On 02/15/2004 02:58 PM, Steve_Quarrella wrote:

>
>Hello Daniel.
>
>14 Feb 04 08:08, you wrote to me:
>
> DL> George Powell was the other person I was trying to remember.  I was on
> DL> his system too.
>
>At the risk of saying something that'll be turned into rumour, I 
>wouldn't be surprised if he's died, or at the very least, moved to a 
>remote location in Thailand or something.  I've tried to track him down, 
>on and off, for years now.  I've had better luck finding childhood 
>friends that I haven't seen in 25 years.
>

I'll bet he's still lurking around somewhere. He was quite a character.  He
turned me on to ProTerm, back when I had a Hayes Micromodem //e and the
horrid comm program that came with it. 

> DL> I had Jawaid over to my house, and gave him his first copy of the APW
> DL> workshop.
>
>These are the times when I recall having had a really good time working 
>for Quality Computers.  I have yet to see anything that equalled the 
>religious cult mentality that we had (and still have, to some degree) 
>about the Apple II.  I see some of it in the Mac community, and there 
>are religious elements to those who love OS/2, Linux, or BeOS -- the 
>latter of which had so much promise, alas -- but not quite the same.  
>Even hungover terribly on a Saturday, we had a good time (Joe Gleason 
>was stepping into the bathroom to throw up every few minutes as the old 
>MP6 floppy drive was demoed. :).

I still do not believe anything can compare to the Apple II and the effect
it had upon those who used it or played with it for any period of time.  I
was able to build quite a few upgrades into it, including extra memory and
my own joysticks, 80-col card, and 35 foot keyboard/joystick extension. The
schatics and firmware listings  placed in the mauals by "The Woz"
were very cleaver and most helpful.  

> DL> Cool. I'd like to do that.  I  have some half-height drives and other
> DL> stuff  for my old Apple II clone that I need to give to someone
>
>Drop me a note and we'll find a common place and time.

I'll do that.  Mondays and Wednesdays are already allocated to my musical
pursuits, but the other days are negotiable.
 
> DL> bvefore they turn to rust or dust. They've been in my garage for
> DL> years.
>
>I have an Imagewriter graveyard out in my garage.  Otherwise, you've 
>made me acutely aware that I need to pull my old 5.25 drives from the 
>hot closet and store them in a better place.  One never knows when one 
>will need to pull data from an old disk that one finds in a box.  "Gee, 
>it's only been sitting there 12 years, unused, but I need that 
>information!"

I have an imagewriter II also.   I think it has the AppleTalk card in it
too, but I am not sure.
I think I also have some 8/12-bit D/A-A/D cards out there as well. 

> DL> My brother Dennis still has the Apple GS that Loderunner was
> DL> writen on,
>
>Really?  How'd he come across that?  I presume you mean a later version 
>of Loderunner, given that I was playing that game in the early 80s, a 
>bit before the IIgs showed up ('86, IIRC).

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

 I think my brother got a //e in the deal too.  As I recall, the two Apple
CPU's were outfitted with everything you would want: a pair of 3.5-inch
drives and pair of 5.25-inch  drives, memory expansion cards (128K in the
//e and 6 Meg ramkeeper in the GS),  SCSI HD's and an excellent collection
of Apple II programming tools with the original media  including APW/MPW,
as well as the ORCA/M stuff  The GS also had a PC coprocessor card, with
its own set of two 5.25-inch  and two 3.5-inch drives.

> DL> but it is in Louisisan, which is a bit more than 30 mins
> DL> away.
>
>I used to work with Tom Hall, most famously of id Software, and he had 
>his IIgs up in our offices.  I regret not spending more time talking 
>with him about his days at Softdisk, as I recall that he and some of the 
>other id guys did develop some Apple II software here and there.  While 
>I know that Wolfenstein GS had a long history, I was always amazed that 
>nobody ever ported the Commander Keen games to the IIgs.  I just fired 
>up "Goodbye Galaxy" for the first time in years yesterday,
and it still 
>impresses the heck out of me like it did back in '91 or '92 (and I spent 
>a little time supporting the game, and it never bored me).  I admit that 
>Apple had long abandoned the II line by then, but this could have been 
>another one of those K-Fest "wow" moments.

Hehe.  The Beagle Brothers and Don Lancaster did that for me on the II+ and
//e, and FTA guys gave me a lot of those on the GS.
 
> DL> At  some point I would like to get images made of thes
> DL> shoeeboxes full of 5.25's I have. I wonder how many can be converted
> DL> and how many will fit onto a CD or DVD.
>
>I haven't yet pulled all my stuff from floppy disk, but I have a Quadra 
>whose job in life is to hold my Apple II and Macintosh files, as I sort 
>through my disks.  Having tired of my 2x burner, I just use Toast to 
>burn an ISO image, which I copy over to my PC and burn.  I've got one 
>image for Mac stuff, and one for Apple II stuff, and I expect that by 
>the time I fill up a CD, I'll have a DVD burner here anyways.  I can't 
>believe I'll ever fill that up with what I've got, but then again, I've 
>seen DVDs for sale on a2central.com.  Don't know how full they are, but 
>I'd like to hope there's more than a CD's worth of data to be had.  The 
>current push to create virtual disk images has probably helped, given 
>that you can really cram a ton of stuff onto a disk if you compress the 
>images.
>
>Steve

Hmm.  I have not given away my AppleTalk stuff, and these two Beige G3s
have the Appletalk serial port on them.  It looks like what I need to do
this are:

1. An Apple II series CPU with OS and required drives and software to make
images of floppies. GS preferred, because it has the ability to test the
images made of the GS software too.

2. Time to set up an Appletalk network

3. Time to create the disk images and test them.

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

I believe I have the storage space to host them. There is 6 GB free on this
system, and I have an 80GB drive I pulled from my other G3 tower that I am
not currently using. My laptop burns DVDs too.

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