II Something
by Clark Hugh Stiles
March 6, 2002 

The block editor program isn't done, and in fact I've not even worked on it at all in a couple of months. It will get finished someday. I could rough out an AppleSoft frontend that uses the MLI calls (ONLINE, BLOCK_READ, BLOCK_WRITE), but that seems like a duplication of effort. It's time better spent finishing the ML version. 
Screenwriter II 
Years ago, well, many years ago, I first learned of a program, Screenwriter II, that Sierra OnLine published for the Apple II (along with Soft Seventy and probably others I've forgotten). Sierra is around in some form (maybe just a brand name) as a game company. Screenwriter II was a word processor that ran on a forty column Apple II, using the graphics screen to make a 70 column text display -- as the ads boasted, "without hardware!" 

Also years ago NASA built an interface for some early space probes using an Apple II to communicate with them. I read the other day that NASA had re-established communication with one of the Pioneer probes which have (depending on who you talk to) officially left the Solar System. That got me thinking just now about the first Star Trek movie, in which Voyager returns as V-ger. 

So, imagine instead that an Apple II, taken into space by a II-lover and computer hobbyist aboard an early colony ship, sometime in the future, is found and studied and simulated and expanded by an alien intelligence. And the only working program besides the operating system is the Apple II version of Eliza... 

II Infinitum! 