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[Story Researching] Apple ][ as of 1986 Questions

tomasont said:
When did the third-party drives become available? I have a Jameco drive that was a lot cheaper than one from Apple, but I don't if they were available this early.
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From much earlier - back to the 20-pin header days. Think Micro-Sci, Rana Systems.

tomasont said:
Interesting. "Everybody" I knew was using AppleWriter (circa 1983).
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Yeah, that's why I put "everybody" in quotes.
 
So let's update things.

Protag gets a ][e in 84 just as he's starting middle school Has a pair of 5.25 drives and a green screen monitor. No printer. A handful of programs. Still costs an arm and a leg but the thought at the time was it'll be good at least till the end of the decade if not longer and it's what the schools are using so he can just take his floppies there to get printouts.

EDIT
Unknown at the time, and not for awhile actually, the money for all this is coming out of a college/trust that'd been added to since he was little and continued getting added to 'whenever a little extra is laying around'. Best possible method I could think of for what's probably at least a couple grand being dropped all at once. Plus gives reson for sudden tightwadness later.
/EDIT

Come summer of 86. He's gotten a 300 baud modem and had some experience BBSing (and getting trolled heavily for still being at 300 baud. I imagine this is about the point where BBS's are discouraging it since, well... 1200 is so much faster and you don't want to have some luser tie up the line.

At this point the family thinks the kid's golden. Sound investment that will last awhile (even though it's cost an arm and a leg.) Also at this point he's started getting summer jobs that arn't mowing lawns (though he does need to bum rides because he can't drive) and there's rumors on the wind of something new apple's cooking up. This prompts him to start saving everything not needed for paying buddies back for gas and incidental 'hey i'm gonna go out' type things Rumors pan out later that year when the GS is announced/shown off.

Unfortunately even with having saved near obsessively and figuring out what parts of his current setup can be transferred over (if nothing else at least one of the 5.25 drives so he can use all the old stuff he's had) guy's still a few hundred dollars short. He does manage to get a 1200 baud modem though which helps take some of the sting out of it, and he's starting to make friends with some of the folk that either can let him borrow school floppies long enough to make his own, or might be able to direct him to a few new outlets for hardware. Family is unhelpful, but not unsympathetic. They can see the allure but they just spent frak all knows how much on something that's only a couple years old so no direct help there (though they do make suggestions on how he can earn the money himself.)

Between money not spent from the past summer and something that happened middle of the school year that ends up getting enough that he can make the diference in selling his current gear. This gets him an RCA monitor (unsure on brand, but it's a non-apple) and a basic gs. Not what he'd want (since he'd already seen some of the ram upgrades and is all ;-; WAAAAANT) but it's the system he wanted and even at this point it still seems like Apple will keep supporting it pretty nicely. Plus there's the 3rd party market (which is /STILL/ churning out stuff... which makes my brain go f00f.)

After getting THE ALMIGHTY GS it's then a case of getting ram and or an accelerator card along with keeping an ear out for interesting software. Given either of these upgrades would cost hundreds if not a couple grand (forget the price of accelerator/transwarp cards in the 87 - 89 timeframe but i can't imagine it'd be cheaper than ram, and i saw some PDF scans of magazine ads for ram going in the $500+ range for a couple meg.)

Plausibility of this?
 
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Sounds plausible if you remember that he's going to take a BATH on a 2 year old IIe and all the stuff that he bought for it that won't transfer to the GS.

Personally, if I were doing it, I'd just keep decking out the IIe until it was a killer machine and use all the little tricks I learned with that machine to do little things that only someone who knows the machine inside and out could do over the 'net, at the time, by getting some university student's SLIP account.

Which is exactly what *I* did. I just didn't do it with an Apple.

However, it's your story.
 
Which would work except that this guy isn't a hardware nut. OK he might be firmly in power user territory due to having magazine subscriptions and knowing who to tap on the shoulder locally that would know these things, but you're probably the guy he'd try selling his old stuff to (probably at a quarter of it's original value, IF that... which is still a pretty penny, but he'd be like one of those guys in pawn stars that come up going ' i paid this much for it' 'well it's only worth THIS much now.' ;-;
 
The hardware was, pretty much, irrelevant, it was the knowledge that was the key.

However, you aren't going to have him hack into the Pentagon mainframes or create a screenplay for "The Adolescence of P1", so, let him buy the GS. As you said, the whole thing is a minor plot point, and it's being "Hollywoodized". That means he can do things like, oh, use it to monitor remote locations in full colour and 30 fps or control satellites or even launch an ICBM.

Nothing's impossible if you suspend the laws of physics and belief LOL
 
Nah. We're saving the absolute insane stuffs for the girlfriend's C64 (portability ftw.)

There's a whole load of other people in the group he's part of, commodore users, home console nuts, even a couple PC users out there.

I'm just focusing on the guy with the anti-mac. :)
 
OK, well, as long as you throw in the "My {fill in the make and model of computer A} is better than your {fill in the make and model of computer B} because...." stuff since Computer Wars have been going on since the abacus.
 
It's BBS Policy that the Ford V Chevy arguments stay in meatspace with the Banhammer falling on anyone breaking that rule.

However there will be... ah... 'spirited' debates on the matter.
 
lol, you'll have to let us know when this comes out. Sounds very entertaining, especially with you caring enough to do the research :) BTW, I guess I didn't post it before but if you wanted a list of plausable games on X platform by year you can use www.mobygames.com if you hadn't already found that.
 
If nothing else I'll probably post a google docs link of where I'm gonna dump the draft pieces as it's written during NaNoWriMo.

I am gonna have to go do a little more asking around in other forums though for some of the other noteables.
 
These're hormonal territorial teenagers that feel like they have to protect their particular territories, possibly even moreso because they are the social outliners and get poked at anyway.


We will see debates, arguments, people's mice getting stolen... and more than a few leaving the club on learning what the BBS runs off of.
 
"Yes it did come with a 3.5 drive and a mouse."

Really? Maybe it did where you lived. Here in British Columbia I remember it being sold all by itself, and *any* drives were an option. It definitely didn't come with a mouse, or any software except a set of ProDOS disks.

I actually thought that the GS was pretty useless, at least until GS/OS 5 came out. Very little software took advantage of it at first. The Amiga, Mac, IBM AT and the Amiga were much more interesting to me at the time.

Now, however, it has become one of my favorite 80's computers.

P.S. I don't remember too many people using AppleWorks pre-1987. Doesn't mean it didn't happen; it just means I didn't witness it. Everyone I knew was still using AppleWriter (I personally still used Bank Street Writer until 1987).
 
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I might be wrong about the 3.5 drive, I never actually bought a GS until 94 (and then it was a used one) but I am certain that it had a mouse with it. That would have come standard with the keyboard. I got my first copy of Appleworks, version 1.3 in late 86, and upgrade ovcer time all the way to version 5.0 which I continued to use even after I picked up my first Mac, a Performa 6115CD, in 96. I think I finally quit using Appleworks about 98 or 99.
 
lotonah said:
P.S. I don't remember too many people using AppleWorks pre-1987. Doesn't mean it didn't happen; it just means I didn't witness it. Everyone I knew was still using AppleWriter (I personally still used Bank Street Writer until 1987).
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I think that's pretty accurate, given the timeframe. It's probably better to specify AppleWriter.
 
The IIgs in the US came with the system unit, an ADB keyboard, and an ADB mouse. Disk drives were most definitely separate.
 
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