My Nibble Magazine article (April 1986)
Nibble Magazine. Recognition of that title will separate the true old Apple ][ nuts from... well, the rest of you. But if you had an Apple and you liked programming, then this was the best thing going. I learned practically everything I knew from Nibble, the Applesoft BASIC reference and the really quirky, yet amazingly easy to read Apple Machine Language by Inman & Inman.
Actually, by 1986, the time this article was in print, the Apple was getting pretty old. We had already ditched our original ][+ for the smaller, more powerful //c. The Mac was obviously Apple's new flagship, yet people like myself clung to this old 1MHz machine for quite some time afterword (largely because of the expense and much more closed architecture and documentation). This program was an attempt (to some extent) to implement a Mac-style GUI in an application for the Apple ][. Both this app and the Macintosh itself owe a large debt to Bill Budge's Pinball Construction Set which was probably one of the most revolutionary applications ever written up to that point. Why? It was the first popular piece of commercial software had a GUI -- you used the joystick to move pinball components and parts around on the screen to create a playable, digital pinball table. It was an incredible piece of work, and was my main inspiration for this program (the "Movie Construction Set".)
Scans of the article pages: (will open in another window)
page 1 ~
page 2 ~
page 3 ~
page 4 ~
page 5
There's also an additional 14 pages of source code I didn't bother to scan.
Credit for the article and program must be shared with the Nibble staff. They did a lot of work to clean up a teenage hacker's code, as well as the article itself.