8 ms·

Apple II Mouse Card (1981)

94 points by danso 5y ago

nobleach 5y ago
Just a note about folklore.org. This site is just fantastic. I've spent many hours reading the fun stories that Andy's posted. They have a way of instantly transporting me back to the late 70's/early 80's Silicon Valley.
- amelius 5y ago
  Too much focus on Apple for my taste, though.
  - joshu 5y ago
    > Anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh, and the people who made it what were you expecting?
    - amelius 5y ago
      A broader vision.
      - mwcremer 5y ago
        https://www.folklore.org/html/about.html https://www.folklore.org/html/about.html "Originally, I planned to host a variety of histories on Folklore, but we never got traction with other subjects."
  - armadsen 5y ago
    The site was created and most of its articles were written by Andy Hertzfeld, who was an engineer on the original Mac team. The development of the original Mac is explicitly the subject of the site. Not sure why anyone would expect it to focus on anything outside of Apple...
JKCalhoun 5y ago
So much in this short anecdote: • Engineers work on projects after hours for the sheer joy of engineering. • Management not compensating these efforts encourages the engineers to leave (and the ones you probably actually want to keep). • Clever hack: creating a loop with a prime-number cycle-count relationship with another loop so to avoid "phase locking". • Clever hack: two-chip peripheral card for the Apple II. • The utility (albeit slow-speed) of the Apple II design that allowed for a two-chip peripheral card solution in the first place. • Bill, Bill, Bud, Burrell, Battlestar Galactica.
yitchelle 5y ago
This is a fantastic story. For the folks doing a side hustle to your daily job, the last few paragraphs regarding ownership of results is worth reading carefully.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  (The hustle is my day job. ;-))
kfarr 5y ago
Favorite quote for multiple reasons: We were reluctant to show it to Steve, knowing that he would want to commandeer it, but he heard about it from someone and demanded to see it. We showed it to him, and, unfortunately, he loved it. But he also insisted that Apple owned all the rights to it, even though we had developed it in our spare time.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  This kind of greed is so sad. It would have cost Steve pocket lint to compensate them fairly for that contribution. Probably a new car or family vacation would have made them feel like they got something out of this. I think at this point, both were fairly wealthy, so they probably only wanted some token of gratitude. I wonder how many great products remained toys left on engineers floppy disks because of this greedy attitude and the environment it created? This is the epitome of no good deed goes unpunished.
  - dboreham 5y ago
    Ah but...NPD.
  - simondotau 5y ago
    I unreservedly agree that Steve should have compensated these engineers for their work, even if only for the selfish reason of encouraging its engineers to push boundaries of engineering, and to slow the rate of engineers leaving. But on the same token these engineers should have known that as full time employees, work they did during "outside hours" belonged to their employer. And I think that's fair, since that work relied upon knowledge and materials acquired through their employer. Not to mention access to people like Bud Tribble whenever you need it! The moral of the story is that if you want to engage in skunkworks and you think you should be rewarded for its outcomes, talk to your manager ahead of time (in abstract terms, if necessary) about potential bounties or bonuses for doing such work. If you don't set any expectations ahead of time, expect nothing.
- tdeck 5y ago
  Reminds me of a similar story from the guy who wrote Switcher (which basically hacked task-switching into Mac OS): https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Switcher.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...
gugagore 5y ago
> The 6522 chip had a timer which could generate an interrupt at a specified interval. The problem was synchronizing it with the video, since the video generation was not accessible to the processor. Burrell solved the problem by wiring up the spare flip flop to the low bit of the data bus, using it to latch whatever data the video was displaying so the processor could read it. > To synchronize with the video, Burrell had me fill the Apple II's frame buffer so the low bit was on most of the time, but set off at the end of the last scan line. I wrote a routine to sit in a tight loop, reading the latch. When the low bit changed, we would know the vertical blanking interval had just begun. I am confused about this. What is the low bit used for aside from this synchronization scheme? I assumed it would correspond to a color pallet index, or an address into a character ROM. Why is it available to be used for synchronization?
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  I was confused as well. Perhaps it did cause a loss in "color fidelity" (which on a palette-based system with so few colors ... that would be bad).
  - setpatchaddress 5y ago
    Could be the reason the eventual product ended up with a more complex implementation?
  - ddingus 5y ago
    The Apple didn't even have pallets. Each bit represented an absolute color based on its relationship to other bits and the color face signal inherent in the ntsc signal. Lots of color Fidelity most likely meant being limited to only a couple of the four actual color Shades available at the time, due to the use of the pallet bit.
- kmeisthax 5y ago
  The Apple II has a very weird graphics mode in which each byte stores seven pixels plus a palette bit. On a monochrome monitor, the palette bit is unused and the seven pixel bits just become black or white dots on the screen. On an NTSC color TV there's an additional color signal added to each block of seven pixels, and through the use of artifact color the seven dots per byte becomes three-and-a-half color dots per byte. At first I thought this might be referring to the palette bit - as this was almost certainly intended for B&W operation that bit is free to be used for other purposes. However, that's the high bit. Using the low bit would mean every seventh column of pixels would need to be white. Either that, or the engineer in question misremembered something and actually meant to say the palette bit.
zabzonk 5y ago
Anyone remember the Apple II Z80 CP/M card (which always made me wonder why you would buy the Apple in the first place)? https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Z-80_SoftCard https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Z-80_SoftCard
- dsr_ 5y ago
  Ah, I know the answer. At the time, a CP/M machine was a business machine, because it could run a word processor, a spreadsheet, and dBase. (Literally the name of the database program from Ashton-Tate.) So you could buy a "serious" CP/M machine, but not an Apple II, which was an educational/hobbyist machine. But if you bought an Apple II with the CP/M card, it was a business machine again. The ways of people and accountants are strange.
  - zabzonk 5y ago
    The first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, was developed and first released on the Apple II (and apparently accounted for lots of its sales) - native CP/M spreadsheets, which came along later, were frankly a bit crap. But I agree, there was more business software on CP/M.
    - bobochan 5y ago
      Exactly. I still have a //e on my desk and learned how to use VisiCalc because a high school friend's dad was an exec at Symbolics and we would swap back and forth between playing games and trying to figure out cool things to do with spreadsheets. I swore I would never leave my Apple //e, at least until Borland released Turbo Prolog, and then I absolutely had to have a PC.
  - martyvis 5y ago
    Perfectly in sync with hairstyle of the day - the mullet. (Business up the front - party at the back)
  - flenserboy 5y ago
    It was just that way — a hardware version of dual-booting your tower into Linux for work and Windows for games.
russellbeattie 5y ago
I think it's weird that Apple's first few products - which were definitely world-changing - have so many stories around them, but the iPhone, which is arguably a waaaay more influential device, has none that I've seen.
- VRay 5y ago
  Are you sure about that? There must be some stories out there.. There are some great books about the Xbox written by Dean Takahashi a few years back, in the same general tech era. Also, if you like folklore.org, you should check out Alex St. John's stories about Windows 95. He's a bit of an unreliable narrator, but his stories are really interesting https://web.archive.org/web/20160305165801/http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160305165801/http://www.alexst...
- logbiscuitswave 5y ago
  There have been plenty of articles and stories from insiders about the creation of the iPhone, iPod, and other important Apple products. I’ve seen many in Wired and other tech publications. They may not have the same candor and charm of a folklore.org posting, but they are fascinating all the same. It’s wonderful that Hertzfeld et al are willing share so much great technical and personal information about their time in that Apple era. This is the kind of stuff that people like us who read sites like this love. I fear that similar stories of the modern era will be forever buried under the threat of lawsuits from violating NDAs and that’s a real shame. Stories like this need to be told.
- robterrell 5y ago
  Check out Ken Kocienda's "Creative Selection".
- mywittyname 5y ago
  Fewer people worked on these early products, and they were involved basically end-to-end, so the people involved collected a fair bit of interesting stories. iPhone development probably has tons of interesting stories associated with them, but those stories are spread out across so many people that you're unlikely to find a single person like Andy who knows many of them first hand.

94 points by danso 5y ago

Just a note about folklore.org. This site is just fantastic. I've spent many hours reading the fun stories that Andy's posted. They have a way of instantly transporting me back to the late 70's/early 80's Silicon Valley.

amelius 5y ago
Too much focus on Apple for my taste, though.
- joshu 5y ago
  > Anecdotes about the development of Apple's original Macintosh, and the people who made it what were you expecting?
  - amelius 5y ago
    A broader vision.
    - mwcremer 5y ago
      https://www.folklore.org/html/about.html https://www.folklore.org/html/about.html "Originally, I planned to host a variety of histories on Folklore, but we never got traction with other subjects."
- armadsen 5y ago
  The site was created and most of its articles were written by Andy Hertzfeld, who was an engineer on the original Mac team. The development of the original Mac is explicitly the subject of the site. Not sure why anyone would expect it to focus on anything outside of Apple...

JKCalhoun 5y ago

So much in this short anecdote: • Engineers work on projects after hours for the sheer joy of engineering. • Management not compensating these efforts encourages the engineers to leave (and the ones you probably actually want to keep). • Clever hack: creating a loop with a prime-number cycle-count relationship with another loop so to avoid "phase locking". • Clever hack: two-chip peripheral card for the Apple II. • The utility (albeit slow-speed) of the Apple II design that allowed for a two-chip peripheral card solution in the first place. • Bill, Bill, Bud, Burrell, Battlestar Galactica.

yitchelle 5y ago

This is a fantastic story. For the folks doing a side hustle to your daily job, the last few paragraphs regarding ownership of results is worth reading carefully.

JKCalhoun 5y ago
(The hustle is my day job. ;-))

kfarr 5y ago

Favorite quote for multiple reasons: We were reluctant to show it to Steve, knowing that he would want to commandeer it, but he heard about it from someone and demanded to see it. We showed it to him, and, unfortunately, he loved it. But he also insisted that Apple owned all the rights to it, even though we had developed it in our spare time.

mywittyname 5y ago
This kind of greed is so sad. It would have cost Steve pocket lint to compensate them fairly for that contribution. Probably a new car or family vacation would have made them feel like they got something out of this. I think at this point, both were fairly wealthy, so they probably only wanted some token of gratitude. I wonder how many great products remained toys left on engineers floppy disks because of this greedy attitude and the environment it created? This is the epitome of no good deed goes unpunished.
- dboreham 5y ago
  Ah but...NPD.
- simondotau 5y ago
  I unreservedly agree that Steve should have compensated these engineers for their work, even if only for the selfish reason of encouraging its engineers to push boundaries of engineering, and to slow the rate of engineers leaving. But on the same token these engineers should have known that as full time employees, work they did during "outside hours" belonged to their employer. And I think that's fair, since that work relied upon knowledge and materials acquired through their employer. Not to mention access to people like Bud Tribble whenever you need it! The moral of the story is that if you want to engage in skunkworks and you think you should be rewarded for its outcomes, talk to your manager ahead of time (in abstract terms, if necessary) about potential bounties or bonuses for doing such work. If you don't set any expectations ahead of time, expect nothing.
tdeck 5y ago
Reminds me of a similar story from the guy who wrote Switcher (which basically hacked task-switching into Mac OS): https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Switcher.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&stor...

gugagore 5y ago

> The 6522 chip had a timer which could generate an interrupt at a specified interval. The problem was synchronizing it with the video, since the video generation was not accessible to the processor. Burrell solved the problem by wiring up the spare flip flop to the low bit of the data bus, using it to latch whatever data the video was displaying so the processor could read it. > To synchronize with the video, Burrell had me fill the Apple II's frame buffer so the low bit was on most of the time, but set off at the end of the last scan line. I wrote a routine to sit in a tight loop, reading the latch. When the low bit changed, we would know the vertical blanking interval had just begun. I am confused about this. What is the low bit used for aside from this synchronization scheme? I assumed it would correspond to a color pallet index, or an address into a character ROM. Why is it available to be used for synchronization?

JKCalhoun 5y ago
I was confused as well. Perhaps it did cause a loss in "color fidelity" (which on a palette-based system with so few colors ... that would be bad).
- setpatchaddress 5y ago
  Could be the reason the eventual product ended up with a more complex implementation?
- ddingus 5y ago
  The Apple didn't even have pallets. Each bit represented an absolute color based on its relationship to other bits and the color face signal inherent in the ntsc signal. Lots of color Fidelity most likely meant being limited to only a couple of the four actual color Shades available at the time, due to the use of the pallet bit.
kmeisthax 5y ago
The Apple II has a very weird graphics mode in which each byte stores seven pixels plus a palette bit. On a monochrome monitor, the palette bit is unused and the seven pixel bits just become black or white dots on the screen. On an NTSC color TV there's an additional color signal added to each block of seven pixels, and through the use of artifact color the seven dots per byte becomes three-and-a-half color dots per byte. At first I thought this might be referring to the palette bit - as this was almost certainly intended for B&W operation that bit is free to be used for other purposes. However, that's the high bit. Using the low bit would mean every seventh column of pixels would need to be white. Either that, or the engineer in question misremembered something and actually meant to say the palette bit.

zabzonk 5y ago

Anyone remember the Apple II Z80 CP/M card (which always made me wonder why you would buy the Apple in the first place)? https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Z-80_SoftCard https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Z-80_SoftCard

dsr_ 5y ago
Ah, I know the answer. At the time, a CP/M machine was a business machine, because it could run a word processor, a spreadsheet, and dBase. (Literally the name of the database program from Ashton-Tate.) So you could buy a "serious" CP/M machine, but not an Apple II, which was an educational/hobbyist machine. But if you bought an Apple II with the CP/M card, it was a business machine again. The ways of people and accountants are strange.
- zabzonk 5y ago
  The first spreadsheet, VisiCalc, was developed and first released on the Apple II (and apparently accounted for lots of its sales) - native CP/M spreadsheets, which came along later, were frankly a bit crap. But I agree, there was more business software on CP/M.
  - bobochan 5y ago
    Exactly. I still have a //e on my desk and learned how to use VisiCalc because a high school friend's dad was an exec at Symbolics and we would swap back and forth between playing games and trying to figure out cool things to do with spreadsheets. I swore I would never leave my Apple //e, at least until Borland released Turbo Prolog, and then I absolutely had to have a PC.
- martyvis 5y ago
  Perfectly in sync with hairstyle of the day - the mullet. (Business up the front - party at the back)
- flenserboy 5y ago
  It was just that way — a hardware version of dual-booting your tower into Linux for work and Windows for games.

russellbeattie 5y ago

I think it's weird that Apple's first few products - which were definitely world-changing - have so many stories around them, but the iPhone, which is arguably a waaaay more influential device, has none that I've seen.

VRay 5y ago
Are you sure about that? There must be some stories out there.. There are some great books about the Xbox written by Dean Takahashi a few years back, in the same general tech era. Also, if you like folklore.org, you should check out Alex St. John's stories about Windows 95. He's a bit of an unreliable narrator, but his stories are really interesting https://web.archive.org/web/20160305165801/http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160305165801/http://www.alexst...
logbiscuitswave 5y ago
There have been plenty of articles and stories from insiders about the creation of the iPhone, iPod, and other important Apple products. I’ve seen many in Wired and other tech publications. They may not have the same candor and charm of a folklore.org posting, but they are fascinating all the same. It’s wonderful that Hertzfeld et al are willing share so much great technical and personal information about their time in that Apple era. This is the kind of stuff that people like us who read sites like this love. I fear that similar stories of the modern era will be forever buried under the threat of lawsuits from violating NDAs and that’s a real shame. Stories like this need to be told.
robterrell 5y ago
Check out Ken Kocienda's "Creative Selection".
mywittyname 5y ago
Fewer people worked on these early products, and they were involved basically end-to-end, so the people involved collected a fair bit of interesting stories. iPhone development probably has tons of interesting stories associated with them, but those stories are spread out across so many people that you're unlikely to find a single person like Andy who knows many of them first hand.