2009 in review

[D Finnigan]

It's been a good year for us Apple II users.

Let's make a list of some good projects which were released this year:

- iDisk system
- enhanced 5.25" driver for GS/OS
- Vault archive + Usenet archive
- Carte Blanche
- Sweet16 and Virtual ][ updates
- Lost Classics Project
- Apple Game server updated
- ADTPro update
- NadaNet 3.0
- AppleWin updates

What else? We all have done a good job this year to keep the Apple
interesting! :-)

[Toinet]

A pretty good list, thanks for that. I would like to add the
recccurrring (sic) KansasFest and Juiced.GS magazine. Oh! I like my
MountIt software as well :-)

I still don't understand what we don't have a common and unique
repository for software just like other platforms have (c64 in mind) -
We have plenty of different sites or FTP sites but not a unique one.
Too late? Too much work?

I don't know if a thread will be opened for our 2010 projects or not
but I have several items for it :-)

Keep up the good work!

antoine

[Warren Ernst]

The TimeOut line of Beagle Bros software was officially released as
freeware in 2009.

-Warr

[Ken Gagne]

On Jan 1, 6:41 pm, Warren Ernst <wer...@gmail.com> wrote:

> The TimeOut line of Beagle Bros software was officially released as
> freeware in 2009.

Did that happen in 2009? 2008? Or years earlier? I'm not familiar
with the history of the project, except what's posted here:

http://a2central.com/1639/beagle-bros-timeout-series-reclassified-as-freeware/

-Ken

[A2Aviator]

I've been penning out a plan to do some kind of massive repository of
Apple II related stuff and it's come to the front line a little more
now, once I get some other behind the scenes things rolling, I'll have
some more announcements and maybe some appealing. There's not many
folks with the vast stash of stuff like I've ammased over the years,
and years, and I would like to see at least a record of it in archival
quality as both a visual record, and a reference for years to come on
how we, the Apple II got to where we are, and what was saw along the
way.

The amount of machines being tossed, scrapped, and what not has
probably waned massively, and we have definately returned to the
kitchen table and zip lock bag era of the early 80's, but in with
that, I'd suffice to say that the Apple II along with other 8 bit
platforms of it's day are the last ones that came with "free"
technical data in that they were "open", and the Apple II the most, of
those- because of this, things are able to be adapted to the Apple II
in ways that no one would have ever imagined before.

I'm pretty meticulously anal about archiving, packaging and
distribution of materials so I've got experience there. The goal is a
database of material and Apple II specific software on par with that
of textfiles.com, and not a duplication of such, as along the way,
anything that fits into other archive/projects like that would be
cataloged and contributed to those specific areas as well.

..sounds like a big undertaking, and it is. But I think it can be done
if I can figure out the backing on it.

Tony

[D Finnigan]

A2Aviator wrote:
> The goal is a
> database of material and Apple II specific software on par with that
> of textfiles.com, and not a duplication of such, as along the way,
> anything that fits into other archive/projects like that would be
> cataloged and contributed to those specific areas as well.
>
> ..sounds like a big undertaking, and it is. But I think it can be done
> if I can figure out the backing on it.
>
> Tony
>

The Mac GUI Vault project ( http://macgui.com/vault/ ) took me an entire
year-- I started in September of 2008 and finally got it online in September
of 2009. But that was Apple II and Macintosh, roughly 29,000 programs,
photos, and text files online today, and I've got 6.5 million Usenet
articles which still aren't online. Out of that, less than 1,000 items were
from my own collection; most of it was stuff I'd compiled from other sites.

What took the longest was sorting it all. The big archives like Asimov and
UMich were sorted, so they were easy, what took longest were the little
sites which had a mish-mash of unsorted files. Fortunately, I had some help
by writing programs to automatically generate titles and import the files
into a MySQL database.

So it's a lot of hard work! Probably the best thing to do is to not make any
pre-release announcements, but rather work on it in secret, then let us all
know when it's done or 90%+ done, or if you never get it done, then there's
no shame, since we never expected it. :-)

[Hugh Hood]

I think you've done a great job - very impressive.

Your site is definitely 'top shelf' bookmark material for me.

Thanks.

Hugh Hood

in article dog_cow-1...@macgui.com, D Finnigan at dog...@macgui.com
wrote on 1/3/10 1:21 PM: