
Working from home on the //c+ - empressplay
https://gtia.com/2020/04/01/working-from-home-on-the-c-/
======
StillBored
A lot of people are confusing the IIc with the IIc+. The former was a fairly
early/popular "portable" apple II. It was superseded by the IIGS, a 16-bit
machine that competed favorably (with respect to graphics/sound/etc) with the
mac.

The later IIc+ was mostly a cynical ploy by apple to drum up some cash while
assuring that the Apple II line didn't compete with the mac. In most ways it
was a downgrade from the earlier IIGS. Its only real advantage was a slightly
higher clock rate, which could be solved on the IIGS with an accelerator like
the transwarpGS. Further, not only was it an 8-bit only machine, its major
upgrade was the replacement of the 5.25" floppy with the 3.5". Which meant it
didn't run most 8-bit apple ][ software which was overwhelmingly on 5.25"
floppies. A number of applications were Prodos based and could be simply
copied to 3.5" floppies, but most games were DOS 3.3/etc and effectively bound
to the 5.25 format. By the time the //c+ was released, the much less expensive
Laser 128 (a clone) was filling the "portable" niche in a much better way.
Particularly the 128EX, which was clocked nearly as high but significantly
less expensive.

Basically it was a fiasco of a product.

Apple ][ timeline from wikipedia.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Apple_II_famil...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Apple_II_family)

So, more expensive than a laser 128EX, worse software compatibility due to
being 8-bit with a 3.5" floppy drive, and less capable in all regards than an
upgraded IIGS. The latter were frequently in use into the late 1980's early
1990's with hard drives, cpu accelerators, multiple megs of ram, math
coprocessors, x86 emulators, etc.

Which explains why its considered to be a fairly rare apple II.

~~~
Reason077
I never used a //c+, but on the IIgs I remember the 3.5” floppy drive being a
huge advantage. The 3.5” was faster and had much more capacity that the 5.25”,
so the first thing you’d do on a IIgs was copy everything over to 3.5”
floppies.

My memory could be faulty, but I also don’t recall having compatibility issues
between DOS and ProDOS.

The big issue was 5.25” games, which would pull all sorts of low-level
hardware-dependent copy protection tricks. Those couldn’t be copied without
special hacks.

~~~
StillBored
Which is fine, because like most IIGS owners, you had both drives. The //c was
the compact integrated apple II. It is all you needed. You could just buy a
IIc, take it home plug it into your TV and there was a large software library.
You never needed to buy another piece of hardware. The IIe/IIGS were
expandable, you bought the machine, which by itself didn't do anything, then
you bought a pile of peripherals.

The //c+ broke all that, you bought it, took it home, and discovered that
literally nothing worked. All the software being sold on 3.5" was for the
IIGS, and didn't work in your machine, and all the software for the IIe/c/\+
came on 5.25".

So, your nice compact standalone machine, suddenly requires you to drive back
to the computer store and buy a 5.25" floppy drive. A piece of hardware that
was a good 1/3 or so the total size of the machine. No longer was it a
"compact" standalone setup.

The few times I actually saw //c+'s in the wild, they were lonely useless
machines because the owner never purchased the 5.25" drive. Leaving them with
a machine which booted prodos, and maybe appleworks.

A compact IIGS in that form factor clocked at 4Mhz with the 3.5" drive would
have been a great product. Heck it would have made more sense to have put a
hard drive in it instead of the 3.5". Apple did neither, because they just
wanted to milk the II market a bit more so they could release the next mac.

------
ffhhj
I remember creating a math library in Apple BASIC, and a stamps collector
application for my father, with its own database system way before I learned
what a database was. Learned Pascal, and tried learning assembly but that was
too advanced for me. I was in highschool, so many memories in the Apple //c!

Some more interesting things that I remember:

The packaging of the computer smell to apples and lasted many years.

Lots of experimentation with graphics and colors (with a green monochrome
monitor), sound, poke/peek, disk and file formats, etc.

Trying to create a 3D vector game about a robot exploring a haunted house, got
to complete a stairway climbing scene.

Playing around with text to speech:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIejqWEV_8w](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIejqWEV_8w)

Playing some of my favourite games of all time: Wolfenstein (predecessor of
the 3D versions), and Bard's Tale.

Testing a self-replicating virus in Pascal from some Polish magazine.

Trying to wire a circuit to the joystick port, causing sparks and damaging the
port :d

------
potta_coffee
I had this exact model growing up, it was the computer that I first
experienced programming on. My dad tossed it while I was away at college, I'm
still unhappy about that.

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taude
Wow, that was my first computer I had in our house growing up and used it to
write a lot of 8th grade history papers using PFS Write, playing Lode Runner,
printing stuff in Printshop. Oh, and I remember programming basic on it, where
you'd even write the line numbers on each line of code.... I believe I made
some version of an Dungeons & Dragons character generator. Don't forget about
the sound that the Dot-matrix printers made then. Gave me my first taste of
growing up to work with computers all the time....

------
tambourine_man
Can anyone explain what we are seeing here? I’ve never had an Apple II,
unfortunately.

The guy is running a terminal emulator on the Apple II? Or does it understand
vt220 instructions natively?

What is this interface, an editor?

Very cool stuff nonetheless.

~~~
pvg
_The guy is running a terminal emulator on the Apple II?_

It looks like it's exactly that. The zany CHIP computer 'wifi modem' used to
connect is itself a more powerful computer than the vintage 'terminal'.

~~~
uk_programmer
You can do this with just the serial port and a USB to serial converter with
something like a RPi that will emulate a modem for you.

[http://podsix.org/articles/pimodem/](http://podsix.org/articles/pimodem/)

However that can be replaced with a plipbox (I believe he has open sourced it
and you can build your own).

[http://lallafa.de/blog/amiga-projects/plipbox/](http://lallafa.de/blog/amiga-
projects/plipbox/)

You can just plug this into the back of your PC. This is a good demonstration
of how it all works.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egi3MiSgV1k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egi3MiSgV1k)

~~~
pvg
No doubt. I just meant it as yet-another mildly entertaining way to think
about exponential growth. Apple put this turd out about a decade after their
first computer. It's, at best, about four times faster than the original.

30 years after it was discontinued, you need a computer many thousands of
times more powerful to connect the //c+ to a network. That computer costs $9.

------
silasdb
I have a DEC 440 and a HP 700/96 terminal and I love and use both. I can do
almost anything using them (I still can read most of the web using one of the
several text-based web browsers as well), but the main problem for me is using
multi-byte encodings, mainly UTF-8.

I though about writing a terminal application that would stand between the
physical terminal and /dev/tty* to translate a UTF-8 multi-byte character to a
predefined ASCII character. It would be confusing, but still less confusing
than the mess I get today when I try to see information code d in UTF-8.

iconv is not a good choice because, AFAIK, there are hundreds of code points
impossible to be translate to character sets that have 256 possible values.

Any tips?

------
macstuff
Damn this is a hoot! Love that people are keeping these machines alive. I had
a Mac LC with the Apple IIe card in college. After college I tried to keep it
alive as long as possible. I connected a 56k modem to it to connect to the
internet by PPP. I saw the modem lights flash on and get faster and faster,
and then stop and come back on dribbling in slowly only to speed up and then
stop again, over and over. I then learned that the LC didn’t have hardware
flow control. I then admitted to myself I had to let go of the LC. :(

------
Reason077
What that //c+ could really use for Apple’s 44th birthday is a deep clean!

Along with a “Retrobrite” treatment to remove the yellowing from the ABS case
parts and restore it’s original “platinum” appearance:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retr0bright](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retr0bright)

~~~
uk_programmer
While retro-brighting does make it look nice, it can make the plastic brittle.
Also on some old computers (Atari STs) you can damage the look permanently if
you use even slightly the wrong solution (many people use the Hydrogen
Peroxide from ladies hair bleaching producs and it not advisable on some
models). It also takes a fair bit of effort and if you aren't in sunny climate
the process can be very slow.

------
mixmastamyk
I remember salivating over the IIc ads in magazines at the time, also around
the time I saw War Games. Don’t think I ever touched one though. And shortly
after the Mac came out and a few years the Amiga so its days were numbered.

~~~
StillBored
This is a IIc+, not the original IIc. It came out much later than the mac and
IIGS, but was sadly only 8-bit and did little but confuse the market.

~~~
Reason077
Any _true_ fan of classic Apple knows it’s //c, not a “IIc”!

There was also the original “Apple ][“ and “Apple ][+”. Only the IIe and IIgs
were stylised with “II”.

~~~
JdeBP
I am strongly tempted to start calling it an Apple 2, now; to go with MacOS
10. (-:

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otachack
Wow, just realized the movie Explorers has that model of computer!

~~~
icedchai
Explorers was actually using a IIc, not a IIc+! The main difference is that
the "plus" is much faster (4 mhz, I think?) and has a 3.5" floppy. I had a IIc
growing up... only 1 mhz, 5.25" floppy.

~~~
otachack
Got it. So cool, though! Never thought of looking it up so I'm extra pleased
to see its successor on HN. Going to have to rewatch it soon!

~~~
taborj
If you haven't seen it, check out
[http://www.starringthecomputer.com/](http://www.starringthecomputer.com/)

------
jeandejean
Why is this article so small, couldn't the author take a bit of time to
explain some things?

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FPGAhacker
That is absolutely fantastic!

------
ptrenko
how much are they for on ebay?

~~~
ptrenko
the old apple machines of course

~~~
armadsen
This is one of the rarer specific Apple II models (happens to also be the
fastest and the last released). They’re maybe $300+ or so in good shape. The
more common Apple IIe goes for significantly less. I bought one for $50 4 or 5
years ago.

~~~
dunham
Weird to hear it described as "rare" because it was the only Apple that I had
as a kid, but there were a _lot_ of Apple IIe/II+ around at the time. (I
remember that we had a 300 baud modem, actual Bell equipment, hooked up to
it.)

Still the IIgs might be more rare? I seem to recall the world had moved on by
the time that came out.

~~~
armadsen
Are you sure you had a IIc _+_ and not just a regular IIc? The easiest
difference to notice is that the IIc+ has a 3.5" floppy drive, while the IIc
has a 5.25" drive. The IIc+ came out in 1988, as opposed to 1984 for the IIc.

I don't have hard data of course, but I've been an avid Apple II and Mac
hobbyist for a while, and own every model of Apple II. I think the only Apple
II model that's rarer than the IIc+ is the original II, and that might not
even be true. (The original II is _definitely_ more expensive, but I assume
demand is also much higher.)

The IIgs is pretty easy to come by. It came out two years before the IIc+ and
was also on sale for a lot longer than the IIc+. The IIe is definitely the
most common. It was in production and on sale for 11 years, and schools bought
tons of them.

~~~
dunham
Yeah it was a IIc - I had overlooked the plus because I didn't even know the
IIc+ existed.

