I went to KansasFest this year. My main impetus was to meet a group of friends that had already been going, but it was very interesting to see what's going on with the Apple II scene these days. This post will both be about my impressions of the Apple II, and of the whole event.
For a little bit of background, Kansasfest started as a third party developer and power-user conference in the late 1980s, and has persisted through today as a user group. What has ended up happening is that there are two groups of people, at least that I was able to detect: The first group is people actively developing things and making new hardware for various Apple II systems. This includes folks like James Littlejohn, who builds hardware and accessories for the systems, and Geoff Weiss, who wrote various networking applications for the Apple IIgs. The second group is what got referred to (in an endearing way) as "the TV crowd" who are mostly there because they were previously developers or power users of the platform, and have moved on for their main computing needs, but built good friendships with everybody on the scene and comes back as their vacation in order to meet up with those friends.
The Apple II has always been "the other" to me. When you talk about vintage computing, I have always been "a Mac guy" and within that band of computing (that 30-year band of choices) I've always been into any hardware that can run system 7, even if the performance is utterly terrible. (See: Mac Plus, Mac LC.) For me, using System 6 (and by extension, any Apple II) is annoying because I don't like single-tasking on a computer. Back in the day, I used multiple computers so I didn't have to deal with incompatible applications and the performance issues that leaving a lot of applications running tended to produce. I usually had an "internet" computer and computers for other tasks. (Relevant setup photo!) The situation continued when I started to have Mac OS X computers, and intensified a little bit when I got a broadband Internet connection, until I had a single computer capable of everything I wanted to do at once. (At which point the problem was that I'm actually bad at multi-tasking and a way I managed this was to use the move from one physical computer to the next as a context switch, but that's unrelated.)
Even so, the idea that you must reboot your computer in order to run different apps and that each application is a whole OS for the machine and there's no unified anything is completely foreign to me, and if I'm honest, a little bit, completely undesirable. (Also, I'm very used to the concept of networkable operating systems and putting my data on a file server.) It's that aspect of the Apple II that kept me away. In modern times, I think part of what fueled my long-time hesitation was that it was hard to see what applications, other than games, existed for the platform, because I did not really want a box on which to play what would have ended up being a lot of games that exist and run better on the Mac anyway. (Though, you could also ask what the impetus is to run AppleWorks 4 or AppleWorks GS on something, when I could run ClarisWorks or AppleWorks 5 on a System 7 Mac.) That's one of the problematic aspects of most vintage computing groups though: On the home computer side of things, nobody cares about productivity applications; and on the professional computers, nobody is willing to pirate commercial software, or some of it was so complicated that it's not worth trying.
With that in mind, it was actually really interesting to see what some of the friends I was meeting, Ian and Geoff in particular, are doing with their Apple II systems. I'd long been aware of the fact that GS/OS existed, but I've never seen it in operation. GS/OS 6.0.1 is pretty similar to Mac system 6, with the caveat that System 6 on Macs was actually way faster, and has long had more functionality.
The conference is really interesting. I didn't personally follow the structure of the conference very tightly, though it was really clear to see that several people did. After a general meet-and-greet, a dinner out and then breakfast, there was a give-away event. One of the members of the community spends a fair amount of time acquiring things to re-distribute to the rest of the scene. At this event, I was hanging out off to the side, not wanting to get in the way of anybody who wanted anything, but also not wanting to miss the action.
Geoff approached and asked "So Cory, do you have a working Apple II at home?" I can never remember the Apple IIe card, which might not count anyway, so I mentioned I didn't have, and within minutes, there was an Apple IIgs, a spare case in better condition, two different disk drives, and a monitor at my feet. It lacked a CPU, but that was fixed within a day or so as people purchased accelerators for their own systems and CPUs became available. Of course, all the testing I did on the system (which was just to verify that it turns on) was with monitors that other people already have, so I definitely failed to realize that the system didn't have a video cable. I'll pick one up later on eBay. I'm not really ready for another system at the moment, so I don't feel very guilty about setting the new Apple II stuff aside for some unspecified amount of time.
It was interesting because if a new person joins the vintage Macintosh scene, nobody offers to just give you a new system, it's even uncommon for somebody to offer parts to repair a machine, much less at no charge. I think there are a few different factors at work here, though. For starters, I bet that more re-distribution would happen if there were a centralized physical event at which most of the community gathered every year. The other thing that's interesting is that within the Apple IIgs subset of the over-arching Apple II community, accelerating the machines is considered necessary.
On the Mac scene, acceleration is considered interesting, but there's definitely an attitude that buying a newer machine or simply dealing with it is okay. Of course, by the time of the really upgradeable 68k Macintoshes, hardware started to standardize a lot, and where it's uncommon and sometimes impossible to move hardware from machine to machine. (For example, the Apple IIc and IIc+ share almost no internal components.) As a result of this, it's pretty common for people to gut one machine (either in poor physical condition or just not up to the tasks they want to do) as a way to get parts for another machine of a different model.
And that gets to a really core difference between the Apple II and the Macintosh – the Apple II family was outright discontinued by the end of 1993, and at the same time, 68k Macintoshes were slowly phased out over the course of two or three years and replaced with PowerPC Macintoshes that run almost the same operating system, and the same application software, take the same disks and memory, use the same displays, and also look the same.
The Macintosh has been through many such transitions, on the hardware and software, and has by and large took the customers with them. In fact, this particular fact essentially sets the Macintosh apart from almost every other home computing platform that has vintage followers has either ended, or certain vendors, product lines, and architectures have ended, leaving room for a collector's community of, say, MCA-based IBM PCs. Enthusiasts of old professional, office, and UNIX or other "big iron" platforms have other similarities and differences from the Macintosh scene, but I won't go into that here.
The other big opportunity I see for differences is that many of the software publishers for the Apple II are gone, but there's also a really interesting situation going on where most of the people still pay for binders full of paper documentation and commercially available compilers and developer environments for the Apple II systems. This is in contrast to the Mac scene where nobody pays for CodeWarrior anymore, and MPW (whether or not MPW is considered "friendly" notwithstanding) has been available for years. (Part of that situation, however, is that the vintage/68k-based Mac community has very few active developers, relative to the Apple II.)
On the other hand, there's a small and growing contingent of people using modern development ideas and methodologies on Apple II systems, either by connecting them to network storage and using version control systems, or by open sourcing the software and storing it online. As far as I've been able to tell, this isn't an idea that has come online on vintage Macintoshes quite yet, even on systems where using that kind of arrangement more directly makes a lot of sense. (Of course, part of that is that Macintoshes often get used as part of the Apple IIgs development toolchain.)
My actual Apple IIgs in and of itself isn't very remarkable. It is a ROM03 model, it came without a CPU but we added one in, and it is otherwise complete. I already have ADB stuff on hand, but I have the coveted Apple IIgs monitor and the disk drives. One of the more interesting things I'll need to try with the system will be to use a LocalTalk to EtherTalk bridge (such as the Asante EtherPrint) so as to enable booting the system from an A2SERVER instance or from Netatalk.
I'll have to look at the configuration of such things, but if my theory is correct, then I should be able to configure nachibes (or another Linux or BSD host) with the requisite components for network booting, and should have almost unlimited storage for applications and data. Of course, I can't predict ever needing more than about 40 megabytes, but that's another matter.
One remarkable bit about the Apple IIgs is that it's one of my first non-Macintosh "vintage" computers. When I first happened upon Macintoshes, they were a few years old and most of them were entering their second productive lives, and it wasn't anybody thought about as a "collection" or as a "vintage" computer. For a few years after I got mine, the development of new technologies and the performance needed to run these things increased dramatically, and it has since slowed down just a little bit. It's interesting to note the different attitudes this causes about different things in the community. One of the things I think some people presume you have to do when you investigate and use a vintage computer, but I'll admit I'm hesitant to do that, because of my experiences with the other "vintage computer" communities I'm a part of. Whether this is a hint that I personally shouldn't bother with vintage computers, or simply that I should enjoy my vintage computing alone, I don't know.
Back to Kfest in particular: If only because the large number of people I was able to meet in person, I'll likely return, though it'll be interesting to see whether or not I can afford (and get vacation time) for both Kfest and Eurovision.