An Apple II a Day
Weyhrich doesn’t use an Apple II every day, but Hugh
Hood does. Hood, a tax attorney and real estate investor,
still uses an Apple II to run his office.
A self-described “true-believing crackpot,” he
said, “I set up workflows years ago and they just work,
and work quickly.”
Hood, who lives in Waco, Texas, runs AppleWorks 5.1
on an Apple IIGS, which is hooked up to a couple of HP
LaserWriters. The machines perform an assortment of
business tasks, from printing invoices to maintaining a cus-
tomer database.
“Unlike any other hobby I’ve ever had, the Apple II
with AppleWorks has never bored me to the point where
I’ve lost interest,” he said. “And it’s been over 35 years now.”
Hood explained, “It’s lasted so long because of the
‘killer’ application, AppleWorks, and the ability to pro-
gram it. Moreover, I can boot my machine in two seconds
and keep many years’ worth of work on a single 100MB
Iomega ZIP disk. It’s all very low maintenance.”
Hood added that he does use a modern Mac for a lot
of things the Apple II can’t do, such as for surfing the web.
“There may be some nostalgia involved,” he said.
“I first used an Apple II+ in the fall of 1979 and recall
just how cool it was. Personal computers were in their
infancy then, and every new announcement was excit-
ing. The Apple II certainly was much more interesting
than anything I was studying in law school at the time!
“Others, I think, are attracted to the Apple II
because it is capable of being mastered, both on a hard-
ware and on a software level. Today’s machines are so
complex that total mastery is not a realistic possibility.”
Hood said he knew of a watch repair shop in
New York that used AppleWorks on an Apple II for
scheduling and billing, automated by TimeOut plugins to
AppleWorks. A couple of years ago, the business finally
switched over to a modern computing platform.
There was talk within the Apple II community about
a New York psychiatrist who ran his entire practice on an
aging Apple II, using it for appointments, patient records,
and billing. But, alas, he too recently upgraded to more
modern equipment.
Juiced.GS
The Apple II community is big and passionate enough to
support its own media, including blogs and websites as
well as print magazines.
Juiced.GS (https://juiced.GS)
the longest-running quarterly magazine dedicated to the
Apple II. The name of the magazine derives from someone
exclaiming profound admiration for a former editor’s
tricked-out Apple IIGS: “There’s the guy with the juiced GS!”
Hundreds of subscribers around the world receive
the quarterly magazine in the mail. In the last 10 years,
Juiced.GS
has seen its subscriber base quintuple,
according to the magazine’s website. “
Juiced.GS
is
read by hundreds of Apple II hobbyists in 41 states and
14 countries around the globe,” the site says.
Now in its 20th year and still going strong,
Juiced.GS
has been in print for 21 years and reports on
everything from news, product reviews, coding, and
hardware how-tos to meet-up events. A recent issue
included a review of a new Apple IIe accelerator card, a
couple of reviews of retro computing books, a technical
guide on writing commands to extend Applesoft BASIC,
and an article entitled “How to Activate ‘Satan Mode.’”
Edited and published by Ken Gagne, a teacher at
Emerson College in Massachusetts, the magazine boasts
a dozen regular contributors.
For many years, the magazine was produced on an
actual Apple IIGS, but lately it’s been written and printed
on a Mac.
There’s also a monthly podcast about the Apple II:
Open Apple (http://www.open-apple.net). “They seem
to find something to talk about each month,” joked
Weyhrich.
“In general, the people in our community use their
Apple II computer mainly for nostalgia, enjoying old games,
running old programs, or preserving old software and data
on newer media,” he said. “Some of those 5.25-inch floppy
disks are getting to be over 35 years old.”
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