Content, Content, Content

I have found the Elephant’s Graveyard of Apple II programs and it is called Asimov’s.

One problem facing anyone looking to revive their computing experiences of a quarter century ago (or longer) is where you can get programs. There were thousands of great programs written for the Apple II, everything from utilities to games. Some were made by Apple and other “large” publishers but many more were made by small one or two person above the garage companies that never published anything before or since. Fortunately, there are archivists among the Apple community who have preserved and collected these programs and made them available for the rest of us to use.

Many of the 5.25” and even 3.5” floppy disks that I have used died well before their time. As overbuilt as I thought the floppy disk drives were in their day, they too have often died a premature death or become so impaired that they were no longer usable. Thankfully, this is no longer a requirement to enjoy the great programs of the Apple II line of computers.

The problem is solved by a program called ShrinkIt by Andrew E. Nicholas) that creates a compressed image of the original floppy disk (sort of like a ZIP or RAR file for the old Apples) that can be used for storage or transmission of the disks. It is not an executable file and must be restored to a floppy disk or a hard disk subdirectory before being run. Since ShrinkIt expects everything to be in its normal place, it does not work on any copy-protected disks or those with a non-standard version of DOS as found on some game disks. While ShrinkIt will extract all of the real data from a disk, there are also programs that will copy copy-protected programs with a “nibble copier.” There are several other formats that of Apple disk images around including:

- Universal Disk Images (.2mg, .2img)
- DiskCopy 4.2 (.dsk)
- Copy II Plus (.img)
- Sim //e HDV images (.hdv)
- TrackStar 40-track images (.app)
- Dalton's Disk Disintegrator (DDD v2.1+, DDD Pro v1.1+) (.ddd)
- Raw FDI images of 5.25" and 3.5 disks (read-only) (.fdi)
- Unadorned sector-format files (.po, .do, .d13, .raw, .hdv, .iso, most .dc6)
- Unadorned nibble-format files (.nib, .nb2)
- ShrinkIt (NuFX) compressed disk images (.shk, .sdk)

Many of these are stored in an archive called Asimov’s at http://mirrors.apple2.org.za/ftp.apple.asimov.net/ and are available free. The offerings run from system utilities to games with about everything in between. They are available for:

- DOS 3.2/3.3 (13, 16, or 32 sectors, up to 50 tracks)
- ProDOS
- UCSD Pascal
- CP/M

The Machine

Twenty-five or more years had elapsed since I last touched an Apple. (We’ll forget that unfortunate incident with a Mac.) First, I wanted to learn what had happened in the Apple ][ line over the years. Early on, I came upon a great Apple history site by Steven Weyhrich called Apple II History at http://apple2history.org/index.html. Well worth the effort.

I realized several things from reading the history:
- While the IIgs is a superior machine, I am, at this stage, more interested in a “classic” Apple ][ with built-in keyboard.
- The //e series was the best choice for me since a number of the critical features I enjoyed on my original Apple were already built-in without changing the basic function and form of the machine.
- The IIc was also out for me because it was not easily expandable although it has even more features built-in.
- Within the //e series, the final edition, the Platinum, would be a better fit as I have come to use the numeric pad a lot in the past 25 years.

Turning to the world’s garage sale, eBay, I started researching past sales for historic realizations on Apples. Some were crazy with absurd bids (while the same item was offered for less than 1% that did not sell.) Most bids for machines were reasonable with only a few bidders interested. Long story short, I picked up a Platinum IIe, two disk drives (1/2 height), and a color monitor. It all arrived safe in two boxes and then the fun started. Did I mention that I had no disks yet?