Further to the Foregoing
09:56 Wednesday, 12 August 2026
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Words: 47
I recall reading this story some years ago, but it was fun to read it again today. It's the story of how the mouse came to the Apple II, and it relates to how Bill Atkinson didn't think the Apple II could host a graphical user interface.
✍️ Reply by emailLooking Forward to Going Backward
07:58 Wednesday, 12 August 2026
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Words: 1086
Alternatively, Looking Backward to Go Forward.
But I think the first is right.
I've been listening to a lot of the Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld interviews on YouTube. It's inspiring stuff, but also a bit melancholy. The future didn't turn out the way we'd planned, I think. Or hoped. Humanity seldom "plans" anything.
Anyway, the thing I'm looking forward to is getting my MegaFlash card for my Apple IIc Plus. (The "official" name is "IIc Plus," I always thought it was IIc+, like Apple ][+.) The MegaFlash will, after I get everything configured, solve a lot of challenges I have with enjoying retro computing as a hobby here in this confined space.
You can do a lot on an emulator, but it's not the same thing. As embodied beings, there's a physical experience that accompanies using older hardware. Much like the renaissance of typewriters at the moment. I think people like the interaction with the keys, and the paper and the different visual experience, watching letters appear mechanically on a piece of paper.
With an old computer, you do want to experience the keys, but also the sounds of the disk drive, the feel of inserting a disk. Some of those sounds are very faithfully replicated in the emulators, but you never get the tactile experience of closing a drive door, or feeling the drive kind of grab the 3.5" disk and pull it in.
Of course, the MegaFlash is going to eliminate a lot of that disk experience. It'll essentially be like having four 32MB hard drives hanging off of a IIc, and it's likely that I'll seldom reach for a floppy. Which is fine from a safety standpoint today, since there are so many magnets in everything on your desk these days.
One of the things I heard Bill Atkinson say in this interview was that the Apple II didn't have the graphics capability to do the kinds of things they wanted to do with the Lisa and the Mac. In the same interview, he tells the story of how he developed a solution to overlapping windows in a graphical user interface by seeing it done at Xerox PARC. Of course, the punchline to that story is that PARC never developed an efficient solution to overlapping windows. But since Atkinson had seen overlapping windows, he assumed it could be done, and so he did it.
Well, Lisa and the Mac inspired at least a couple of practical graphical user interfaces for the Apple II and its supposedly inadequate graphics system. One was GEOS, the other was MouseDesk, later acquired by Apple and turned into the Apple II Desktop application, which was the first GUI that shipped with the Apple IIGS, though it runs on any Apple II with double high-resolution graphics.
Apple II Desktop is still being developed today, and the MegaFlash card is configured to boot a 32MB hard disk image into Apple II Desktop. I played with it a bit on my Apple //c before I broke the pin on the cpu riser. It's definitely slow, but it's also definitely usable. On the IIc Plus, I expect it'll be very pleasant to use, if I care to, and I may.
I also enjoyed watching an old Computer Chronicles episode with Atkinson and Dan Winkler introducing Hypercard. Hypercard still thrills me in a way that almost no other software ever did. Fontrix for the Apple II still gives me a bit of a thrill. That link is to the Internet Archive, where I uploaded the manual several years ago. When I gave away nearly all of my Apple II stuff back in 2019, I didn't keep Fontrix. It should come as no surprise that I spent $50 on eBay to buy it back again. Running Fontrix with a DOS 3.3 RAMdisk was pretty cool.
Anyway, it occurred to me that BASIC was supposed to make computers accessible to ordinary people. And it did, though not nearly as universally as might have been envisioned. Likewise, Hypercard was supposed to do the same thing for the Mac. I suppose Javascript and HTML were supposed to make the Web accessible to mere mortals, which it did, though again, perhaps not as universally as might have been imagined.
Now we have "vibe coding," and the opening salvos of the AI Wars. "AI slop," is the new "shovelware."
Back in the days of BBSs we had "flame wars." Humanity always brings all its shit with it to whatever forum will have it.
We have some notion, perhaps hard-won over many centuries, about how to get along (mostly) in "meat space." In "real life." We have public sanitation, waste disposal services (as flawed as those may be), sewers and sewage treatment plants. There are zoning laws and residential codes and HOA rules that kind of govern how we maintain our property and the activities we can perform on it. We have institutions and processes for resolving disputes, again, imperfect though they may be.
For the most part, we can live in peace with one another in our neighborhoods.
But not online. We have none of that. At best, we have "moderation," and some rules that vary depending on the platform. Mostly people feel as though they're entitled to be the very worst version of themselves on any day. And they can do it at any moment of any given day because, unlike our neighborhood and our neighbors, we carry "the world" in our pockets everywhere we go.
Computers have made all that possible. But they haven't solved the problem of human nature. "Freedom," and "empowerment" have meant that a lot of us feel as though we're finally allowed to be as bad as we want to be. It's not everyone, by any means. But it only takes a few, and when those few can find each other with ease in this hyper-connected online reality, "few" becomes a relative term.
We are kind of indoctrinated, or conditioned, in how to behave with one another in real life. Not everyone, and not always, but most of the time. But I fear that the sense of "empowerment" that computers offered has mutated into "entitlement," and that it is making its way into real life.
I enjoy retro computing because it recalls a time when the future looked promising. The machines and the applications were new and exciting. Today it feels as though it has all be done to death. It's depressing.
It's unsurprising that typewriters appeal to people again.
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