Instroducig myself - Apple II

From: Bob Lafleur <bob_lafleur_at_technologist.com>
Date: Sun May 12 03:35:17 2002

As I mentioned in my PET message, my dad bought an Apple II while I was
still an avid PET user in high school. I tinkered with the machine a
little, but not a whole lot. When I was at U-Mass Amherst from
1981-1983, several friends had them in their dorm rooms, and I started
to become familiar with Apple II software.
 
While I was at college, my dad had gotten a contract to work on an Apple
database system called CCA-DMS. This was a clunky system written in
BASIC. The sorting function was especially slow, and my dad was
contracted to write a new sorting routine using 6502 machine language to
speed it up. Later on CCA-DMS was bought by VisiCorp (Personal Software
bought VisiCalc, and changed their name to VisiCorp, and made a whole
line of ?Visi? products). The new CCA-DMS became VisiFile, and was a
real clunker.
 
A friend of ours was doing a lot of mass mailing and wanted to put
together a software program that would combine a database for
maintaining name/address lists, and a word processor for writing
letters, and a program to merge the data into the letters. He wrote the
database and merge programs in BASIC, but there was no way he could
write a decent word processor in BASIC. He had seen a program called
?Magic Window? which moved the screen back and forth (the Apple II
screen was only 40 columns wide) as you typed so you could see your full
page. He liked that idea, and wanted me to create a simplified version
that worked similar. So I created ?The Letter Writer?, which was similar
to Magic Window, but simpler, and it was integrated into my friends ?The
Letter Carrier? mail merge program. I don?t think he sold very many
copies.
 
VisiFile was starting to get popular, but we hated how slow and clunky
it was. My dad improved the sort routine even more, and make a separate
program you could use instead of the standard VisiFile sort function.
Another function of VisiFile that was really awful was the reporting
function. The report generator was a huge program that could print a
report from a variety of specifications. My dad wrote a program that
would take the report specificiation, generate a BASIC program
SPECIFICALLY for that set of specifications, and run it. It was faster
to spend the time generating a BASIC program to print the specific
report, and then run that program, instead of using the clunky VisiFile
report generator. And the other advantage was that you could SAVE this
specialized report generator program, and simply run it whenever you
wanted to generate a new report from your data. My dad sold the sorting
program as FAST SORT, and the reporting program as FAST REPORT.
 
Another aspect of VisiFile that was clumsy was the data editing. You
could see one record at a time on the screen, in a form layout. It
worked OK for some applications, but if you wanted to see data from a
previous record (or records) you couldn?t. We came up with the idea of
showing data in a grid-like form, and in the summer of 1983 wrote MASS
MAINTENANCE. It worked on CCA-DMS or VisiFile format databases. You
could use it standalone, or replace the standard VisiFile data editing
program with it. We wrote it in 6502 assembler, so it was fast. I don?t
know if anyone else had used the grid metaphor before for showing data,
but we certainly hadn?t seen it anywhere ? we just came up with the
idea. Now, it?s the standard method for displaying tables, etc.
 
VisiCorp contracted with us to modify VisiFile to be Apple //e
compatible. They had a prototype Apple //e sent to us, which we used for
the project, so that VisiFile was Apple //e compatible when the Apple
//e was introduced. We were also sent a ProFile 5MB hard drive, and beta
versions of ProDOS. VisiCorp wanted to know if it was possible to
migrate VisiFile to ProDOS, and if so, could we do it. We started
working on the project, and did get much of VisiFile working under
ProDOS. In the meantime, VisiCorp went bankrupt and so the project never
got completed, and we never had to return the prototype Apple //e.
 
I do remember going to Apple user group meetings and everyone was
talking about seeing pictures of a hard drive attached to an Apple II.
It was awfully hard for us to be quiet, as we had one operational at our
house.
 
The ProFile hard drive had a head crash, and we lost our Mass
Maintenance source code. By that time, the IBM PC started to take hold
as a business computer, and the Apple II was used less for business
purposes. I got a real job as a programmer for a company, and our Apple
II software business quickly died out. The Apple II did continue to get
used until I bought a Macintosh in 1985. My dad continued to use the
Apple II for a few more years, but he didn?t do much in the way of
programming.
 
   - Bob Lafleur
     Springfield, MA USA
Received on Sun May 12 2002 - 03:35:17 BST