Apple //e Twitter machine

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By John Edgar Park
Posted 2010/04/24 @ 11:30 pm
Category Computers & Mobile

I just got a tweet from @yergacheffe letting me know that my @johnedgarpark Twitter avatar made me look young in 8-bit.

Why does he have my avatar in 8-bit? Because he took an Apple //e and wrote a bootable 5.25″ Twitter floppy for it! This all makes me immensely happy, because I, too, spent my formative years in front of an Apple //e.

In his own words:

The Apple II has an 8-bit 6502 CPU running at 1 MHz, so it can literally execute thousands of instructions per second. In other words, it’s about a million times slower that the computer you are using right now. So I wasn’t about to write a networking stack or Twitter client on the Apple II itself. Just like the TweetWall the communication with Twitter would happen on a PC and the Apple is just used for display.

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2 Responses to Apple //e Twitter machine

jason1729 on April 26th, 2010 at 2:53 pm said:

I have to admit I still have very fond memories of my IIe (which I still have though it hasn’t been powered up in years).

But this project completely misses the point. To do it ‘properly’ you wouldn’t want to implement the TCP/IP stack on the Apple. Just like you had a network card for you PC (and even now, you still have a dedicated network chip), the right way to do this on the apple would be to use an Ethernet module like what you’d use on on the Arduino.

IIRC the IIe serial port was on an optional card, but it absolutely would connect to a modern ethernet module.

As much as I love seeing an Apple IIe get some action, having the PC do all the work and the Apple relegated to a display makes me wonder what the point is. The whole project seems silly as implemented.

Reply ↓
- John Park on April 26th, 2010 at 4:09 pm said:
  
  Hi Jason, I appreciate your point, but I’m A) impressed by the gymnastics necessary to get the graphics portion of this working, and B) a big fan of silly when done right. I don’t mean that to sound glib, I really think messing around for fun is a great way to learn and stay loose mentally..
  
  Reply ↓