How the Apple ][ Works!

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The year I graduated high school they were replacing all the IIe systems in the computer "lab". My computer teacher was AWESOME, and she called me into her office on the last day. They were apparently just going to junk most of them, so she saved me one and gave it to me. I still have it, too, and it still works just fine. Thanks Mrs. L.

It's been said many times before, but Woz's "annus mirabilis" from March 1975 to April 1977 when at just 26yo, he designed, implemented and launched the hardware, kernel, sound and color output as well as a BASIC interpreter (and much more) for the Apple I and II is one of history's greatest technological achievements. It was a tour de force of talent which is astounding to this day.

My first 'real' job in college back in the 80s was programming Apple II educational software. The program I was writing was for teaching geometry, and I needed to have theta, sigma, and other greek letters. We generated all the text and graphics in hi-res monochrome mode using a little assembly language subroutine and character map, and I remember designing my own characters and overwriting the bitmaps of characters I didn't need for geometry, like the $. This video doesn't mention the use of graphics sprites on the Apple II, which I needed to use in that job as well. They were truly weird little data structures useful for moving a little graphic item around on the screen. Designing a sprite was definitely a black art, involving graph paper, a lot of binary to hex fiddling, and so forth. If any of you used a program called "Perimeter, Area, and Volume" on an Apple II, I wrote it!

I remember when my dad brought home our family's first computer, at Apple IIe. I think I was 6 or 7 years old. Looking back, and thinking about it, I realize it is THAT moment that had the biggest influence on my life. Its hard to imagine, butI wouldnt be who I am today, if that moment didnt happen.

Just what I needed, a new 8 bit guy video

PR#5 (or more commonly PR#6) really does mean, printer in slot 5/6. The PR# command DOES NOT "just run the ROM" code in the specified slot, as you said. Rather it directs print output to the card in the specified slot, using the code on that card to run whatever printer the card was intended to support. However, because the very next thing that the computer does is output a newline and prompt, the redirected output is sent to whatever ROM code is in the relevant slot, which happens to be the disk book code if that slot holds a disk controller card rather than a printer. Furthermore, the exact same thing happens for IN#6 which is "input from slot 6". The next thing the BASIC does after printing the newline and prompt is go look for keyboard input - in this case, from whatever input device is in slot 6, using the ROM on that card. Once again, this will be intercepted by the disk controller card and thus both character input and output requests for a disk controller result in running the disk boot code.

These documentary episodes are some of my favorite things on YouTube. They’re so well done!

These systems really did last longer than anyone would have thought in public schools. I can remember in 2002 I was in second grade and we had two Apple ][e systems in class for educational games still. Heck even through third grade, 2003, I regularly saw LC II and III systems in labs along with iMacs

As a fellow Commodore evangelist, I appreciate this series to finally get the deets on the other side. Would love to see one on the Tandy lines.

My mom bought an Apple //e with a speeddemon card, which fit in the special slot, raised the system memory to 512K and doubled the system speed. She used it for bookkeeping but I got to use it at other times. Forgetting to disable the speeddemon card when playing games was a real trip. I think I still have that thing stored somewhere. I'm sure it needs recapping by now...

I can't believe anyone had the patience to deal with all this! I remember learning to program the VGA card at a low level and thinking - this is insane. Little did I know! :)

This channel is something I look forward to watching every week, so I hope the next episode won't be delayed. When many people in Comments talk about the episode content that makes me feel I'm with my community and that connects me to the beautiful past, which gives me a beautiful feeling that the community still exists, remembers those days well. Proud to have lived during that time.

Always a great day when The 8-Bit Guy uploads! Keep up the great work, David!

Can't express how excited I was to see one of your history documentaries drop in my subscriptions! Thanks for all your hard work making computing history accessible

Our school had Apple IIe computers. In 1982, as a freshman, I took my first computer course and got the programming "bug" quite bad. BASIC was easy - simplistic, actually. I mastered BASIC in about a week. My teacher, seeing this, gave me a 6502 Assembly Language book to keep me busy. My eyes were opened, and I was hooked! It was the most exciting time of my life. I spent a couple of weeks mastering Assembly Language, but my real education was reverse-engineering Bank Street Writer, a disk-copying program, Apple Works and a couple more "big" programs of the day. That was the start of my 40 year programming career and one of the most exciting times of my life. Thank you Woz!!!!

Much of your content is from before my time, my family didn't get a family computer until Windows 95 was released, but I still really enjoy this. It's well done and interesting to see how far we've come.

Such fond memories of using IIe's and IIGS's back in elementary school in the 90s. Playing old school Oregon Trail, making signs in Print Shop, learning how to type off of some typing program on floppy disk, and so much more. We also had several Mac's some of which even had the IIe card. This video took me right back. Thanks, David!

PR# does stand for print, not peripheral, because there is also the IN# command for getting input from a peripheral card. For 80-column cards and disk controllers they both happen to do the same thing, but for parallel and serial cards they redirect the output or the input to the card, respectively.

As a young adult, I bought an Apple //e in 1983. I used it primarily for my own programming projects, and I bought AppleWorks, which I used for word processing. Computer games were never my thing. I came within an inch of buying a Commodore 64, but the crisp 80 column text I could get on the Apple //e carried the day. I quickly migrated to assembly language for almost all my programming, so I retain great affection for the 6502 to this day. You can make more music than you might think on that Apple 2 speaker. I wrote a program that could play 3 part harmony, e.g., one of Bach's three part inventions. Of course, the computer is completely occupied while it plays - no spare cycles whatsoever. :)