Hello Daniel.

17 Feb 04 08:28, you wrote to me:

 DL> I'll bet he's still lurking around somewhere. He was quite a

[George Powell]

Some of these guys, I swear, must have been descended from Ambrose Bierce
(anybody familiar with the Blue Wave offline mail reader can compare notes
about how George Hatchew vanished into the woodwork some years ago, and a
gentleman by the name of Martin Pollard, who had a related product, also
went into the ether, despite his having lived 30 minutes from me).  I
wasn't so fortunate with one of the old Byte Brothers guys, Jimmy Pierson,
but at least I found out what happened to him.

 DL> I still do not believe anything can compare to the Apple II and the
 DL> effect it had upon those who used it or played with it for any period

If Joe Siegler is lurking, we used to rib a co-worker who went on about
what he could do with DOS and Word Perfect, and we'd kinda look at each
other, yawn, and say "We were doing that ten years ago on our
//es." :-)  About the only thing he had on us was laser printer
output, but given a IIgs, the right printer, and the right tools (Seven
Hills, was it?), we could go there, too.

 DL> I have an imagewriter II also.   I think it has the AppleTalk card in

I have a few of those cards here, and I think they're even still in the
shrinkwrap.  I laugh, because for years, I wanted an Imagewriter.  You know
how compatability issues were, and while there were nicer printers out
there, your hairpulling was greatly reduced if you were using one of
Apple's printers (and my problems always occurred when I had 30 minutes to
print out my term paper and get to school to turn it in).  Never did get
one when I had my original II computers, but as mentioned, today?  I have
about 20 of 'em in the garage. :-)

 DL> My brother bought it directly from the original programmer who worked
 DL> for Broderbund. I think his name is Doug Smith when the guy had
 DL> decided that he'd had enough of computers and program development and
 DL> had the itch to buy  sailing yacht and cruse the world for a while.

If memory serves, the guys who did Cosmocade and Senseless Violence and all
those other great games got out of the II world and produced game
cartridges. And then, there's the aforementioned id Software guys...

 DL>  I think my brother got a //e in the deal too.  As I recall, the two
 DL> Apple CPU's were outfitted with everything you would want: a pair of
 DL> 3.5-inch drives and pair of 5.25-inch  drives, memory expansion cards
 DL> (128K in the //e and 6 Meg ramkeeper in the GS),  SCSI HD's and an

How'd that RamKeeper behave?  When we were supporting them, we kinda
thought of them as the product that got away.  It seemed that a day didn't
go by when we didn't have someone on the phone, ready to kill us because
something had fried.

 DL> excellent collection of Apple II programming tools with the original
 DL> media  including APW/MPW, as well as the ORCA/M stuff  The GS also had
 DL> a PC coprocessor card, with its own set of two 5.25-inch  and two
 DL> 3.5-inch drives.

Ah, those were the days...now, so much of this is done with emulators, and
while I'd be hard-pressed to give up my IIgs, the need for a SCSI hard
drive or a Transwarp has been eased with the portability of img files and
my ability to connect to a network.  In fact, very little of my II data
actually sits on the IIgs's hard drive:  It's all on the Quadra's hard
drive.  Speed?  I can fire up Bernie on my 8600 and really fly (haven't yet
played with Sweet16 under BeOS).

 DL> 4. I would proabably  want to under take the effort to sort the stuff
 DL> I have so that anything that was PD/Shareware could be available for
 DL> download on my BBS.

That's the real fun part.  Remember at the end of "Raiders of the Lost
Ark, " where they put the ark into that huge warehouse?  I feel like I
HAVE that warehouse here, and it's full of computer disks going back to
'79.  I can catalog it, and then what?  Put it away for another ten years?
  I DO think, though, that I might turn up a few things that
aren't obtainable these days (like my "exploding Detroit trash"
icon).

Speaking of Apple IIs and BBSing, check out www.morgandavis.net.  I knew
that he had released ProLine some time ago, but thank the folks at A2
Central for tipping me off to his cool website.  It's like taking a trip
through history, and sure enough, all of his old software is available for
download.  Can't say that I have the time or the urge to put up a ProLine,
but I admit that it would be cool to see that thing running today in 2004
(the UNIX aspect of it used to scare me off :).

--- GoldED+/W32 1.1.5-030104