The Softalk Apple Project blogs

Assembly Lines: The Video Podcast

Chris Torrence — Fri, 01 May 2015 23:47:54 +0000

For the past few months, I've been making YouTube videos in a series entitled: "Assembly Lines: The Video Podcast." The videos came directly out of my involvement in the Softalk Apple Project, which provided the PDF scans (and the encouragement!) to create Assembly Lines: The Complete Book, by Roger Wagner.

In the videos, I cover the basics of assembly-language programming on the Apple II. Titles include:
Assembly Lines: The Complete Book
The Merlin Assembler
The Merlin Editor
Arduino EEPROM Programmer
Replacing Apple //e RAM
Merlin 8 Full-Screen Editor
6502 Clock Cycles
Pi to 1000 Digits
Debugging Assembly Code Using Virtual ][
Oregon Trail and Typetime Part I
Oregon Trail and Typetime Part II

I've also uploaded two interviews with Roger Wagner, of "Assembly Lines" fame:
Interview With Roger Wagner
Roger Wagner's Apple IIGS

If you have feedback, be sure to create an account on the Softalk Apple Project and leave a comment below!

Previously Unknown Softalk Top 30 List for September 1984! (as I imagine it...)

Peter Caylor — Fri, 27 Feb 2015 18:37:12 +0000

I recently had the chance to combine my love for retro computing and Softalk magazine with a "homework" assignment required for a Decision Support Systems class I've been taking. We needed to exercise our skills in model-based forecasting, so I saw a great opportunity to use this assignment to take a much closer look at the time-series of data represented by the famous Top 30 software sales charts at the back of every issue of Softalk (except the first).

As I have time, I'll tell you a bit more about the particulars of the forecast model I made and how it was used to predict the Top 30 list for the imagined "49th issue" of Softalk. In the meantime, below is the text I wrote as the introductory editorial commentary that traditionally wrapped the presentation of the Top 30 list.

Once you have had a chance to savor my "homework" analysis – I've already won a Softalk/FactMiners Data Digger achievement for this contribution – please head on over to The Softalk Apple Project's new GitHub repository where my Excel homework spreadsheet has been morphed into our project's first official topic-specific dataset! :-) Word has it that The Softalk Apple Project and FactMiners will soon launch an official Data Diggers Challenge to see what kind of additional insights folks can gather from digging into this fun bit of micromputing history.

During the four year run of Softalk, 239 unique programs made it onto its legendary Top Thirty list. This is a projection of what the Top Thirty list would have been if the September 1984 issue of Softalk had been published. It is based on a four-month weighted average, with weighting values of 0.4, 0.3, 0.2, and 0.1 for August, July, June and May 1984. Because it uses historical data only, it has several limitations. Most notably, it heavily penalizes new entries to the list. This can be seen most obviously with Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, which was moving quickly up the chart in August and July of 1984. It is very likely that BCW would have been in the top five in September 1984. (It was at #6 in August 1984.)

The Apple II market was in transition in mid-1984. A new generation of productivity tools, led by AppleWorks and ProDOS User’s Kit (which, debuting in August 1984, did not make this list) were coming on the market that would breathe new life into the Apple II market. This wave of programs is in many ways the transition between the classic Apple II/IIe era and the Apple IIGS era to come. Another newcomer in August 1984, Print Shop, which debuted in August 1984 barely made this list, although they sold well in September 1984 and beyond.

This transition can be seen with some programs included on the list that were discontinued or essentially off the market in September 1984. These included Apple Writer IIe and Quick File IIe, both long popular programs that were merged into AppleWorks. Sensible Speller also appears, although it was replaced with Bank Street Speller. If these two were combined, they would have been higher on the list.

As was common in 1984, the list is dominated by productivity software, particularly word processors with AppleWorks, Apple Writer IIe, and Bank Street Writer claiming three of the top five spots. Only three games, Flight Simulator II, Julius Erving and Larry Bird Go One-on-One, and Lode Runner, cracked the top ten.

Not surprisingly, several long time bestsellers would have stayed on the list. Home Accountant, is probably the unrecognized workhorse of the Top Thirty list. Barely remembered today, it was frequently in the top ten, along with better remembered programs such as PFS: File, Apple Writer II/IIe, and VisiCalc. Long time mainstay Wizardry continued to do well as did Legacy of Llylgamyn, the newest chapter in the Wizardry series. Interestingly enough, the Ultima series did not see this long term

VisiCalc, a mainstay of productivity applications on the Apple II is conspicuous in its absence on this list. VisiCalc had begun to fall in sales in 1984, particularly with the rise of AppleWorks. HomeWord, despite its fairly advanced interface for the time, would similarly fall to AppleWorks in the months to come.

I hope you found this to be an enjoyable trip down memory lane and gave you a chance to ponder what might have been if Softalk had continued on.

Assembly Lines: The Complete Book

Chris Torrence — Mon, 22 Dec 2014 17:45:30 +0000

I am very excited to announce that Assembly Lines: The Complete Book is now available as a hardcover from Lulu press. Roger Wagner’s Assembly Lines articles originally appeared in Softalk magazine from October 1980 to June 1983. The first fifteen articles were reprinted in 1982 in Assembly Lines: The Book. Now, for the first time, all thirty-three articles are available in one complete volume. This edition also contains all of the appendices from the original book as well as new appendices on the 65C02, zero-page memory usage, and a beginner’s guide to using the Merlin Assembler. The book is designed for students of all ages: the nostalgic programmer enjoying the retro revolution, the newcomer interested in learning low-level assembly coding, or the embedded systems developer using the latest 65C02 chips from Western Design Center.

The book will be available in a few weeks from Amazon and other online retailers. I am currently working on an eBook version, which I hope to have finished in early 2015.

You can download disk images of all of the assembly-language programs from the Asimov ftp site in the pub/apple_II/images/programming/assembler directory:

AssemblyLinesWagnerDOS1.DSK contains DOS versions for chapters 1-17
AssemblyLinesWagnerDOS2.DSK contains DOS versions for chapters 18-30
AssemblyLinesWagnerProDOS1.DSK contains ProDOS versions for chapters 1-17
AssemblyLinesWagnerProDOS2.DSK contains ProDOS versions for chapters 18-30

Note that a few of the programs (in the DOS chapter) will only work in DOS, not ProDOS.

To create your own programs, you can download a copy of the Merlin assembler from the same directory:

merlin/Merlin-8 v2.48 (DOS 3.3).dsk
merlin/Merlin-8 v2.58 (ProDOS) Disk 1-2.dsk

These disk images can be opened in any of the Apple II emulators, such as Virtual ][ for the Mac or AppleWin for Windows. You could also use ADTPro to transfer the disk images to an actual Apple II.

I would love to get your feedback on the new book. If you have any questions or comments on the new book or the original articles, please post them below.

Here's a video explaining more about how the book was created...

Archive Update - Slice Baby Slice

Timlynn Babitsky — Fri, 11 Jul 2014 22:35:55 +0000

Print media pages come in all levels of complexity from a simple page with only one large text block to a complex page with text, tables, graphics, photos, advertisements, lists, and more. Most of the pages in the 48 issues of the Softalk magazine can be considered moderately complex, some are very complex.

Thanks to Peter Caylor’s monumental scanning feat we have lossless 600 dpi PDFs of all 9,300+ Softalk magazine pages. These were scanned as 2-up pages, exactly as you see them in the print copy of the magazine. In order to proceed with the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) phase of our project, the 2-up pages have to be split into 1-up page format. This is what I’ve been working on.

ABBYY Fine Reader 12 Professional is amazing software. It can open a PDF file and through selection of various pre-processing choices, will split 2-up pages into 1-up pages. This splitting process is time-consuming (on my machine) – it takes nearly a minute a page for ABBYY to pre-process and split 2-ups. A thirty-six page issue takes a little over thirty minutes for pre-processing. But, the output is incredibly good.

Because of the complexity of the pages, every page must be carefully “verified” as having come through this page splitting process unchanged in any way other than being split into 1-ups. During the pre-processing, advertisements sometimes skew page text or cause streaking on a page. Two-ups that bleed photos across the two pages often do not get split automatically. And so I've found (so far in Volume One) that between 5% and 11% of the pages in every issue have to be reprocessed using a multi-step manual reprocessing protocol to split, but preserve, the original pages. ABBYY Fine Reader does an amazing job on splitting the other 89-95% of the pages; just a few pages are "gotchas."

As of today, all the pages of all twelve issues of Volume One have been split to 1-up pages. Each page has been verified and manually reprocessed where needed. All issues of Volume One are now ready for the next phase -- OCR processing.

By the end of the month, 1-up page pre-processing by ABBYY Fine Reader of all four volumes of the Softalk archive will be complete. Verifying all pages in all issues from Volume Two through Volume Four will then begin.

The Future of Museums Is Open, Social, Peer-to-Peer, and Read/Write

Timlynn Babitsky — Tue, 27 May 2014 21:51:21 +0000

#CODEWORDS

I’ve just re-read for the third time, Michael Peter Edson’s very powerful piece Dark Matter, the first essay in CODE/WORDS, a collaborative writing project about technology in museums.

Edson’s message to all of us involved with museums, libraries, and big data archives is to think MUCH BIGGER – way beyond tracking how many visitors come through the doors, or how many scholarly articles have come from connected researchers, or even how many page views a website has garnered.

There are over 3 billion people on line today, with another 5 billion predicted to join them over the next 10 years. Museums need to understand the unprecedented opportunity they have to engage users to participate in citizen-action science, archiving, and exploring - to use and share and help.

"There’s just an enormous, humongous, gigantic audience out there connected to the Internet that is starving for authenticity and good ideas—and they want to learn."

Tech innovation is leaping forward exponentially; the connected world we live in is changing almost faster than we can track. As keepers of the artifacts of human experience, museums, libraries and all related institutions need to prepare now for the open, democratic sharing of information that the World Wide Web provides and tech advances ensure.

It is no longer enough to just archive and digitize our huge collections (although that in itself is a HUGE undertaking). We need new platforms that allow each of us to explore those collections to gather facts, to ask questions, and to learn. FactMiners is one such platform and the Softalk Apple Project provides the pilot project on which to test it.

Help Send Jim to Museums and the Web 2014 Conference

Jim Salmons — Thu, 06 Mar 2014 00:24:46 +0000

We're using the amazing GoFundMe.com platform to solicit donations to support sending STAP Research Director Jim Salmons (that'd be me) to the Museums and the Web 2014 conference (MW2014), next month in Baltimore.

Museums and the Web is the premiere conference where hundreds of museum and archive professionals from around the world gather to exchange ideas, train newcomers into the field (that'd be us), and network to establish collaborations that will empower their research and visitor agendas throughout the year.

This conference is the BEST place to establish valuable collaborative relationships to support The Softalk Apple Project and the FactMiners social-game platform.

My projected budget is based on a full week in Baltimore, travel, meals, and of course, the fee for the conference and an important workshop introduction to OpenData in museum applications. Here's how the $3,520 budget breaks down:

MW2014 Full Conference registration: $700
Intro to Museum OpenData workshop: $175
Airfare Iowa-B'more plus bag check: $343
Hotel w/ taxes: $1,393
Meals and incidentals: $455
Softalk/FactMiners Meetup hosting: $200
GoFundMe fee (approx): $155
Payment processor fee (approx): $100
TOTAL: $3,520

As a donor/backer of this campaign you will be helping our grassroots project to achieve our goal of honoring the unique impact that Softalk magazine had on the lives of its creators and readers. And your support will be helping us to 'pay it forward' by spawning the FactMiners social-gaming community as a gameplaying crowdsource resource available to all museums and archives as we race into the 21st Century.

Softalk Magazine FactMiners Fact Cloud to be CIDOC-CRM Compliant

Jim Salmons — Sun, 23 Feb 2014 01:32:47 +0000

The Softalk Apple Project is pleased to announce adoption of the Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) of the International Committee for Documentation (CIDOC) of the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The CIDOC-CRM is an 'ontology' for cultural heritage information, in other words it describes in a formal language the concepts and relations relevant to the documentation of cultural heritage. This ISO standard will be used as the reference model for the development of the FactMiners Fact Cloud metamodel that will logically organize the 'facts' to be 'mined' out of the digital archive of Softalk magazine, respecting both the elements of its editorial content and the complex document structure of a magazine.

It is truly exciting to be able to 'stand on the shoulders of giants' with respect to formalizing the candidate elements and overall logical organization of the facts that we will be capturing in the FactMiners Fact Cloud describing the content of Softalk magazine. This reference standard will dramatically accelerate our design and implementation of the FactMiners Fact Cloud Wizard component within the core FactMiners Open Source development platform.

A relatively small group of dedicated data scientists and museum informatics professionals have spent nearly twenty years working out an essential set of elements and their logical organization. This means we can get right to work developing our FactMiners Fact Cloud companion of the Softalk archive as a domain-specific extension of the CIDOC-CRM reference model. Doing this, we guarantee Semantic Web and OpenData accessibility which is essential to our project mission.

Our growing collaboration with the www.Structr.org team will benefit greatly from this reference model as we work together to envision and build the FactMiners platform on the Neo4j-powered Structr CMS/web-services platform. Our first efforts will focus on the FactMiners Fact Cloud Wizard described in Part 2 of this Neo4j GraphGist.

More information will be available soon on the www.FactMiners.org Open Source developers community website.

FactMiners Milestone: Neo4j GraphGist Design Docs On-line

Jim Salmons — Sun, 02 Feb 2014 23:02:37 +0000

I have been very quiet during the year-end holiday and throughout January. That is because I have been busy in the 'deep weeds' of moving the FactMiners social-game ecosystem forward. Quick summary... The FactMiners game is the means we will use to create an incredible 'Fact Cloud' of all the information in all 48 issues of Softalk magazine. It is an ambitious mission, but one that is guaranteed to be "serious fun"– especially when we create a crowdsource game technology and community (that's the ecosystem scope of this).

I have posted two of four parts as an entry in the Neo4j GraphGist Winter Challenge. This multi-part GraphGist presents the "embedded metamodel subgraph" design pattern underlying the FactMiners ecosystem:

What's up next? Getting the www.FactMiners.org Developers Community website up so I can move the 'deep weeds' stuff about FactMiners to its intended and future home.

FactMiners: Scientists Say It's a Great Idea!

Jim Salmons — Sun, 26 Jan 2014 20:42:01 +0000

Okay, the headline's unnamed scientists did not specifically say that the idea for the FactMiners social-game ecosystem we're developing as part of The Softalk Apple Project is a great idea. What they are saying is that game-powered crowdsourcing methods are a tremendous resource for doing real and important science research.

In today's world where pure science and many domains of research are financially challenged, getting gamers to have "serious fun" helping with underfunded research activity is a win-win for sure. But beyond creative financine, many scientists are also finding that social games with a "serious fun" side can be a great way to engage the public; a great way to have science be something 'we' do rather than something 'scientists' do 'over there' (and without 'us'). More win-win.

You don't need me to fill you in further, simply check out this exciting article at The Guardian and Observer website, 'How online gamers are solving science's biggest problems'. The column's author, Dara Mohammadi, has thoughtfully provided an excellent overview of this exciting gaming trend and then profiled ten examples with links to on-line games where you can help do serious scientific research by playing games.

This article gives me the proverbial goosebumps. It affirms my personal belief about the potential for the FactMiners social-game ecosystem to be my "pay it forward" tribute in honor and recognition of the importance of Softalk Magazine. This article – and especially the games and associated projects to which it links – provide context for what we're doing here to create the first FactMiners Fact Cloud as a companion to the on-line digital archive of Softalk Magazine. It is also good context to justify the excitement I feel about the ideas captured in the thread of blog posts looking at the potential to create FactMiners game plug-ins to build a Fact Cloud for the million-plus Public Domain Image Collection of the British Library.

If FactMiners sounds like it might be an interesting idea to you, by all means check out this article. In the meantime, I have to get back to writing an entry for the Neo4j's January GraphGist Challenge. I am writing a piece to explore the embedded metamodel subgraph design pattern used for "self-descriptive" Fact Clouds that are part of the FactMiners social-game ecosystem.

FactMiners: The Pursuit of Serious Fun with Images and Robots

Jim Salmons — Fri, 10 Jan 2014 22:24:39 +0000

Posts in this series...

Can kids and parents – students and tutors – have fun learning and teaching together AND create something that will contribute to advancing the state-of-the-art of computer vision and artificial intelligence research?

In 2009 when Dr. Li and kindred computer vision and artificial intelligence (CV/AI) researchers looked to the Internet for real world data to test their machine-learning programs doing full scene image recognition, user-tagged collections of images on sites like Flickr were about as rich a learning resource as could be found. Dealing with "dirty"/irrelevant tags in such image collections is a non-trivial challenge for these CV researchers. And it is certainly reasonable for these researchers' study designs to have assumed scarcity of (assumed-expensive) human resources for both materials prep and interactive tutoring/training of machine-learning programs.

By 2015 the 'Seeing Eye Child' Robot Adoption Agency plans to have both:

a semantically-rich Fact Cloud for a non-trivial subset of the British Library Image Collection, AND
a game-energized, crowdsource-powered human-tutor resource freely available as a CV/AI machine-learning program training resource

Through initial counsel and collaboration with active CV/AI researchers, we will refine and extend our game design and community dynamics to transition the 'Seeing Eye Child' Robot Adoption Agency into its mature and sustainable state.

At sustainable maturity, the Robot Adoption Agency gaming community will attract programming learner-players who will use the game's "sandbox" resource and community to develop and extend their CV/AI skills and interests. Some proportion of those programmer-players will develop a deep interest in human/computer interaction and contribute to the Robot Adoption Agency's gaming community by creating such components as new Open Source training/tutor workflow plug-ins. Those with interests driven more by game design and development will likely contribute presentation/interaction plug-ins to add fun and engaging robot character generators for our programmer-players' otherwise unseen running-in-memory agent programs. When we get to this level of community self-support, the game will be in its own good hands.

So, what's next? Will the FactMiners ecosystem ever be more than just an interesting idea that remains untried? I, for one, don't intend to let that happen. Step by step, we're moving forward. In the "FactMiners: More or Less Folksonomy?" article, we have reached out and begun collaborations with museum informatics professionals, both for the counsel of their domain expertise and to find kindred spirits interested in hosting FactMiners Fact Cloud companions for their on-line digital collections. In this article, we've described how the FactMiners ecosystem and its Fact Cloud architecture can accommodate image-based digital collections in addition to the print/text realm of complex magazine document structure of our project focus at The Softalk Apple Project.

In exploring this new use case within digital image collections for the FactMiners ecosystem, we have identified how our game design can "play" into the domains of computer vision (CV) and artificial intelligence (AI). So among our next steps along the path of bringing the FactMiners ecosystem to life will be to find some kindred spirits in the CV/AI domain interested in exploring just how fun (and useful) it would be to have a British Library Image Collection Fact Cloud companion and 'Seeing Eye Child' robot-tutor web service.

I believe if we can bring the active interest of a CV/AI collaborator to the table as we discuss this idea further with the good folks at the British Library Labs, we'll be a BIG step closer to opening the Internet's first 'Seeing Eye Child' Robot Adoption Agency courtesy of the collective efforts of the FactMiners developer community, the British Library Labs, and some as-yet-unidentified CV/AI researchers. Stay tuned...