10 years ago, I was shortly involved in the Apple II scene, mainly in the interest of using an Apple IIc Plus as a bridge machine to affect a floppy-disk-based data transfer and backup of my Macintosh SE with a 40 MB internal SCSI hard disk drive. At the time, I did note that there were some interesting local Apple II user groups, but I never thought about attending them at the time. “Maybe later” was a passing thought.
Well, now it’s later, and I’ve got involved once again, out of the interest of actually building the much yearned-for null modem serial cable to connect my Macintosh SE directly to a PC RS-232 serial port. At the earlier time, I’ve read the Inside Macintosh book, learned about the trick, but never built the cable.
But, anyways, with all that cool demoscene underway that I have now, now I want to get more involved with the local Apple II and Macintosh Classic community. To show off what I have, see what more cool things I can learn, and maybe should I consider parting with the machines, some semblance that I will personally know who I sell the machine to and can come back for visits.
But, unfortunately, that simply has not panned out. Checking back 10 years later, it appears that most of the local Apple II user groups have disbanded. Many old-timers must have left the Apple II vintage computing scene in that period of time, and naturally there is not a viable supply of new members to replace those who are walking out. The community is getting sparser and more skeletal, which means the geographical gaps between the few remaining members are growing larger. No longer is it easy to find an Apple II users group within your local community, if it ever was surprisingly easy back in the late 2000s up until the year 2010.
This list of Apple II users groups is full of broken links.
20190605/http://a2central.com/
20190605/https://a2central.com/user-groups/
Multiple repeated web searches reveal nothing, at least nothing locally that is. However, there are, of course, some familiar signs of the few, the passionate, and admittably the very young when they started learning and programming the Apple II computer. Unfortunately, they too are fading away.
20190605/DuckDuckGo apple ii users group
20190605/https://macgui.com/newa2guide/
20190605/https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R3LU8GXYVZE2VV/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_viewpnt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0615639879#R3LU8GXYVZE2VV
Nowadays, of those born in the United States, it is no longer remotely normal for a computer programmer to have first learned programming at a young age. It’s hard to imagine that at one point in time, there was a glut of self-starting Americans who learned computer programming at a young age and willing to take their skills up to the next level to kickstart a new economy. But, that was the truth, many of these programmers built what we came to know as Microsoft Corporation of the 1990s, that booming company with the youngest billionaire and richest man in the world at the time. Rightfully so because they built the mass market software of the new economy.