Boot tracing in the 21st century

In a previous post, I went over the contents of The Electronic Mailbag program, but I want to also run through how I managed to get it into a usable format, since it was an interesting foray back into the world of boot tracing. The disk itself is fairly resistant […]

Intro to email

A while back, I got a copy of a disk called The Electronic Mailbag from eBay. The purpose of the software was to help the user get used to the idea of electronic mail and how checking/sending messages, printing, mass emails, and searching worked. A way to practice without the […]

on three

I recently received a great collection of On Three magazines and I am working through them to fill in some of the holes in the collections on the net. I have started scanning on the tail end of the run, partly just because they were the easy ones. As of […]

Space War, Road Race Game. Wow.

One of the tapes I recently got was this one. On the front it says “Road Race Game”, copyright “WOW”. Ok. I’m appropriately awed. Flipping it over, I saw that the other side contains “Space War” and that “WOW” is short for “Wise Owl Workshop”. I’d never heard of Wise […]

What happens in Cupertino stays in Cupertino

Back when the Apple II was new, there wasn’t a lot of software available for it. On the earliest price list I’ve seen, April 1977, Apple listed the Apple I™ and several cassette tapes for it, and the then new Apple II™, but with no software available. The next iteration […]

Apple on Apples

At a few different times in its history, Apple has published magazines of a sort. These were not just catalogs, although they did of course promote the Apple cause. The Apple magazine lasted for a few issues in the early 1980s, and I will be posting scans of those at […]

Dear Educator, we live in exciting times!

Pretty much right from the beginning, Apple marketed itself heavily to children and the educational market. Through a happy accident I wound up with what seems to be an untouched Apple Curriculum Materials Kit, from February 1979. From what’s inside, it seems to have been sent out to schools (on […]

The Rising Star

Almost certainly the biggest player in the Epson QX-10-specific software world was Rising Star Industries, the creators of Valdocs and its various successors. Valdocs is an integrated software suite that (as I understand it) was generally packaged with Epson QX-10 machines. RSI pretty much tied its future to the QX-10 […]

Set phasors to “Zap”

Here is Programma’s Phasor Zap cassette, another game of the “shoot alien spacecraft in space” variety. Here are the audio files. I have not tested the WAV files but the AIFF file loads fine in Virtual II. I have also put it on a disk. Programma – Phasor Zap AIFF […]

A dazzling display of purple and green

I got two copies of Programma’s Kaleidoscope, which seem to straddle the point in time when their tape packaging changed, and for the better I’d say. I took audio images of both tapes, but there do not appear to be any differences. I didn’t do a byte-level analysis, but they […]