Once again the turn of the year approaches, bringing with it a
Retrochallenge event. Generally, for Retrochallenge I want an entry that scratches an itch of some sort while maintaining the desired level of "why would anyone do that?" I had a few items under consideration, but none felt quite right for a variety of reasons. Also complicating things are some home repairs that will likely require us to vacate our house for several days sometime this month -- not very friendly to a hobby project with a deadline! :-)
As fate would have it, a few things came together to give me a bit of a "sign" as to what the project should be:
- A recent eBay search led me to taking an interest in "Assembly Lines: The Book" by Robert Wagner;
- Shortly thereafter I became aware of "Assembly Lines: The Complete Book", which is a modern reprinting and extended edition;
- I ordered the book from Lulu.com, and it arrived yesterday just as I was getting desperate about finding a Retrochallenge project.
While I have dabbled a bit with programming the 6502, that has been confined to toying with the
Atari 2600. Similarly, my experience with the
Apple II is limited mostly to some
LOGO programming back in elementary school and a few more recent retro computing experiences here and there. Clearly, there are a couple of related gaps in my retro computing prowess that I would like to address...
So, my project will be an attempt to read and absorb "Assembly Lines: The Complete Book" with the goal of writing some sort of program for the Apple II series of computers. I'm not promising anything as good as
Threshold. But if I succeed, then maybe I can go to
KansasFest this year without feeling like too much of a
poser!
Wanna see how I do with this? Then you'll just have to stay tuned... :-)
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