work. It's huge!) It can't count to 10-thousand quicker than I can run for coffee... but it has a lot more charm than my Linux box, which could otherwise eat the thing for breakfast. Oh, and sorry about the entire "wholesale slaughter" thing. If somebody had asked, we probably would have donated them somewhere where they were wanted. Moral: Talk to your local school districts... (But not us. I think we're fresh out.) Warm regards towards you die-hards, :-) Tom
Tom,You might be interested to hear about a couple of developments that have gone on in recent years for the Apple II.
Internet. With the Uthernet or LanceGS ethernet interface cards, and Marinetti/Spectrum or Contiki software, an Apple II can directly connect to the internet! (of course, it's hard to find many useful things to do once you are on, but still pretty cool IMHO). You can also get onto the internet with a serial card simply by linking your Apple II with terminal software to an internet-connected PC.
Mass storage. You can plug in a CompactFlash card for solid state mass-storage inside the box. 128MB, 256MB, 512MB, 1GB.
Acceleration. On the bleeding edge, some hardware modders have been able to tweak up their accelerator cards to run the IIGS at speeds up to 5 or 6 times faster than standard.
Networking. Michael J. Mahon has developed NadaNet, a simple way to link up Apple IIs in a low-speed LAN (9kbps?) via the game port.
Parallel Processing. Michael Mahon used NadaNet to create the AppleCrate, a fascinating assemblage of 8 Apple IIe motherboards in a cage, to do parallel processing experiments e.g. multi-voice music.
Emulation. There are quite a few Apple II emulator programs around for different platforms. AppleWin (for Windows) is the one I use, and is being very actively developed. Sweet16 is another one being actively developed that runs on OS X.
Virtual software. There are multiple locations on the web where an Apple II enthusiast can access vast repositories of Apple II software. Virtual disk images can be downloaded and used directly with an emulator, or transferred to a real Apple II floppy disk via a serial link with a program called ADT.
I don't castigate you for the slaughters, it was simply bound to happen as the Apple II faded from being a commercially viable and broadly useful system to an antique of a bygone era, only valued by a shrinking base of hobbyists and collectors. Kudos to you for saving a couple of them for sentimental reasons. I hope you do find some time to see what is still possible to do on the Greatest Personal Computer Of All Time.
Cheers Martin