Retro Challenge Update: Getting Started

My Apple is a IIe Platinum that I bought in 1999 from an elementary school surplus sale. It was in great shape except for the usual yellowing of the case. It came with a DuoDisk and probably some cards, but I can't remember which ones.

1999 was the year I started collecting Apple II stuff when earlier I discovered someone had discarded a complete IIe in the dumpster of the apartment I was living in at the time. I remember taking out some trash and seeing it, running back up to my apartment and exclaiming to everyone who was there at the time "there's an Apple II in the dumpster!" My girlfriend (now wife) and her friend offered to retrieve it. Thank you ladies!

I had used Apple II's in high school but had never owned one up to that point. But from that day on I started collecting software, peripherals, etc. I don't have that dumpster IIe anymore, but I've since added a IIc and a IIgs to my collection. While my TRS-80 Model 4 collection is by far my largest, my Apple II collection is a not too distant second.

For the Winter Warmup I decided I wanted to use my IIe Platinum as I haven't used it much lately. In fact I couldn't even remember what I had in it until I cracked it open the other day. It took me awhile to find out what card was working and what wasn't, which should go in which slot, etc. but I now have it set up and ready to go.

In slot 1 I have an SMT Printech II parallel card. While I know I've had this card in the II for some time, I've never actually used it. Something to add to my list of "accomplishments" for this challenge.

In slot 2 I have an AE Datalink 2400 baud modem. This is a beautiful modem (if a modem can be beautiful). It has always worked great and 2400 baud is the nostalgic baud rate for me as it was the speed of my second modem, the first being 300. At the time it seemed lightening fast!

Slot 3 is taken up by the 80 column card in the aux slot of course.

Slot 4 is empty.

Slot 5 is a VTech UDC (Universal Disk Controller). This card is hooked up to a single Apple 3.5" drive. It only has one drive cable connected to jumper 1. With jumper 1 it is supposed to be able to daisy chain certain combinations but for some reason I can't get it to work with two 3.5" Apple drives. I spend quite some time fiddling with it, reading the manual, etc. but it is time to move on.

In slot 6 is an Apple Disk II controller card connected to the DuoDisk. I could have daisy chained the DuoDisk to the 3.5" (it works) but I wanted to boot from 5 1/4 by default and the VTech UDC works best in slot 5. So I just used both controller cards.

In slot 7 is a "The CP/M Card" Z80 card. I've mucked with this before in the IIgs with partial success. I've misplaced the disks but they are available on the 'net at Roger Johnstone's VintageWare site.

For a monitor I have a nice amber monochrome Pi3 from USi. The display is crisp and clear, just the way I like it!

A clock card and a shiny new CFFA3000 would be nice but they're not in the budget right now. Here's a grainy phone cam photo of my machine:

Retro Challenge Update: Use it Or Lose it!

A little over a decade ago I bought a brand new Apple IIe Platinum keyboard. I tucked it away in a bin of various computer parts thinking I'd use it one day when I "needed" it. Well I thought I'd install it yesterday, thinking why wait, save the older keyboard for a spare. So I hauled it out and went to install it. The caps lock key was detached. I thought nothing of it at the moment but when I turned the keyboard over to my horror I saw that it had been damaged beyond repair while in storage. Make that poor storage. A corner of the circuit board had been snapped, severing at least 4 traces. I'm sure a clever person with excellent soldering skills could probably fix it, but I'm not that person. So I decided that I'd at least remove the key caps and swap them. The camera on my phone is poor and has no flash, but here are the before and after results.
Old key caps: New key caps: While disappointed at my lack of care for this keyboard over the years, overall I'm happy with the resulting aesthetic improvement.

2012 Retro Challenge Winter Warmup

After reading about it for a number of year's, I've decided to enter this years Retro Challenge (winter warmup). If you've never heard of the Retro Challenge here's an excerpt from their site:

In a nutshell, the RetroChallenge is a loosely disorganised gathering of RetroComputing enthusiasts who collectively do stuff with old computers for a month. The event is very much open to interpretation... individuals set there own challenges, which can range from programming to multimedia work; hardware restoration to exploring legacy networking... or just plain dicking around. It really doesn't matter what you do, just so long as you do it. While the RetroChallenge has its competitive side, it's not really a contest... it's more like global thermonuclear war — everyone can play, but nobody really wins.

What's my entry going to be? I'm going to dust off my Apple IIe Platinum and finally get that CP/M card in it working. I'm also going to do some work related technical writing on it. I've always claimed to prefer early 80's word processors to Microsoft Word, let's see if I actually do!

eMate Battery Rebuild

eMate Battery Rebuild

While I was a little hesitant to do this project, I didn't want to spend about $100 on a rebuilt battery either. So following directions found on the net, I successfully rebuilt the battery pack for my Newton eMate 300.

Taking apart the original battery pack was straight forward enough. There are two sensor that you need to preserve for the rebuild that are a little tough to come off without wrecking them. Patience is simply the key here.

Re-assmbly with new batteries (the kind with soldering tabs) is easy, if you are half-way decent at soldering. I'm not. In fact I'd go so far as to say I'm bad at it. Hopefully with practice I will get better though as the savings in self-repair are tremendous. Soldering the two pairs of AA batterries together was the easy part. Soldering the thermal sensor and the wiring back on was not. For some reason I couldn't get the solder to stick to the batteries very well.

Once I got past that I packed the batteries back in the heat shrink wrap and stuffed it (quite literally) back into the battery pack "shell". To my surprise it went in quite easily. I plugged the battery connector into the eMate motherboard and almost instantly heard the reset power-on chime. I have to say I was surpised that it worked.

But work it did. I'm using the eMate now while the batteries are charging. So far no smoke or acrid smells! We'll see how well they take a charge and what kind of discharge rate I get out of them. Regardless, if I get any kind of decent life out of them then I'll be thrilled because the cost, $13!

Apple eMate 300

Having become a recent Newton fan this past year, I have had my eye on getting an eMate. The eMate is similar to the MessagePad 2000/2100 in that it runs the same version of Newton OS. However, it is in the form factor of a Netbook. The keyboard is a bit cramped but I can still touch-type quite fast with it. And that is the key for me. You see, despite how good the handwriting recognitions is in later versions of Newton OS, my own handwriting (and printing) is terrible and I find it almost literally painful to do.

The eMate is not without its limitations though. For instance, it only has one PC Card slot vice my MessagePad 2100's two. This means I have to swap out my storage card whenever I want to go wireless. Also, the eMate is slower and has less internal RAM than the 2100.

But despite those shortcomings, the eMate has a real keyboard and for me that makes it a winner. And as you may have guessed, I typed this blog post on my eMate.

Apple IIgs and blogger-cli

I've set up my IIgs beside my MacBook Pro (2006 model) and connected the two via a serial cable and a serial to USB converter. Using getty and screen I am then able to log into OS X's command line from the IIgs. I'm using ProTerm 2.2 for this but any decent terminal program would work. While this makes my IIgs little more than a dumb terminal, I enjoy using it this way.

Using MacPorts I set up Mutt on the MacBook and configured it to work with Gmail. Now I can check my email and write letters on my IIgs. While this in itself was a fun exercise and I get great pleasure emailing family and friends from my 23 year old computer, I wanted to expand my command line capabilities to include blog posting.

With the help of Google I discovered blogger-cli. This utility is in the early stages of development and currently allows you to list your blogs, list your articles and search by label on Blogger.com. And of course it will also allow you to post new articles.

To post an article with blogger-cli you must first write it in a text file that is formatted in what looks kind of like JSON. The formatting includes such items as your blog id, article title, labels and the content. Then with the command:

blogger-cli -n -f article.txt -u your.email@gmail.com

your article is posted to your blog. I suppose to really do this retro style I'm going to have to write my articles in AppleWorks, save them as ascii files and upload them to my MacBook before I run blogger-cli. Maybe next time!

Programming For The Newton

Programming For The Newton

I've been toying with the idea of writing an app for the Newton. So I got a copy of Programming for the Newton. Bought it online from a bookstore in India. Cost me $24 plus $6 shipping and arrived in 6 days! If I were to send it cross-country by Canada Post it would cost me $12 and take at least 10 days.

Anyway, I've been reading the book and learning about NewtonScript. What a cool language. While the authors compare it to C and Pascal with enhancements, I see it more like modern Javascript. Variables aren't typed but their values are. NewtonScript's Frames and Slots seems like JSON with the added cool feature of having a function in a slot as well.

I haven't gotten far in the book but it is getting me excited about trying my hand it Newton programming. Of course I'll want to come up with something that hasn't been done on the Newton before. Hmm...