Category: Reflections

There have been many flavors of Unix type systems for many platforms over the years, but there have been few for the Apple II. However in this world of bleak shortsightedness, there has been one project that gained the recognition of many in the Apple world. GNO/ME What is GNO/ME? It is a nice Unix style system for the Apple II GS which ran on top of the Apple II GS OS allowing multitasking of text based windows and was…

Over the years, I have watched the computer industry grow, from the little world that the 1960’s and 1970’s hobbyists had built, into the multi-trillion dollar industry it is today. In 1977, we had about three or four choices as to the type of computer that we could buy and really only one or two of those choices were realistic. Today we have hundreds of choices of platform, style, size and capability. Yet, even though the 1990’s brought the computer…

When I started programming in 1976, the computer world already had several programming languages. There was Fortran, Algol, Cobol, PL/1, Assembler, and half a dozen others. Apart from the scientists and engineers that used these languages, there was the one language which was supposed to be for the common man. BASIC. Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. The language, which anyone could learn and understand in short order. The BASIC of those days was simple, useful and could perform complex tasks,…