Sunday, November 30, 2008

Apple ][ plus

An important, though often overlooked part of Thanksgiving is the challenge of killing time before the meal is set to begin. This year, I spent a good part of that time with an old Apple ][ plus I unearthed from my mom's closet. I intercepted it on its way from my high school to the rubbish heap about a decade ago. They were throwing it away because it was completely obsolete then. I knew I could still get some fun out of it, and I sure had fun with it on Thursday.
The Apple ][ plus was in production from 1978-1982, which means it's about as old as I am. It has a built-in capacity to understand the Applesoft BASIC programming language (which I happen to have taught myself, geek that I am, while in the 5th grade). This arcane knowledge came in handy when trying to get it to do something useful, like play Frogger.

It runs completely off of 5 1/4 in. floppy disks. (It has no hard drive.) I could only find one disk: the one that was still in the drive. It had three games on it, but the menu program to select the games had some corrupt data and wouldn't function.
Thankfully, I remembered enough of the old BASIC to type in "BRUN FROGGER" and in no time I was as happy as a frog in traffic!

4 comments:

whispering loudly said...

Oh man... what memories... I remember many late nights spent playing on that machine!

Anonymous said...

paul, you are more geek than I am! But I too enjoy a good game of frogger. A few years ago I had an Atari 2600 emulator on my machine and was also enjoying some frogger (not the arcade style but alas the 2600 style). I gave up on it, however, and am sad to say that I need to find that emulator again for nostalgia's sake.

JenniferSamantha said...

Libby!!!
It is Jennifer Jones...
Oh my oh MY!!!
YOU LOOK AMAZING.
Please email me. I cant figure out how to get your email on this.
jsamjones@gmail.com
hugs hugs

Anonymous said...

Thanks for brightening my day Paul. I could truly use one of your magnificent lattes! Barb Pederson