On Wed, 9 Sep 1998, David Williams wrote: I know exactly how you feel. There's something special about a piece of computer equipment that's stayed in its original, pristine state for 15 years. I'm the same way, as are many other people for some strange psychological reason. But if I really want to use it, there's no sense in depriving myself of it just because its in such a state. The Softcard came with additional RAM, so yes, they were probably referring to the fact that you could access that extra bank of memory from DOS 3.3 in Apple // emulation mode. Hint for you young-uns: Apple's DOS hit version 3.3 about 4 or 5 years before MS did. After that, they wised-up and started over with ProDOS. While it had its failings, at least they had the balls to throw the old OS out and begin from scratch. Something MS should have done with MS-DOS. Sam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Ever onward. September 26 & 27...Vintage Computer Festival 2.0 See http://www.siconic.com/vcf for details! [Last web site update: 08/25/98]

On 9 Sep 98, at 21:17, Sam Ismail wrote: Exactly. And after I overcame the small urge to leave it wrapped, what do I find? The disks and each of the manuals are individually wrapped as well! Arg! Now I have to fight the urge again, though not as strong this time. Everything was there, including the registration card from Microsoft and the warranty registration from Apple. I'd love to fill those out and send them in. :-) They did try that, along with IBM. It was called OS/2. ----- David Williams - Computer Packrat dlw(a)trailingedge.com http://www.trailingedge.com

On 10 Sep 98, at 10:49, William Donzelli wrote: That's a good point. In my case I was going to open it anyway and you'll be glad to know everything was there is in fantastic shape. I didn't have time last night to do more than open it up and start looking through the manuals. Hope to have time tonight to install it and fire it up. ----- David Williams - Computer Packrat dlw(a)trailingedge.com http://www.trailingedge.com

"David Williams" <dlw(a)trailingedge.com> wrote: The Apple /// dealer diagnostic disk contains a version of Apple DOS 3.3 modified to boot directly (w/o emulation mode) on an Apple ///. I've been meaning to study the changes sometime, but haven't gotten around to it. Aside from the boot sequence, the only changes that would be absolutely required would be some code to load the character generator. Eric

"David Williams" <dlw(a)trailingedge.com> wrote: Wow, it's pretty rare to find anyone who remembers Apex, since it wasn't ever all that popular. It was distributed by Apparat, and they were more famous for NewDOS/80 for the TRS-80 Model I and Model III. The 16-sector hack should have been quite easy, since the source code of the disk driver was printed in the Apex manual. I don't recall if it was provided on disk. Apex used Apple's RWTS routines sans some of the formatting code, in order to free up the page between $bf00 and $bfff for other uses. If you'd gotten in touch with us, we would have sent you a 16-sector update. Apex was written mainly by members of the "6502 Group", which has met on the Colorado School of Mines campus in Golden every Tuesday* since it formed in 1976. These days the discussion topics rarely involve 6502s, but the name has stuck for historical reasons. At its peak around 1981, a typical meeting had perhaps 80 attendees, but these days it tends to be fewer than a dozen. I no longer live in Colorado, but whenever I go back to visit family and friends I try to attend a meeting. Apex evolved from earlier operating systems called FFS (Floppy File System) and TFS (Tape File System), which were never widely distributed. The command interpreter and most of the utilities were written in a language called XPL0, conceptually similar to the way that parts of CP/M were written in PL/M. The main people behind Apex and XPL0 were Peter Boyle, Wayne Wall, Larry Fish, and Loren Blaney. I'm sure I've omitted other contributors; my apologies to them. The XPL0 language has been ported to other processors including the x86: http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/computers/xpl0/ Apex was ported to the 68K, and ran on some models of Macintoshes. It was used by DFM for telescope controllers: http://www2.csn.net/~dfm42/dfm.html Apparat's EPROM programmer for the Apple ][ was originally supplied with APEX-based software written by Larry Fish (who also designed the hardware), using special routines by Roger Nace to read and write Apple DOS 3.3 disks. Because this was somewhat inconvenient for most of our customers, I wrote entirely new software for it that ran directly under DOS 3.3. Cheers, Eric * Actually we missed a few due to weather and holidays. But almost every Tuesday.