Yesterday’s big excitement was getting the Apple II up and running. The final working setup is the Apple II computer, the monochrome Zenith monitor, and the connected 5.25″ disk drives and Epson MX80 printer, both of which were originally hooked up to the Apple IIe (though we kept the Grappler interface chip for the printer that was already in the Apple II). The Weather program only prompts us to use one drive, so it is still unclear whether both of the individual disk drives are working. Once we hooked the old printer up, we got it to print out a monthly summary for October 1990 and all the data points for a couple of hours on October 31st – it took a bit to get the ink going and the paper got a little jammed, but it worked, and it was incredibly cool. So now we know the program still works and the data is still preserved on at least one and hopefully all of the disks, and that it can be sent to a printer.
The next question, which I spent the last hour yesterday and most of today so far researching, is whether we can instead hook the Apple II up to the parallel port on a PC and input the data that the Apple II sends onto the newer system. From the many different web pages I’ve read, it sounds like it can be done, though different sites say different things regarding the ease with which it can be accomplished, what kind of software and hardware requirements there are, how much information the parallel port can take in at once, etc. Most of what I’ve read is also pretty vague. For example, this site talks mostly about the port itself and the hardware involved in inputting a byte, and this is one of a number of sites I found that talks about using specific software for digital input from the parallel port. It’s hard to tell how relevant any of this is to us. I’m now moving on to either a CSS form for the weather site as viewed from a smartphone or creating a weather site app until Tom and Doug return next week to help investigate this issue.
-Katherine