Within a couple of years of building our Apple ][+ clone, it seemed like almost everyone had a computer. But, almost no one I knew had an Apple ][. My best friends both got Atari 800XL’s. We played a bunch of games on those. I remember playing Conan on the Atari quite alot. Also, one of my friends got a 300 baud modem for his Atari. Sometimes I would watch as he would log onto a local BBS. He would post messages to different boards and I remember he would get into heated arguments about something or other with these people he had never met and didn’t know at all. It all seemed pretty strange but I would see it all again on Usenet a bit less than 10 years later.

Then a computer store opened in our small town. The owner was an Atari fanatic so my friends fit right in. We would hang out there quite a bit and talk about computers. I would get a bunch of ribbing about my Apple from these guys which probably helped to instill a sense of defensiveness about my choice of computer which would often pop up over the next several years. More on that later.

Perhaps looking for more like-minded people, I joined the “London Apple Corps” at some point. It must have been around 1984 or so because I remember someone bringing a Macintosh 128K to a meeting. At these meetings, new software and hardware would be demonstrated, people would ask for help with some problem they were having and just talk about Apple. They sold freeware software and if you knew who to ask, you could also obtain some other not so free software also. Later, I would become the librarian for the user group. This meant that I kept a good supply of the software for sale, making copies of the 5 1/4″ disks as necessary and filling orders.

But more than anything else, people had Commodore 64’s. I hated the C-64. Compared to my Apple, it just seemed slow and clunky. On my Apple, I could draw graphics without incanting peeks and pokes. Just a couple of “HCOLORS” and “HPLOTS” in a Basic program and you could do some interesting things. On my Apple, you can cram 256 characters and tokens on a single line of Basic which was great for making cool and complicated 1 or 2 line Basic programs. On the C-64, you could only have 80 characters on a line which seemed like a serious problem at the time. But more than anything, the performance of the disk drive on the C-64 drove me nuts. I cared because at school, this is what we had.

In high school, we had a grade 11 and grade 12 computer science course. They allowed students who were interested to take the grade 11 course in grade 10 and the grade 12 course in grade 11. However, I was allowed to skip the grade 11 computer science course and take the grade 12 computer science course in grade 10. Oh joy, I get to use a Commodore 64!

For our year end project, we had to decide on something we would write and then code it. I decided to make a “Adventure Writer” and an “Adventure Player”. I created a simple language to describe the locations in an adventure game, the relationship between these places and the objects in the game. The writer allowed you to create these things and save it into a data file. Then, you could run the player, load your data file and play the game you had made. So, I was actually writing two programs for my project, not just one. And, they were the most complex Basic programs I had written and were very long. The disk drive on the C-64 was so slow that the time to load and save the programs was significant. In a one hour period, I would spend several minutes just waiting for my program to load. And if I didn’t start saving it early enough, I would be late for my next class. In the end, I got it done but I did have to go to a friends house one Saturday to work on it.

By 1985 and 1986, things were changing. At the London Apple Corps, there was conflict between all of the Apple ][ users and the new Macintosh users. It seemed more and more time was spent talking about the Mac. Eventually, the user group would split and the die hard Apple ][ users like myself wouldn’t have to worry about the Mac anymore. Also, the Amiga 1000 and the Atari 520ST arrived. At the computer store in town, the Atari fans would extoll the virtues of the ST, deride the Amiga and completely mock the Mac which had no colour at the time and was far more expensive. One of my friends replaced his 800XL with a 520ST and would later upgrade it to a 1040ST. I never met anyone with an Amiga at the time but later in university would meet an Amiga owner.

By 1986, my Apple ][+ clone was just not as cool as it once was. But what would I replace it with. Soon enough I would have my answer.

As I said in my previous article, I didn’t just use my Apple clone to learn programming. There were games to play and work to do. Most of this software was copied, which was the style at the time (to quote Grandpa Simpson) but not all of it was illegal. Honestly, the games we enjoyed the most were the ones we bought so at least the developers of those great games were properly reimbursed.

Among those games which we bought and spent hours playing were the Ultima series. Specifically Ultima III, Ultima IV and Ultima V. To me, Ultima III was the one which I enjoyed the most. It was a simple role playing game where the goal was, in general, kill everything you see. If you need a bit more gold, we would often raid a city, kill the inhabitants and take all the gold. And, if you leave the city and come right back, you could do it all again. It was a quick way to get the gold you need for buying a new ship or whatever you thought you might need next. But with Ultima IV, that all changed. In Ultima IV, your actions and choices affected your ability to progress in the game. Your character needed to develop different virtues like honesty and honour. So, killing the inhabitants of a city and stealing their gold didn’t help anymore. I finished Ultima III (a couple of times I think) but I never got to the end of Ultima IV. I was pretty far along but didn’t get there. I don’t think I spent more than a couple of hours playing Ultima V. My brother, Steve spent a bunch of time playing that one. But it came on a crazy number of disks and I really didn’t enjoy all of the disk swapping which was required.

We also played Summer Games alot. I remember that we would often play a single player game and take turns on the events. My brother was best at some events, I was best at others, our friends best at other ones. Our goal was to try to get the best score possible. But, no one was good at the gymnastics event and it seemed to go on and on forever. So, if someone screwed up their event, they had to do the gymnastics event.

That wasn’t the only olympics style game we had. We “acquired” a copy of Microsoft Decathalon and am I thankful we didn’t pay for it. Firstly, because the game sucked. Secondly, because it allows me to say that I am one of the few people who haven’t ever purchased a Microsoft product (and this is the only one I ever pirated). I remember the shot put event the most. You had to use the joystick to control your players arm. One axis controlled the rotation of your shoulder and the other axis controlled the rotation of your elbow. Try as you might to throw the shotput, inevitably you would end up with your arm in a completely unnatural position and the shotput would go anyway. Truly an awful game but not a bad piece of software for Microsoft. I honestly don’t recall it ever crashing which is something.

It wasn’t just games on our Apple though. I had a copy of Apple Writer which I was using to write essays and other things for school. We bought an Epson RX-80 dot matrix printer and a Grappler parallel interface card to hook it up. So, I could print out whatever I was working on in Apple Writer. But, an Apple ][+ only had 40 columns of text and no lower case (unless you bought an 80 column card or modded it to get lower case, neither of which I did). In Apple Writer, it showed everything as upper case but if you printed it, it was all lower case. If you pressed “escape” and then a letter, that letter would be shown in inverse text and indicated it was actually upper case. Sure enough, it would be upper case when you printed. So, that is how you got upper case and lower case in your documents on a computer which only supported upper case. The printer had 80 columns of text (I think you could get 132 with the right control sequence also) but the screen only had 40. Between the different columns of text and the lack of lower case, it definitely wasn’t WYSIWIG but it was good enough for me.

We also bought The Print Shop from Broderbund. Suddenly, we were printing banner, signs and lots of other crazy things. It was a great little program though and it made it really easy to create a nice simple, reasonably good looking documents. Or, you could use lots of pieces of clip art, turn on all of the different text modes and really create a god awful looking poster. We did that quite often too.

The other neat thing about the Grappler interface card was that it could print directly from the Apple ][‘s graphics screen. Using the right commands, you could print the text screen, the low res screen or the high res screen. So, all of the little programs I wrote to create strange patterns in hi res I could print now. Pretty soon the walls around the computer was covered in paper of different images I had printed.

We had that computer from 1982 until 1987 and it served us very well. In 1982, I didn’t know anyone else with a computer but within a couple of years, it seemed almost everyone had one.

Turns out if you build an Apple ][+ clone in your basement, you can take first prize in your school’s grade 7 and 8 science fair. In retrospect, I (and my dad) assembled a computer from parts but clearly from the look on people’s faces when I showed my project, people thought we had designed it. In the future, I would come to better understand the difference but at the time I was happy to have people think what I had done was somehow very significant.

But, in a way it was. What I had was a computer but no real manuals which came with it. Doug provided us with a Dos 3.3 manual (which is visible in one of the pictures about the construction of the computer) and some photocopies of some other manuals. On the whole though, the machine was undocumented.

He did provide us with a bunch of disks of programs. I would experiment with these programs and figure out how they worked. For example, we had a copy of VisiCalc but no manuals. So, I experimented with it until I understood how it worked. Eventually, I had figured out enough that I helped my dad build a budget spreadsheet for the family.

I didn’t just experiment with programs. Any time I found a BASIC program on these disks, I would load them and read them. I would try to figure out how they worked. If I saw a command like “poke” in the text which I didn’t know, I would try to figure out what it did and why the program did it. I would try to change the program and see what happened.

The other place I was learning was from Nibble magazine. There were other Apple ][ magazines on the rack but Nibble was the only one I really cared about. If I remember correctly, I ended up getting a subscription so I didn’t miss an issue if I didn’t get to the store on time. Nibble was different because it was packed full of useful and interesting programs. They had a one-liner and two-liner contest where people would submit programs which were 1 or 2 lines of BASIC long but did incredible things. In many ways, it was similar to the Obfuscated C Contest because what these programs lacked in readability, they made up for in creativity.

Plus, the magazine had lots of long BASIC and machine code programs. I would type many of these programs in. With machine code programs, it was just a listing of hexadecimal numbers which I would enter into the Apple ][ monitor. Often, my friend Jeff would be over reading the hex numbers to me while I typed away. Often after entering everything and then running it, it wouldn’t work. With machine code, I didn’t really have the skills at the time to do anything except just check the hex digits against the listing. But with BASIC programs, I would start debugging it.

So, from this early stage, I had already learned two key skills which were and still are critical to my work today. First, there is no better way to learn than to experiment with something. Real understanding comes when you see how something works. Secondly, and probably more important for someone interested in software, read other people’s code. For me, I was reading all of the BASIC programs I could find. I would read them to see how they worked. I would read them to see what tricks other people used. And I would read them so I could change them and make them work for me the way I wanted. To develop these skills today, get involved in open source projects. Get the code to a project you are interested in. Figure out how it works. Try changing it. Did it do what you thought it would? If not, why not? Nothing beats getting your hands dirty, especially with someone else’s code.

But, I didn’t just program on this new toy I had. My next story will describe some of the other things I was doing with my Apple ][.

Now that realities of tax, duties and exchange rates had squashed my dream of owning a Timex Sinclair computer, my dad offered an alternative. A good friend of his, Doug Leverton, taught electronics at Fanshawe College but built Apple ][+ clones on the side. He would supply us with all the parts to build an Apple ][+ clone and my dad and I would assemble it.

Visiting Doug’s place one night, I remember he let me play with a completed clone for a while. I played Apple Panic and Apple Adventure. I was completely hooked.

My uncle George was interested in a computer also. So, we obtained the parts to build two computers and started work. When people talk about building computers now, they buy a motherboard, a processor, some RAM, a case and power supply and plug everything together. In 1982, it was different. The motherboard was bare and we soldered components and sockets onto the board, including the 8 slot connectors. All chips were socketed onto the board. We sourced keyboards from a surplus store which used to be part of electric typewriters. These keyboards needed a special interface board to connect them to the Apple motherboard.

The components we didn’t assemble were the power supply, disk drive and the disk controller card. However, the disk drives needed another interface board between it and the disk controller which we built and attached inside the case of the disk drive itself. So, the drive was customized a bit. Also, we built a 16K RAM card for slot 0 which brought the total memory size to 64K. With a disk drive and 32x more RAM capacity than the Sinclair I was considering, this would be a much better computer.

The case was custom also. The sides were wood and two pieces of sheet metal were bent into the correct shape for the bottom and the top of the computer. Everything was connected together. We hooked it up to an old black and white TV set using an RF modulator. All we were missing were the ROMs.

We spent an evening at Doug’s house to burn the EEPROMs. We started with the official Apple ][+ ROMs and changed exactly 8 bytes. We changed the “APPLE ][” string which appeared when the machine boots with a “<RAND X>” string. So, yes, the ROMs were copied from Apple but to me, it didn’t seem wrong at the time.

With the newly burnt ROMs installed, we turned the computers on, one at a time and heard the satisfying “beep” and the whir of the disk drive. My dad and I had successfully built two computers.

But what now?