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- Downloading a copy of The Anarchist's Cookbook off some BBS at my friend's house, saving it on a 5.25" floppy drive that I hid under my mattress where the FBI would never think to look for it, and feeling like a smug outlaw badass for pulling off that perfect crime. - Listing off the Applesoft Basic code for Oregon Trail at school and deleting the line that checked how much money you'd spent on oxen/medicine/food/etc so that we could spend MAXINT amounts on each and nearly instantly win the game due to having incredible mutant cyber oxen and enough future medicine and food to never be remotely in danger of dying. Our middle school computer class instructor got really pissed off about us doing this which in retrospect tells me that he was completely missing the point about what useful skills were being learned in his class. - Building a rudimentary scanner by using an Apple IIc's joystick port to power an infrared LED and IR transistor that were stuck into two halves of a cut up soda straw. I glued these to an old ink cartridge from my dot-matrix printer so that the LED straw would shine light onto a point on whatever was on the platten and then read back the analog value of the reflected light as detected by the IR transistor straw. You could move the printer head by printing a space character, read back the analog light/dark value of what it was pointed at through the joystick port and then repeat/newline/carriage return to form a blocky image file. My friends and I did a pretty brisk trade in scanned Playboy nudes with the added advantage of getting to laugh at the noobs who weren't tech-savvy enough to display the images in proper Apple II HIRES mode.
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Dec 22, 2015 06:38
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| # ¿ May 6, 2024 07:18 |
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 The Beagle Brothers were like tiny gods to nerdy kids with Apple II series computers. They produced a bunch of utility programs and 'hacker' tools, but the thing I most remember was their series of laminated cards that outlined things like the 6502 instruction set or the PEEK/POKE memory locations for the Apple II's custom hardware ASIC that let software interact with hardware. My Nerd Squad of friends and I would gather around one of our school's Apple II machines and type stuff from the Beagle Bros cards to make the system beep and boop, switch to Hi-Res graphics, or just list out sections of assembly code that we would try to decipher. Then we would write programs in AppleSoft BASIC to read in the position of the joystick and print it out onscreen or whatever. One of our teachers was terrified that we were going to permanently break something inside the computer with our activities, luckily there was another much cooler teacher who told her to chill out because he realized that (a) what we were doing was harmless, and (b) we were essentially getting one of the best learning experiences possible in terms of figuring out how computers worked at a low level. Thanks to the cool teacher most of Nerd Squad went on to become either electrical or computer engineers.
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Jan 3, 2016 02:23
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