On Aug 29, 2009, at 19:41 , Rick Womer wrote:
I tried to look at people's photos, and found the interface to be slower than an Apple II in Job's garage.
Did anyone see the program "How It's Made?" that I saw last night (made in 2008) where they showed how player piano rolls were manufactured? I did.
A digital keyboard is played and recorded digitally to an old Macintosh, where is shows up as elongated dots and lines on a Mac screen. It's then transferred to a 5 1/4 floppy with peeling label as an analog file (didn't show how) and that is fed into an old Apple ] [ with dual floppies and a green screen Apple monitor just like in the the 1979 ads for same. The Apple ][ runs the machine that stamps the tunes through 18 layers of the thin oilskin-like paper. The words to the song are printed on the paper from a master that is created with an old machine that looked like a large Dymo-writer, except it punched through the master 3" canvas-like tape.
So 32 years after it was introduced, an Apple ][ is still controlling an industrial machine. Huzaa!
Under contract, I once produced an 8 bit board for Apple ][s that along with the Basic program I wrote tested continuity on Southern Bell (BellSouth) cable breakout fixtures with 6 punch down blocks and 4 short RS-232 cables as they came to the end of the assembly line. It worked great, but paid me little money, of course.
Odds are it is no longer running. Joseph McAllister Lots of gear, not much time http://gallery.me.com/jomac http://web.me.com/jomac/show.me/Blog/Blog.html -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
