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Re: Do people still actually use Apple 2?
heuser.marcus@freenet.de wrote:
<snip>
- Apropos possibilities. The old systems do make some things easy for
you in giving you not as much possibilities as a modern computer.
Graphics are a good example: If you want to program something for an
old Apple you don't have to choose among thousands of colors to begin
with. Instead you have to find the best algorithm to bring the graphics
on screen - and coding is maybe a bit easier than designing 3D-models
and drawing textures which do look really good. Though I think that
most enthusiasts do not program actively they probably could do/learn
it and singlehandedly create something - with modern systems it is far
more difficult to achieve a personally acceptable result as single
person.
Hear, hear!
This is, for me, the major attraction of the Apple II. It is an
elegant, resource-constrained environment that offers very broad
possibilities within those constraints--and a programmer working
alone can realize them!
When GUIs became popular in the late 1980's to early 90's, I observed
that productivity did not appear to improve. Where a correspondent
used to spend 5 minutes writing a memo and thinking about the content,
they now spent 2 minutes on content and 10 minutes picking fonts! ;-)
We have a similar situation with todays's programs. For most
applications, the logic is pretty straightforward, but the user
interface programming is voluminous and complex. For me, this
takes most of the fun out of programming.
- The old systems are for the most part simpler to understand. There is
no bulky operating system in the way, you can program hardware
registers directly and though the CPU is primitive compared to modern
systems you can easily access it directly, do what you want with it and
get a nice satisfying feeling if it happens to function ;-)
Then you can fiddle with your code even more and optimize it for speed
or size. You have to cope with maybe 32-64K - in contrast to the
gigabyte you have in your PC...
The key to creative computing is accessible power--and while the power
of personal computers has gone up a thousandfold, the accessibility
has suffered a similar or worse _reduction_ over the years.
There is some similarity with automobiles: cars are more reliable and
efficient than they were in the past, but they are almost impossible
to do seriious work on without scores of special and expensive tools.
-michael
New Applesoft BASIC interface for NadaNet networking!
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/