About the author: Richard J. (Rick) Sutcliffe, is Professor of Mathematics and Computing Science at Trinity Western University in British Columbia. He represents Canada on international computing standards committees, and has written two textbooks and more than fifty papers, articles and reviews. He has been a columnist, software author, and active in electronic publishing. He has also been an invited speaker at numerous churches, educational and computing conferences, and technical symposia at local, national, and international levels. He presently resides…
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…
A.P.P.L.E. Glimpses Apple Computer releases QuickTime 6 Preview Apple Computer Inc. released the latest beta version of its popular video playing software, Quicktime 6 to the public this month. While the software is expected to build upon the changes that were in the last release, it still has some distance to cover before catching up with the other players in the market. The latest version includes support for MPEG-4 file format as well as AAC Audio from which is an…
While this month’s web site is not specifically an Apple site, it is an important web resource for users of many platforms. Snackey Pete’s is a nice web site for those interested in the Inform format of Interactive Fiction games. The site, which is produced by Helikon Technologies, is a nice simple web site and has man compilers, interpreters, games, and even documentation for the Inform format. As many of the older users may know, Inform is the format in…
Ebay has purchased the online payment services company PayPal for a reported $1.5 billion USD. The purchase was made using stock swaps based on the July 5, 2002 value of PayPal’s stock and is still subject to the stockholder approval and the regulators. While the acquisition appears to solidify Ebay’s online services, it also presents a problem with respect to the amount charged for transaction fees as well as the quality of service. Until now, Ebay was forced to advertise…
This month, I am writing “The Editor Bytes Back” while Val Golding takes a short hiatus. In trying to figure out what to write, it occurred to me that no one ever talks about the early software companies that rose up out of the Apple II world. With this revelation, I figured I’d attempt it, having been one of those teenage programmers that the Apple II world so readily reflected in the 1980s. The day the music died Like all…
Loading and Saving Graphics Screens on the Apple II Series Part 2 While last months article covered some nifty graphics manipulation techniques, I missed making a few points about some extremely important items which must be made in order to make our program work well. Every Apple II has some calls built in the rom of the machine which when called, perform tasks which we would normally have to assign basic statements to. A perfect example is the disk access…
Normally, we would be listing a product item or a press release in this column, however, this month we found an item which deserved a closer inspection. We were looking at G4 notebooks online and naturally ran to Ebay to try to find a good deal on that new titanium G4 notebook. What we found was that the section for Apple G4 Powerbooks was rife with fraud waiting to happen. There were several listings for the 667mhz version of the…
A Star is Born In the world of corporate servers, there are the haves and the have-nots among manufacturers. Until 14 May 2002, Apple Computer Inc was among those have-nots. This changed with the introduction of the Apple Xserve. A server in an unusual for Apple, industry standard 19-inch rack mount 1U case, the Xserve introduces a form that is a great standard to follow. Long criticized for not having a server that was useable in the corporate world, the…
INTRODUCTION This paper is an attempt by a long time Lisa user to clarify the significance of the Apple Lisa personal computer for the computing industry. The audience of this paper is anyone who has an interest in innovative computing technology and wants to learn a little about Apple Computer’s brief foray into this area via the Lisa computer. This paper hopes to show why the Lisa was significant in its time and how some of what was called “Lisa…
This month’s tip is for the Macintosh and is known to work on all OS’s 7.x through 9.x. This tip will come in handy when you want to capture a screen for a document or to provide a customer with a screen shot of a program. It can also be handy for those engineers who need to see exactly what is on a customer’s screen. Get the screen you want up and then decide which you want to do; a…
At this months WWDC Keynote speech, Steve Jobs once again announced the impending death of an Apple Computer product. Steve has been well known over the years for doing this well ahead of the actual death of a product and this is no exception. Walking onto the stage where a coffin containing a large mock up of the OS 9.x product, Steve opened the coffin, set the box up so that all could see. While people laughed at the analogy,…
On the 20th of May 2002, A.P.P.L.E. had the pleasure of sitting down with Dominique Goupil, the president of FileMaker Corporation and talking with him about the company. Dominique has been the driving force behind the incredible rise in stature the company has enjoyed over the last several years. With a background in business and Aerospace, Dominique brings his European upbringing with the Asian perspectives to FileMaker. A.P.P.L.E.: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. To…
Introduction We’re not talking about “bibles”, say about some piece of software or the Mac platform here, Nellie. The software under review this month relates to the real thing–front ends to search the Scriptures in the original languages and multiple translations. These packages are for the person who wants to move into the twenty-first century from the massive old paper versions of Strong’s and Young’s concordances, Nave’s Topical Bible, interlinear Hebrew-Greek-English, and parallel KJV-NASB-NIC-RSV that can consume vast resources of…
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…
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…
A.P.P.L.E. Glimpses is where we introduce new Apple and Macintosh products. Each month, we will be writing about items that we think are noteworthy here. Although items are listed here, it does not mean an endorsement. It only means that we figured the item was interesting enough to be noted to the Apple community. This month we have a nice variety of items. We hope that you will find them as interesting as we did. If you do decide to…
Mystery Monologue Having written these past couple of months on A.P.P.L.E.’s accomplishments in various fields brings us to this month’s harangue\\ …er, monologue. Today, we’ll talk about A.P.P.L.E. software. Lest the reader go away thinking we have done nothing but pat ourselves on the back, we should set the record straight. For the benefit of those of you who are hearing about the club — A.P.P.L.E. (Apple PugetSound Program Library Exchange) and the later A.P.P.L.E. co-op and Tech Alliance –…
This is a new column which we are introducing this month to supplement our Apple II coverage. Each month, you will find hand tips and tricks in this column which are specifically for the Apple II series computers. While primarily focused on the beginning programmer, even the more advanced programmers may find a nify trick or two in this column which may be helpful. This months tip concerns saving the graphics on Hi-Res screens. On the Apple II series computers,…
Seattle – 21 June 2002 0545am – Vintage Micros of Marietta, South Carolina is offering a rare Apple Lisa 1 “Twiggy” personal computer online. The machine, which is among the uncommon machines of the Apple Computer, Inc., is expected to draw in the range of $15,000 based on past online auctions for similar items. The Lisa 1 sold originally for nearly $10,000 when it was released in 1982, however, due to the number of problems with the machine, very few were…
