Tell me your Apple Cat 212 Stories.

[doctor_x]

There is some lore on AppleFritter, and I think I’ve seen a bit of here too - but I figured it might be nice to have a “sticky” for all things Apple Cat exploit stories...

 

I didn’t own one, plus the breakout box - till about 2 years ago and still havent built out my 2gs yet - so my experience is simply piddling around with the various programs in an emulator. 

 

I’ve read some super neat home grown stories about this modem though. Share yours!!

 

 

[Keatah]

A huge mishmash from my journal. Unfortunately the best of times with modems (for us) revolved around the Hayes MicroModem II. It was a vehicle of imagination and discovery. There's some 'Cat stuff in here. But it's mostly utilitarian.

 

Spoiler

My modeming and BBS'ing began with original Hayes Micromodem ][. Not the "//e" single card version. No sir! This is the ORIGINAL one with the blue cable and external black (somewhat transparent) plexiglass-covered Microcoupler box. The digital mainboard/card sat inside the system and the analog connectivity circuitry was in the plexi-box. Inside this box is a little red led that's got a cool glow in a dark room.. It clips along at TDD or 110/300 baud speeds and has total control from basic through the onboard firmware. I used with mostly with ASCII Express in both terminal mode and as an AE line. I even used it extensively with the Networks and GBBS stuff. Wrote plenty of custom modules for both. Clocks. Spinning cursors. Remember those? Your "line" was elite if you used special characters like []\{}|_~/-=+ and more. Lowercase was out of this world! My BBS grew to be something like 93K in size and relied on some BeagleBros shit to make it all work. Printing it out was an all-day affair. Thank god for the MicroBuffer. An external parallel in-line buffer. Otherwise my system could be tied up for hours!\\

 

During the moments I wanted something else to do besides BBS'ing and WaReZ I built up some circuitry to measure the static and cosmic microwave background. Ran it through a digital shortwave radio and a GlobePatrol, somehow. Mesmerizing to listed to the static and watch the screen print stuff on the screen. Especially on rainy nights with bursts of thunder and lightning. Moody and downtempo. Exciting. I liked the soft tick of the relay and red glow of the off-hook light. I even figured out a way to call the Voyager 2 Spacecraft.. Well as a kid I thought I did. But I did dial into the JPL system to get next-to-live pictures as they came back. Loved the MicroModem because it was so firmware oriented and obviously easy to program from Applesoft. We did so much with this little box, like modify it run at 450 baud.

 

There was software that would take like 15 minutes to transfer a hi-res picture. And show it on the screen at the same time as it was coming in down the line. At 300 baud. And it would let you type in realtime to the sender. I think DFX II was the name.

 

Those great stormy late-nite BBS'ing sessions on that old MicroModem II were the best. Usually consisted of calling 3 or 4 very local BBS's within 50 miles distance tops. Communication occurred at 300 baud and dipping down to 110 if the weather was really nasty.

 

Transferring a single-sided floppy disk would take anywhere from 1 to 2 hours depending on the above mentioned weather and if we had to restart the transfer half-way through. Single file games came down much faster in like 10 or 15 minutes.

 

While the transfer was going on we'd read tech manuals and general computing magazines. We'd make up stories about the ultimate computer - especially one that had a disk drive full of crystals, talked to the host with 2 wires, and had no moving parts! We'd discuss features to add to our BBS'es. Discussions about arcade establishments and the space program and were also high on the topic list.

 

It was especially fun with sleep overs or on babysitter nights. We had all kinds of sci-fi movies playing or 70's and 80's rock music going. We had loads of fun making mixtapes. Waiting till next song was ready to play and try to start the tape recorder just-in-time.

 

We were the only kids in town that were doing activities at night and neighbors often inquired about why our bedroom lights were burning at 1am! What was going on?

 

Back then the MicroModem was the best peripheral ever made! It was like a magic box generating new games every week. A veritable magic lantern. Every night it would reach out into deep ether space, find something, and pull it back and place it on a disk we could touch and hold. With some imagination we could imagine particles of electricity flying through sub-space and my Apple II was a master communications hub & relay. It itself buried and tangled in some satanic electronic grip.

 

Indeed. We even had our BBS'es (similar to FIDOnet) contact each other and trade a list of games and sometimes the games themselves. This all preceded FIDOnet and Echomail by at least 3 or 4 years. But we never took it big time. The sole purpose to keep a tiny network of 8 or 10 BBS'es in daily contact.

 

Some of this really scared us because we thought we might overload something someplace and cause an explosion or burn something out. Other times is really was spooky and moody, in the dead of night past 9:30pm, all quiet except for a hum of a SystemSaver fan and the MicroCoupler's relay click on occasion. The swishing of a spinning floppy punctuated the A.M. when it saved things from this strange realm that didn't actually exist.

 

This truly was an awesome time. Our activities were so un-earthly and different than normal kid stuff like baseball and BMX. Though we BMX'ed to the local arcades quite often. So different and confusing our parents didn't know what to think. I used to like to imagine they thought we were play acting and doing make-believe. It was just so far out and radical. Including those 400$ phone bills! Some of which were cause by wardialing and leaving the computer on all night dialing all the numbers in a prefix and printing which ones had a carrier tone. We mostly discovered boring things like inventory control computers. Or university unix computers. Useless stuff like that. On the extremely rare occasion we would find a real BBS that wasn't yet in our lists.

I still consider the little Hayes MicroModem II 300'bauder to be my favorite. I did so much make-believe play that sometimes some of the things actually worked! Did my first warez trade. My first BBS calls. DL'ed some pictures from a guy at JPL for real! Pretended I was a secret agent hunting on the wires. Semi-pretended I contacted the Voyager II spacecraft. Pretended I was looking for lifeforms in the Aurora Borealis. Hacked the little bugger and made it go 450 baud. I made a radio telescope. Decoded WWV and Morse Code realtime with it. Used it as a controller for my Globe Patrol SW radio kit from RadioShack. Made an RF jammer by transmitting the tones over an amplifier. Toggled the red LED OFF-HOOK indicator to signal my buddy across the street via lenses and a small telescope - later it was a real fiber-optic cable.

 

I remember how when we'd call warez boards we would have serious discussion about if we should page the sysop and if we did what we'd say to him. After all, it was us little pre-teen shits calling the big daddy who had all the games! One of the times IIRC one of the "sysops" ran a honeypot and he like came over to trade and "check us out". At least it seems that way now in retrospect.

 

Ohh the fun we had with all this, it was a totally new form of communication and experimentation. Unlike walkie-talkies, unlike CB radio, and especially unlike the regular telephone! Nothing, Nothing! ..even comes close to the amount of fun and exploration we had with that little black box attached to the Apple II+.

 

I still have my Crystal Radio and Globe Patrol receivers, Along with the Aircraft and Police VHF kits. These were really fantastic imagination catalysts. Between the Apple II, the Hayes MicroModem, these kits, and all the discrete parts - any kid could very easily pretend to be constructing their own SETI communications station.

 

Great fun to get hundreds of meters of wiring and string it out across the field an up into a tree. I swear we picked up sounds from space and from around the world. The foreign radio stations freaked us out because we actually thought we had picked up space alien conversations.

 

But time and technology would move on and leave the old stuff behind.

 

As soon as the AppleCat II came out I got the base card and was impressed that it would whip a disk over the phone in 10 or 15 minutes. I loved things like Cat-Fur and Cat-Send and Mega-Term.

 

I would soon get everything made for the 'Cat. Still have it today. All 8 manuals, 212 card, BSR X-10 kit, handset, expansion module, tone decoder, firmware upgrade, ribbon cables, power supply cable to save-a-slot, developer's package, Com-Ware, and all the other odds and ends like cable mounts, the adhesive insulator plate and headset holder brackets.

 

Boxing and phreaking were popular activities but I never got into the stuff. It was novel that the 'Cat could synthesize the box tones and effects. I lived it vicariously through the innumerable text files on the subject. I was forward-thinking about how to make it go faster and what new tech was right around the corner. It was amazing to find the 'Cat could digitize and play music, act as an RS-232 interface, and even lend its oscillator to realtime clock duty.

 

With the newfound speed of 1200baud (more with data compression). We (myself and my buddies) focused on speed and grew out of the infantile fantasies of calling starships through deep sub-space networks and all that. I always liked to imagine there was a particle accelerator in the PLL module. And even wrote some sci-fi stories about it. So.. Continued running the BBS for a year or two more. Not so much the AE line however. Sometime in approaching twilight years of the Apple II I discovered ProTerm. It was a sophisticated polished terminal package. Highly functional. Supporting multiple protocols, MouseText, and a text editor. But a lot of the magic of the early 1979-1981 years was missing. But it was still groundbreaking. I began a personal journal with its editor. Overall the program didn't see much online use. Not as much as AE.

 

Everything we did with the modem was about speed and efficiency. And the change/decline in the WaReZ scene started reflecting that. Boards became 1200 only and that effectively made me put away the MicroModem II for good. We were growing up. We didn't have time to sit and play with computer programming. ProTerm came out around 1986/1987 and we were out of high-school, friends leaving and getting jobs and getting into girls and cars. The era of the idea of SpaceShuttles servicing SpaceColonies was finished. Discovering how radios works and the era of S-100 bus computer was over, years ago. How microchips were made, we knew it all(!) CB radios, erector sets with motors, electronic project kits from RadioShack, that was over too. We had coasted out of the Apple II, through the Amiga, and trying to catch up to things PC.

 

The IBM PC years were encroaching and expanding. Especially with color ASCII. And I was soon looking forward to color text. It would be late 1992 that I got my 486 PC and pretty much relegated the Apple II to storage in good time.

 

[doctor_x]

Yea I had seen this either here in another post or on Apple Fritter.. Thank you for taking the time to share those stories with us!

[Baldrick]

Don't take offence at this, but...

 

What I do remember from back then were the Apple-Cat cults.

Because they were the only commercial device for the Apple II that used the 202 communications standard running 1200 baud they were really great at keeping the rest of the BBS community away from their shores by relegating even 212-equipped 120 baud Smartmodems and compatibles at 300 baud on Apple Cat-equipped BBS systems.  They even bragged about being an elite community.

I can say that I have zero fond memories of interactions with Apple Cat users back in that era.

Edited May 23, 2021 by Baldrick

[doctor_x]

1 hour ago, Baldrick said:

Don't take offence at this, but...

 

What I do remember from back then were the Apple-Cat cults.

Because they were the only commercial device for the Apple II that used the 202 communications standard running 1200 baud they were really great at keeping the rest of the BBS community away from their shores by relegating even 212-equipped 120 baud Smartmodems and compatibles at 300 baud on Apple Cat-equipped BBS systems.  They even bragged about being an elite community.

I can say that I have zero fond memories of interactions with Apple Cat users back in that era.

Yep.. There was NO CHANCE of getting on an AE Line back in the day if you werent on a cat. I got the single use password once and got to lurk around an AE one time and they most certainly were a different feel than the general bbs population. If I was an apple person back then I definitely would have owned a cat - and especially since I was also a phreak - and pretty hardcore during that period.. I never remember being angry or jealous or whatever. It was just a hardware thing.. whatevs.. As far as I’m concerened they had every right to be snobbish to those that weren’t there kind. They wanted all transfers to run bidirectional so chats could happen while the xfer was rolling.. .

 

Super cool! So glad I was able to pick a couple of them up.. Some day I will get my 2gs power supply replaced, drop the modem in, and play with some of the apps and see how they respond when you actually have the target modem installed in your machine rather than trying to emulate those pieces of software with no modem found… 

[Keatah]

Getting on AE lines at 300 baud wasn't much an issue. Not till 300 baud was getting old and dated.

 

But I did experience some of the snobbishness and eliteness surrounding 1200-anything. And then it started again with 2400. Anything faster didn't seem to afford one any special social status. Nothing 'cat specific however.

 

Just happy to have gotten in on the ground floor with a 300 baud Hayes MicroModem II. Loved everything about it. Introduced me to ASCII Express & AE lines, warez transfers, X-Modem protocol, entry-level BBS'ing and then programming my own BBS. Spinning cursors, clocks, online etiquette, sysops, big phone bills and more! Not forgetting all the terminology that was a part of computer telecommunications in 1979 like answer, originate, carrier, off-hook, and so much more.

 

Had I had a 'cat in 1979 (had it been out then) I think my experiences would have been similar.

 

ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/documentation/hardware/io/Hayes Micromodem II Manual.pdf

ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/documentation/hardware/io/Hayes Micromodem II - Owner's Guide.pdf

ftp://ftp.apple.asimov.net/pub/apple_II/documentation/hardware/io/Novation_AppleCat ][_Manuals.zip

Edited May 23, 2021 by Keatah

[Baldrick]

On 5/23/2021 at 1:47 AM, doctor_x said:

Yep.. There was NO CHANCE of getting on an AE Line back in the day if you werent on a cat. I got the single use password once and got to lurk around an AE one time and they most certainly were a different feel than the general bbs population. If I was an apple person back then I definitely would have owned a cat - and especially since I was also a phreak - and pretty hardcore during that period.. I never remember being angry or jealous or whatever. It was just a hardware thing.. whatevs.. As far as I’m concerened they had every right to be snobbish to those that weren’t there kind. They wanted all transfers to run bidirectional so chats could happen while the xfer was rolling.. .

 

Super cool! So glad I was able to pick a couple of them up.. Some day I will get my 2gs power supply replaced, drop the modem in, and play with some of the apps and see how they respond when you actually have the target modem installed in your machine rather than trying to emulate those pieces of software with no modem found… 

There were a few "regular" 1200 and 2400 baud AE lines in my area but not many.

So I started one with a 1200 baud Smartmodem and then a 2400 baud Smartmodem.

Judging from its popularity during its relatively short life I think that there was a lot of demand from non-Apple Cat users.

Edited May 25, 2021 by Baldrick