AppleWorks on the Apple II

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Dig, if you will, a picture.<br>It's November 1983 and throngs of people are engaged in literal fisticuffs, "dozens of people were injured, some even hospitalized," to claim the last homely, pug-nosed Cabbage Patch Kid from the local Zayre's for Christmas shopping. In video footage, a store manager climbs a display, brandishing a baseball bat, trying to will order onto the chaos. The riots make the local, then national news, and eventually have a page on Wikipedia. It's a striking exclamation mark to punctuate 1983, with dark implications for the coming new year. Had we sunk so low?<br>Then, at the start of December, a Christmas miracle.<br>The hottest pop star in the world released one of the most influential music videos of all time on MTV. You know the one, where Michael turns into a werewolf, but then he's a zombie, and they do that dance, and the electronic beat "ur URRR adugga dugga dugga dugga dugga dug ur URRR adugga dugga dugga dugga dugga dug", and the Vincent Price laugh, and those crazy eyes at the end. The video for "Thriller" released simultaneous to the riots, and karmic balance was restored. Huzzah! Maybe 1984 wouldn't be so bad after all.<br>1984 wasn't just "not bad," it was radical.<br>I tried to find "cutest adorable chubby-cheeked preschoolers Thriller dance" but this will do.<br>Pop-culture nerds, in particular, would gorge themselves that year with Ghostbusters, The Terminator, Gremlins, Nightmare on Elm Street, Beverly Hills Cop, Revenge of the Nerds, Splash, Red Dawn, The NeverEnding Story, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Lynch's Dune, Karate Kid, Repo Man, This is Spinal Tap, Sixteen Candles, The Transformers toys and show, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic, Stop Making Sense concert film, Prince's Purple Rain, Do They Know It's Christmas?, Neuromancer, Elite, Karateka, King's Quest, the Soviet boycott of the Olympics, and the first MTV Video Music Awards. "Thriller" lost "Video of the Year" to "You Might Think", but did win "Best Choreography" and "Viewer's Choice."<br>Oh, and Apple aired a commercial during Super Bowl XVIII. You know the one, with the skinheads in grey, and the oppressive fascism, and the woman in red shorts, and the sledgehammer, and that electronic siren "BEE oooh.... BEE oooh", and "1984 won't be like 1984."<br>Apple introduced the Macintosh, a system Steve Jobs said was so easy to learn, "You can sit your grandmother in front of this computer and she’ll figure out how it works." That's an interesting way to describe a computer that internal documentation shows "we will not attempt to position the product in any way as a 'home' computer."<br>Meanwhile, that same year, the Apple II series sold another one million units while Apple was taking its third stab at obsoleting those machines. Having shrugged off the Apple III, then the Lisa, Apple II fans would be forgiven for looking at the Macintosh's anemic launch software library (essentially just MacWrite and MacPaint) and shrugging in agreement with Clara Peller's 1984 catch-phrase, "Where's the beef?"<br>Tom Weishaar, writing for Open-Apple newsletter in July 1985 (a rough year for Apple), "For six years now Apple's management has been trying to build a computer better than the Apple II. In all these years, after all this money, only the Apple II has ever shown a profit. Buyers are looking for tools they can use. The Apple II has plenty of power to be useful."<br>VisiCalc was early, clear proof that innovation isn't measured in megahertz. By 1984, developers had a lot of expertise in making the most of limited hardware. Look at the strides made in six years of software research on the Atari 2600, for example. Practice makes perfect.<br>Surround (1977, Atari) vs. Robot Tank (1983, Activision), both by Alan Miller.Rupert (later "Robert") Lissner heard the call. While the Macintosh was an interesting promise of a computing future that may or may not come to fruition, there were millions of Apple II owners with immediate needs. AppleWorks fulfilled those needs, growing a strong fanbase, spawning dedicated newsletters, lots of books, add-ons, and more. When Apple finally abandoned their 8-bit line, AppleWorks singlehandedly kept those machines productive for another decade .<br>My only experience with AppleWorks was in the early OS X days, and that version had nothing to do with what we're looking at today. That and this only share a name; the Apple II version holds a legacy.<br>A veritable turducken of operating systems: an Apple II on System 7.5.5 on Windows 11. Deja ][ was a commercial Apple II emulator purpose-built just to run "Classic" AppleWorks. That's how popular it was, that many still wanted it despite updating to a Mac.Historical Context<br>Today's Rig<br>AppleWin x64 1.32.00 on Windows 11Emulating a prohibitively expensive Enhanced Apple IIe.<br>All cards and hard drive included, maybe $8,000? ($22K in 2026)3x machine speed and enhanced disk access<br>Super Serial Card<br>Mockingboard C<br>Mouse Card<br>Disk II...