Apple II, forgive me

I had no idea that Apple II is alive and kicking! I found 8-bit Sound & Fury with both purist Apple II music and also compositions made with external hardware and overdubs. Yes! The Apple II was developed by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, and with its graphics, color, and sound it won the battle over Commodore PET and Tandy TRS-80 back in 1977. Also, the inner workings of the hardware was made public, unlike competing computers. (source: Gamasutra) Also, it was probably here the cracking of games started getting organized with modem-linked networks of mainly Americans, dating back to 1979 according to Linus Walleij. This is a quite legendary machine, growing out of the homebrew hippie hacker action that seems to have been dominating computer progresses in the 1970s. Parallel to this was ofcourse the copyright-mongering Microsoft (although I do remember seeing a documentary called Psychedelic Science where Gates’ partner Paul Allen said that BASIC wouldn’t have existed without LSD). Anyway, time for some contemporary Apple II music!

Framebreaker – Serial Dub (2007) is an EP with four dub-smelling Apple II tracks, the first that caught my attention among the other more pure squarey tracks. I am not sure how much overdubbing and effects is on this, but it sounds like a sharp dub-rock printer soundtrack!

Geometry for Lovers by J.Warden & S.Williams is “Mathematically-derived instrumental compositions performed on the Apple II computer.” and might be called industrial (anti)chaos pop, or something. Worth checking out.

Michael J Mahon – In My Life (2005?) – nice and cheesy Beatles-cover, made with his custom hardware/software 8xApple//e – AppleCrate Eight Voice Music Synthesizer. This is 8 channels of samples, and doesn’t sound like Apple II to me at all. Check out his other Apple II projects he’s been doing since 1981 here.

Telnet Heart (2005), Robot Revolution and Nightdriver are amazing speech synthesis hard-rock songs in low-res. I’ve always had a soft spot for both 8-bit rock and speech synthesizers, and this is definitely among my favourites.

Also worth checking:
* Apple II music podcast: 1mhz
* Apple II hardware production company: reactive micro.
* Apple II ethernet card here
* The mother of all Apple II webrings!! : )

Also, even more interestingly, pouet has Apple II demoscene releases from 1981 to 1997 here. That crackintro from 1981 is probably the oldest one I have seen…