A2-Central Summer Conference
By Andrew Roughan
Copyright (c) 1992 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
Around this time last year reports from KansasFest reached our ears and inspired our imaginations. Five AUG members pledged to be part of the experience if given the chance. When A2-Central again announced their intentions to hold the event, Richard Bennett, Cameron Brawn, Chris Nelligan, Sean Craig and myself decided to take the plunge and go and see what all the fuss was about. Personally, I believed that this year, celebrating the fifteenth birthday of the Apple II, would probably be the last year to sustain such a gathering of Apple II enthusiasts. Thankfully I was wrong.
The Summer Conference consists of three two-day events. The Developers College, KansasFest proper and the Apple Central Expo. This year the colleges offered were on Hyperstudio, Pascal programming, C programming, and IIgs Sound & Graphics. Richard, Sean and I attended the Sound & Graphics college. After paying US$150, I was expecting to attend a lecture and pick up a lot of useful information. Nate Trost and Bill Heineman poorly presented a great deal of detailed information which bamboozled those who didn't already know what they were discussing. To give them credit though, there were some flashes of brilliance and memorable anecdotes, and they are just programmers after all.
Chris and Cameron attended the C College presented by Walker Archer from Quality Computers. They said it was very well run and covered C from the very basics right through to writing a desktop application with resources.
The KansasFest event consisted of 36 sessions structured to give everyone a good dose of what they were interested in. Tom Weishaar, the man behind Resource Central, opened the conference with a video of a telephone interview with Steve Wozniak the inventor of the Apple I and co-founder of Apple Computer Co. This entertaining piece will hopefully be shown at a future Apple IIgs meeting.
The other major session was given by Tim Swihart, manager of Apple II Continuing Engineering. Tim emphasised the fact that the majority of Apple IIgs computers have been sold to education and that future product directions will be directed towards the installed base. As an indication of this Tim announced System Software 6.0.1 which will primarily support the new Apple II ethernet card.
6.0.1 will contain an ethernet card driver, a read-only MS-DOS FST, an 18% faster HFS FST, default messages for common fatal error codes, a few new calls and a number of Finder enhancements.
The MS-DOS disks are encoded with a technique called MFM which many Apple drives cannot read. Therefore, the MS-DOS FST will only be useful with devices such as the TransDrive connected to the PC Transporter, the Apple Superdrive connected through a SuperDrive Card, the Syquest Removable Hard Disk and the new PLI Infinity Floptical Drive.
The Apple II Ethernet card in reality will be an 'EtherTalk' card which means that an Apple II can be placed on a network which is sending AppleTalk packets. The Ethernet card will not support non-AppleTalk frames which means no 'Telnet' capability. The card is fully compatible with other Apple Ethernet products including Macintosh and LaserWriter solutions however a gateway will be needed
to access an AppleTalk printer such as the ImageWriter. A future modification to the card may allow handling of TCP/IP packets. Mark Day, from Apple II Networking, has stated that the main market for this card will be education. The Ethernet network is much faster than a pure LocalTalk network and the Apple II Ethernet card will allow network booting directly to ProDOS 8 which will be a boon for schools.
Tim Swihart reassured us that the Continuing Engineering group will be around until the end of 1993 at least and that the Apple IIe and Apple IIgs are still being manufactured. When questioned, Tim also reiterated Apple's policy of ten years service support for discontinued machines.
Tim said that marketing for the Apple II was aimed at the installed user base, for instance the Apple II Buyers Guide, and that any new marketing would be aimed at the K12 area.
All the sessions were taped by Resource Central staff and will be offered for sale through the Resource Central catalogue. Some to look out for are Old Timers: Muse Software with Silas P. Warner, Old Timers: Two Survivors with Alan Bird and Roger Wagner, SoundWave Secrets II (gs) with HangTime, and Announcing Avatar with Bill Heineman.
The last event was the Apple Central Expo presented by Event Specialists. It was a great sight to see the vast majority of 46 booths occupied by Apple II related companies and doing a roaring trade while the few Macintosh related booths had very little patronage.
Notable products at the show include the following:
Switch-It! a multi-desktop application switcher, the next best thing to a multi-finder, from Procyon. An Advanced Interface Board for Apple II computers which allows a combination of analog, digital and timer interfaces from Sunset Laboratory. A huge range of science interfaces for the AIB-II card from Vernier Software. "If Apple had done ResEdit for the IIgs" then it probably would look a lot like Foundation, a resource editor from Lunar Productions. SoundMeister, a stereo ampilfier and digitiser for the Apple IIgs, which promises the ability for real time stereo digitising, from Econ Technologies. Out Of This World, a version of the Amiga game "Another World" by Bill Heineman.
Most of the value from the week came not from the college, conference, or the expo, but in the chance to meet and talk to many people who we had only ever heard of, or maybe communicated electronically with. People like Bill Heineman (Interplay), Matt Deatherage, Dave Lyons, Andy Nicholas, Greg Branche & Tim Swihart (the Apple Crew), Tom Weishaar (A2-Central), Mike Westerfield (Byteworks), Steven Chiang (DreamWorld), Roger Wagner (Hyperstudio), Tim Meekins (SoniqTracker, GNO/ME), Kenrick Moch (Columns).
Most people slept very little during the week because long hours were spent doing extra-curricular activities such as hallway soccer, GEnie sessions, various dorm parties, tunnel navigation, and the mandatory demonstrations of ones latest project.
The atmosphere of the whole week was one of excitement and enthusiasm. It was infectious! All of us who went over benefitted greatly from the experience and we want to spread the feeling on this side of the Pacific. The number of people for the KansasFest conference was around 150 which was the largest attendance in the 5 years it has been run. KansasFest will definitely go ahead next year, and I hope for many
more years after that. We hope to be there again next year, will you join us?
Apple II Forever!
I've passed all the brochures from the expo on to Jeff Schuurman from Two Series Software (02)606-9343.

THIS CONTENT COPYRIGHT © 2007, APPLE MACINTOSH USERS' GROUP, SYDNEY
Permission has been obtained to make this material available on the Internet.

Permission is hereby granted for non-profit user groups to republish this content.
PLEASE CREDIT THE AUTHOR AND THE SOURCE: Applecations, publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia

THIS PAGE COPYRIGHT © 2007, ANDREW ROUGHAN