Bytes From The Apple

Posted by: Bill Martens Date: July 3, 2002 0 Likes 431 Views

This month we take a look at the internal workings of A.P.P.L.E. over the last several weeks. While most people are downsizing in this day and age, we actually were upsizing.

We have migrated our systems to a brand new Cobalt 4 server, which gives us a good bit of power and hard disk space for our future plans. The new server once configured and completely installed will be the cornerstone of our efforts here.

We have spent over 150 man-hours working on the migration at this point and for the most part it has been completed. We did have some minor glitches along the way with scripts suddenly not working and our logins not being accepted. For the most part, these were related to the fact that we now had our own server and there were a few configuration items that we now need to do ourselves.

This additional maintenance will require a few more man ours from our staff each month but for the most part, the transfer went fairly smoothly.
Another development this month has been the addition of new items to the product catalog. You will notice that we now carry Apple hardware, Newton software and several other miscellaneous Apple items. This is due in part to our relationship with Vintage Micros. They will be distributing all of our hardware products in the US. This relationship will allow us to maintain the high quality of the catalog while keeping our storage requirements down.

Also this month, we have added a good number of OS X URL links to our A.P.P.L.E. Links page on the web site. With the release of this issue, we will also be adding the Apple /// links which will bring our database to a total of almost 400 links. This number continues to grow everyday.

One final change that you might notice this month is the cover. We have begun to add cover art to the magazine as we did in the mid 1980’s. This change was just a progression with more content going into the magazine each month, we figured that the old 1981 style cover just wasn’t going to do in the long run.

As we continue to grow our group and to grow our web site, we definitely will need more help. This help currently comes from our member base, as we are a volunteer organization. If you would like to volunteer to help a section of the group, let us know as editor@callapple.org. There will be several items added to the web site in order to facilitate this more.

Author: Bill Martens
A.P.P.L.E. Chairman of the Board and Club president -- Bill worked for the founder, Val J. Golding and A.P.P.L.E. from 1981 to 1982. In 1999, he began archiving the materials which were distributed and sold by A.P.P.L.E.. That project led to the group that remained of A.P.P.L.E. Bill was involved in the financial industry in Tokyo and has over 20 major office infrastructure projects to his name. In March 2001, he retired to write books and to spend more time pursuing personal interests. As the president of the users group, Bill is in charge of distribution of Call-A.P.P.L.E. magazine as well as the organization of this web site. Bill currently resides in Tokyo, Japan and Shelton, Wa splitting time between the places.
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