Kansasfest Diary
By Richard Bennett
Copyright (c) 1995 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
26th July 1995 - Wednesday
Flew in to Kansas City at about 7pm, and joined up with Andrew. He flew in on a different airline. Managed to find the rental car place, and drove to the hotel. Time to get online!
Phone socket have an RJ-11? Yep, cool. Got enough battery power left? Nope. Got a U.S. power cable? Nope. Time to visit Walmart!
Thirty minutes past midnight and Walmart is still selling power cables, and everything else a frustrated hacker would want! Back to the hotel and haven't got the local node's phone number. Phoned GEnie's automated help service. Crashed their PABX twice, but third time got the local 9600 number. Cool. Was online by 1am. Read the week's email, and dropped into the Apple II Roundtable Conference. Nobody home. Gee, you'd think no one was in Kansas City! Went to bed.
27th July 1995 - Thursday
Had breakfast at the hotel, and checked out at 7am. Drove to Avila. Walked in the front door and there's Mike Westerfield, Steve Disbrow, Noreen Disbrow, Joe Wankerl and Bill Moore. They'd driven in over night. We spent the next hour chatting about the A2 market and why nobody else had turned up by registration time.
9am and we're still the only ones here! Went over and checked out Ridgway Hall. Ahh! Registration is in the dorms this year and about half had already checked in. Met Cindy Adams, and the photos began. Checked in and moved our stuff to 502.
Met Joe Wankerl outside our room, he's next door in 501. Then Nate Trost walks in, followed by Dave Ciotti, Tim Buccheim, and other notables. By this stage most people had arrived, many I remember from previous years, most I knew from online.
Lunch had been changed to 11am, then 11:30am, so we all moved down to the cafeteria to eat. This year there's an attendance register to stop the freeloaders. Noticed Paul Zaleski standing in line. He must be paying this year.
Sat with the GS+ people, and finally met Nathaniel Sloan, A2Pro.Help and part of my GS Front End team.
After lunch I went to the first session, Ashley Carter, the local Kansas City Apple rep. showing us their new goodies. The highlights were that all new Powerbooks will have infrared LocalTalk speed communications, like the Newton, and that my Duo 230 is upgradable to a PowerPC. That'll do me just fine!
From then on, sessions were three at a time, the first I chose was "A Fireside Chat with Joe Kohn". Joe gave us a brief history of his Apple II career, and its possible future. He mentioned a lot of stuff which had never been discussed before, particularly regarding the collapse of A+/Insider and other notable organisations.
I missed the last session before dinner, chatting in the dorm with various people.
Had a brief chat with Joe Kohn and Lunatic at the drink machine.
Dinner!
I missed the keynote speech after dinner, with Tim Buccheim, Sloanie and Russ Nielsen, getting our Friday morning demo together. In hindsight I guess I should have been there. I also missed the following session, mainly because I had no interest in the topics being presented.
Bite the Bag started around 9pm, and continued until 2am, with Roger Wagner shouting 20 family size pizzas, and cans of drink. Yes folks, that's 20 home delivery Pizza Hut pizzas! The winner was Russ Nielsen. I got bored and we went back to getting the demo ready.
28th July 1995 - Friday
Got up at 7:30am. Went straight down to breakfast, sat with Sloanie and Tim, discussing the demo. We're the first session! Talk about last minute preparation.
Presentation of the GS Front End for GEnie started at 8:30am. First discussed the winner of the product naming contest: "Jasmine". Showed logging on, viewing the bulletin board, searching for and downloading files from the library, checking email, visiting the Internet gateway. I didn't crash! People were impressed! Got a personal congratulations from Steve Disbrow. Made my day...
Next stop, Mike Westerfield's technical presentation on morphing, "Inside Morphing." Amazingly, I've still yet to see Quick Click Morph in action, and this session didn't rectify things. But it more than made up for it by showing how simple morphing algorithms really are, and how good a presenter Mike Westerfield is. Amidst a volley of "my language is better than your language" and "what's a pixel?" questions, Mike gave a clear logical description of how to write your own morphing code.
Lunch!
Ate with the A2/Apro staff. Chatted with Joe Wankerl and Russ Nielson about various things. The buritos followed by chocolate mousse were beautiful! Spent quite a bit of time in the cafeteria, being completely amazed by Ryan Suenaga's Connectix QuickCam! A baseball sized video camera, which plugs into the serial port and generates real time Quicktime movies. Cool! Ryan spent most of KFest roaming around doing instant Quicktime's to be seen on a KFest '95 CD-ROM real soon now! Hmm.... Quicktime IIGS...
Chatted with Paul Parkhurst about PMPFax and co-existence with Spectrum. We finally belted out a way to do it. Had a joint photo taken, which was cool.
Ended up chatting with Mike Westerfield, Sloanie and Tim about development environments and cool stuff we'd like to see. Then they kicked us out of the cafeteria!
Next stop running around trying to find a machine to test my GraphicWriter III demo on. Went through the presentation I'd written on the plane, seemed to work OK. Cool.
Caught the end of Tony Diaz' "Building a Case for the GS" presentation. I've never seen so many Apple II related devices crammed into such small spaces before. Tony also knows how to present a session, being both informative and humorous.
Caught the end of Greg Templeman's talk on GSLib, the ORCA library from Softdisk. He's busy finishing up the documentation as we speak, amongst other projects. We chatted later about stuff he and I were working on, including IINotDisturb support for Spectrum and Jasmine, and possible other projects in the pipeline.
Last session of the day was my GraphicWriter III demo, and a brief description of Babelfish and the new Super Convert, which I didn't get a copy of in time for KFest. People were impressed. Got a round of applause at the new font menu, and again glowing praise from Steve Disbrow as he informed everyone that the new "Object specs..." dialog saved him a whole day of past up work on GS+ magazine. What more could a struggling Apple II developer ask for?
Afterwards, chatted with Joe Wankerl about our current and past projects, and airing a lot of ghosts from past lives. Gave me a demo of some really cool stuff he's working on, and my first look at Code Warrior and the Newton development system. Gee, if I'd known Newton programming was so easy! Also got a demo of Joe's Nerf gun. Gotta get one!
Dinner!
This time it was Steve Dibrow's turn to be roasted. I'll leave the details to other reviewers, as it seems to have been a highlight. Sat with Sloanie, Nate, Bill Heineman and his wife, as Nate and Bill discussed various failed projects from throughout the 80s.
After dinner, watched Tim Kellers win at Trivial Pursuit. It seems as though Joe, Cindy, Paul and Magnus were playing just to give Tim someone to beat. Not that I was much use, most of the questions involved either the history of baseball, or famous black people throughout American history. Gee...
Ended up chatting with Joe Wankerl about the past, and various other people about gun control, and how the U.S. is so different to the rest of the world. Some understood, others didn't. I shut up just short of being beaten up, I think.
29th July 1995 - Saturday
Packed the car first thing, and went off to breakfast. This time with Sloanie and Tim.
Lunch!
First up was the swap meet. Spent a couple of minutes doing a speak piece for GS+'s video. Got a hug from Noreen Disbrow for re-subscribing and buying their last T-shirt. I think I'll have to buy more T-shirts next year!
Got photos taken of the Jasmine development team, Sloanie, Tim and myself.
Ended up chatting with Joe Kohn for an hour about the future of the Apple II, and how much his "Fireside Chat" from Thursday had revitalised my attitude to the Apple II.
Spent three hours chatting with various people until we went off to Jess and Jim's to meet up with the A2 GEnie folks. After dinner, spent two hours standing outside Jess and Jim's chatting with Tony Diaz, Lunatic, Nate Trost and Joe Kohn about the 1980s and stories that could now be told.
Ended up back at the Route 66 hotel chatting with Joe Kohn until 3am about anything and everything, computing and otherwise, while Tony Diaz and Andrew Roughan slept.
Andrew and I got back to our hotel at 3:30am.
Another KFest. Another 12 months of programming for the Apple. See you next year!

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