A few tiny graphics trinkets for the Apple II

[Keatah]

Back in the day before we knew what really really happened inside a micro-chip we'd sometimes imagine these sorts of patterns taking place on the silicon substrate. Sometimes we'd think there were exotic mini particle accelerators in there too. Shooting atoms back and forth. Or on the snow days and evenings when we'd be off from school we'd put on that electronic planetarium music that sounds like 1 unvarying note and pretend we'd be tuning in an alien radio station and that this would be the signal strength graph.

 

We really did imagine we contacted some intergalactic transportation dispatch office and discovered these were the navigation beacons. Some close by and others far beyond The Local Group. We had all the trimmings of a radar dish in the backyard. We built it up from the picnic table umbrella that would have otherwise been tossed. I had just learned about crystal radios and diodes and capacitors, so, naturally, our equipment had a kit from RadioShack thrown into the rig as well. I had the Apple II+ connected to the phone jack in the wall, the cable box, the VCR, 2 home-made blue and red boxes, my Estes SolarLaunch Controller for my model rockets. Monitor, joysticks, 2 disk drives, dual cassette deck, printer, parallel port buffer, MicroModem, 80-column card, Videx Enhancer, 200-in-one Lafayette project kit, Micronta DMM, some sort of variable power supply, dad's shortwave stuff, my brand-new CB, and probably more. Yep, we had a microphone connected to a highly modified walkie-talkie that was connected to the game port and cassette port.

 

But the best thing of all all was the puny speaker. I connected it up to the 50-billion watt quadra-phonic amplifier. And it made this incredibly loud BBBBRRAAAAAAAPPPP - BEEEEEP when the thump of the power-supply turned on and the computer made its signature beep. The rig, sprawling throughout the bedroom and the rec room picked up all kinds of subtle electronic noise from all the shit we had wired into the hub that was a humble Apple II+. And we recorded a lot of it. This was like the SSB and background noise. We ran the tape backwards and decoded it with Audex and did all sorts of S.E.T.I. like transformations to it. It was some of the best fun we'd ever had! Just like playing Lunar Lander on my TRS-80 PC-1 under the bed covers. So cool.

 

We wrote about our discoveries and kept logs and decoded all sorts of flight instructions and directives and sure enough we built up a map of all the interstellar flight routes. We "discovered" fantastic new civilizations that made triangular-shaped stars. We even had an Applesoft BASIC program going that would control all of this stuff, bring it all together, make one big-ass system. I still have it. It was(is) a S.E.T.I. Simulator and Controller that would help us decode and send messages back to the ships.

 

One time one of my sidekicks thought he'd been tracking a derelict pirate ship full of death pumps and compression chambers for executions. That was pretty scary shit man. It's all in the logs stored in Visicalc and Applewriter.

 

Another report we overheard was about some Stanford Torus being spun up at such high-speed that everything inside was flattened into a torroidal singularity. An experiment gone wrong; producing an innertube black hole.

 

We even hoped that the government would drop by and confiscate our "research" and that we'd get hauled away to Hangar-18 at some obscure Area-51 base. This was right around the time Cosmos was being aired and Space Colonies were all the rage in space circles. So that only made stuff more exciting. Such were the musings and imaginations of not-yet-teenagers having unlimited amounts of fun.

 

Here are some of the graphics animations we used for the radio part when we'd make contact with the aliens. It's nothing to write home about now, but when I found it back in the day I thought it was perfect for what we were doing.

pulsars.zip