On a tangent...

My wife picked the book up for me (dead tree edition) for reading material for our family trip to Disneyland (the fam is currently having siesta). Given that I live in SF (setting for the book) and pass through many of the referenced locales on a daily basis, I'm enjoying the book in a "ZOMG we're doomed!" sort of way. (Well, that and it's well written...) For the contemporary technophile the exposition about such things as public-key-crypto are unnecessary, but we're not the target audience - the book is intended to educate and scare the crap out of people who don't know what liberties are being stripped away.

It reinforces the fun of passing through Disney's "security theater" at the park entrance, of course. I just take everything out of my satchel, hold my in my hand and let them glance into an empty bag and wave me through. I won't be terribly surprised when park passes/re-entrance stamps are replaced by injected RFIDs. *sigh*

Still, it is a fun simulacra to visit. My son's got Heelys now so he's zipping around the park as an augmented human, putting the crowd-dodging skills of his baseline-human elders to shame.

Thanks for the kind words, everyone!

Hagrid - yeah, it's definitely a //c. Apple used a variety of letterforms to make the Roman 2 on the cases and during the boot sequence. I believe the sequence is something like ][, ][+, ][e (early), //e, //c, IIgs, IIc (late), IIe (late), IIc+ where the exact glyphs changed even within a model over time. However, that's basically just ASCII art, not actual product naming. These days, "II" is used generically.

Hazmat - To get the stellar frame rate shown (a whopping 1.5Hz or so!) it requires 115kbps. This is supported on the Super Serial "Card" (SSC) present on the Apple IIc and IIgs motherboards. This speed is undocumented - I was unaware of it myself and apparently no software at the time took advantage of it. I am not sure if the SSC add-on card for the IIe, but it is unlikely that any other card did.

Before I knew about the possibility of a 115kbps transfer rate I was thinking of doing it in lo-res graphics mode (40x48!). Although the graphics are chunky you get a 16 color palette to play with, and can easily achieve 30fps. Developers have recently done some amazing things with this, including a 30fps ray-casting adventure game (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUN5CSWiLaw) and encoding short music videos, which is what directly inspired this project. (You just have to stand on the other side of the room...)