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The Apple II Desktop
The Apple II Desktop
I originally found this program on an Apple II GS system disk back in
high school. I imported the disks to PC disk file format, but I only
recently found an emulator that could properly run it.
The Apple II Desktop is broken in to two components, the Selector and
the Desktop.
The Selector is a small menu program that allows quick selection of
applications or booting from other Apple II devices.
The Desktop's About box. It is interesting to note that this was back
in 1986 and based on the Macintosh UI that was released in 1984. Microsoft
Windows did not even come close to a UI like this until almost 10 years
later with Windows 95! (And then M$ ditched it all in Windows 98)
The Desktop, which was obviously based on the Macintosh finder, presents
the file system as a series of iconized files and folders. Double clicking
a drive or folder opens up a new windows that can be dragged around the
screen and resized at will. Notice how open drives and folders remain grayed
out. There is also a "zooming" animation that occurs when a folder or drive
is opened.
Just drag and drop between folders or to a drive to copy files. Dragging
to the trash deletes them.
I was copying some files around when it hit me how much this was like
Windows 95 (or perhaps how much Windows 95 took from it). Other disk managers
of the time were usually very unfriendly about overwriting files and I
was surprised to have it ask me in this manner.
Also notice the Selector menu, which lets you manage the items previously
seen in the selector screen. Now is it just me or does this look like a
the "new" Windows 98 Favorites menu?
This is one of the Desktops dialog boxes. In this case it is editing
one of the Selector entries.
The Apple II Desktop is not really an operating system, but it does
come with several desktop accessories. On is a simple calculator.
Another accessory is the text viewer. It can view any file that contains
ASCII text. Clicking on the "Proportional" in the upper right switches
between a proportional and fixed width font.
Finally, it also includes a scrambler puzzle with the Apple logo.
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