Sean Gallagher

























On July 4, as I arrived at my parents' house for a week away from the Orbiting Ars Headquarters, I inherited a family heirloom of sorts: my father asked me if I'd want to take custody of an Apple II Plus computer stored in the attic.

Naturally, I was happy to take it off his hands. As I noted in a recent story about my early days in tech, I did some of my first "serious" application development in Apple Basic on an Apple II Plus back in the early 1980s. And having developed something of a reputation for trying to resurrect old technology, it was obvious that I needed to do something with the Apple II, which amazingly still has a relatively small but devoted following of hardware and software hackers and retro-technologists of various stripes.

I wasn't even certain that the computer would successfully boot. It had been sitting in a semi-finished attic gathering dust for the better part of at least 25 years and had gone through the temperature swings you'd expect for the latitude where my parents live. The II Plus was also short of a few things: it did not have a power cord; and while there was a second-generation Apple floppy drive stored with it, there was no drive controller inside.

Making a bet that I could get the thing to power up when I got back to Baltimore, I made a few rash purchases on eBay:

A disk controller card, still in its original box and shrinkwrap;

An Apple Language card, to support loading Integer Basic, Apple Pascal, and FORTRAN;

A second Apple 5.25" disk drive;

An Apple Super Serial Card.

By the time I got back home, the disk controller and Language card were both waiting for me. Within about 20 minutes of coming in the door, before I had even begun to unpack (much to my wife's dismay), I was plugging a television into the composite video jack on the computer and powering it up with the aid of a borrowed power cable from an aging HP desktop. And it booted without protest. Today, I added the disk controller, and it successfully talked to the floppy drive (though I have no disks to put into it yet to determine if the drive actually works).

There aren't a lot of double-sided, double density 5.25-inch floppies from the 1980s with Apple DOS boot code on them out there. But thanks to the booming retro-computing community around old Apple hardware, there is a vast collection of disk images out there. The Asimov Apple II archive hosts many of these, including images for Apple DOS and ProDOS. And loading them onto the Apple II Plus would be a lot less of a problem if I had the CFFA3000, a card created by Rich Dreher that allows Apple II systems to boot from a compact flash card or a USB drive. But the card is a hobby for Dreher, and his next production run isn't until November. I've let him know I'm interested.

So, I'm going to have to load up disks the old-fashioned way: over a serial connection. With the Apple Super Serial card and a connection to a computer running a program called ADTPro, I will in theory be able to push those disk images to the Apple's floppy drive (after sinking a few more dollars into a null modem cable for the Super Serial card, a box of retro floppies, and a serial-to-USB connector).

The question is, what after that? After a few games of Choplifter and dusting off my Apple Basic skills, I'm looking at ways to connect the Apple II Plus to the wild world of the Internet. Anyone have any ideas?