Just a few days before the end of #MARCHintosh a call went out over Mastodon asking if anyone had an Apple IIe with an Apple Workstation Card . The hope was that someone could try to use it to join the #GlobalTalk network. While I have the hardware required, I had been reluctant to try and participate in GlobalTalk. Many posts had gone by my feed about the steps required to join and it looked like quite a bit of work. I replied that I had the hardware available but wasn't sure about being...

When I got the #ForestApples many years ago, one of them came with a 16k Language Card clone in slot zero, and another RAM card in slot one. The Language Card clone had a ribbon cable going to the RAM socket at E3 as usual. The other RAM card also had its own ribbon cable going to another RAM socket! It looked like there were two Language Cards installed, something I had never seen before. I soon discovered that the extra RAM card was a Legend Industries 64KC. It had 64k of RAM instead of a...

Saturday morning I woke up early excited about my planned experiment. I took care of all the online stuff I needed to and rushed to prepare a boot disk for the Apple II Plus as an intro for Retro Computer Day . A couple of pictures, a little bit of image conversion on "the timeshare", and a quick transfer of files to floppy using an Apple IIe with an AppleTalk link. I then went around and turned off all the Macs and I was just barely ready at 8am. To try to keep myself from...

Not long after I started RetroBattlestations I started contemplating spending an entire day using only a retro computer, even possibly lugging it to work and using it there as well as at home. The idea of seeing whether or not an old computer could still be usable in a modern world sounded somewhat interesting, at least to me. After all, as much as computers have changed in the last 40 years, they also haven't. I often find myself using knowledge I acquire from tinkering with these old...

As part of collecting I've managed to build up a small pile of Apple II+ computers that were purchased to get various cards and other parts. A revision 7 one made in 1984 (contrary to popular belief, Apple II+ production did not cease when the IIe came out in 1983, see last two images in gallery) had become my favorite test machine when I needed to try out a newly received card or other Apple II+ hardware. One night while testing out a Micromodem II card and going through the...