Re: help with transfferring software to an Apple IIe

[Jeff Blakeney <CUTjblakeney@sentex.net>]

On Mon, 27 Jan 2003 21:49:51 -0800, "Paul Grammens" <grammens@svn.net>
wrote:

>I disagree. Mastering the Apple II would certainly be fun, but not
>particularly useful in the real world.
>A lot more people are making a good living by using PC's and Macs than Apple
>II's these days.
>As I noted, you can also learn to program on a PC, in a modern language with
>job potential.

It it quite difficult to learn to program on a PC and you need a
fairly hefty PC to run the current development environments that you
would have to learn to be able to gain any sort of possibility of
getting a job from it.  Even if you do learn one of these modern
environments, most places won't hire a programmer who doesn't have
some sort of formal education and even then, you need to know their
particular development environment.

I think it would be far more likely that someone would be able to
handle learning to program on an Apple II than they would on a PC.
The PC would just get frustrating while the Apple II, being so much
simpler and easier to deal with, would make it easier for them to
learn enough to actually get something written and possibly get them
interested in learning more.  At that point they may want to move to
PC programming but to try and learn from scratch on a PC would be a
nightmore, in my opinion.  (By the way, I am a Windows programmer and
I do my best to avoid all the annoying, bloated, unintuitive
development environments that are out there.)

>I have almost every Apple II model ever made, and they are fun, interesting,
>and historical.  But there's no way I'd give one to a kid to actually use.
>Not when I can give him a Pentium 166 that's cluttering up my garage.  Very
>few kids would give an Apple II the respect it deserves, they're going to
>want one like their friends have.

The other problem, and one that has bit me in the butt again just this
week, is that with PC hardware you have to deal with a lot of crap
that has nothing to do with actually using the computer.  Just this
week on my work machine at my brother's office, I replaced the 10 Mbps
network card that was in it with a 100 Mbps card and ran into an IRQ
conflict between it and the SCSI card that has been in that machine
for ages.  Network access either wouldn't work or was very slow and
access to the SCSI devices either didn't work or was very slow.
Windows 2000 Pro didn't help because it said there was no IRQ
conflicts and that everything was working properly.  It also wouldn't
let me change the settings for either card.  Once you getting running
properly you are usually okay but you can go through a bottle of
Tylenol just trying to get through all the headaches that can result.

>Sorry, I know it's heresy, but it's also reality.

Say 10 "Hail Woz" 's and you'll be forgiven.  :-)

-- 
 Jeff Blakeney - Dean of the Apple II University in the
                 Apple II Community on Syndicomm.com
 CUT the obvious from my address if you want to e-mail me