When we moved house in 1986, my new school (Arthur Street School, in Dunedin, New Zealand) had a nice little collection of Apple //e computers, which had been purchased as part of a government-funded computers-in-schools programme. I’d never really used computers before, but these were the most fascinating machines I’d ever seen, and I seem to remember ending up spending about as much time as I could on them!
That year, the entire class produced an interactive digital adventure story (complete with pictures) based around the fairy tale of Little Red Riding Hood, using the Twist-a-Plot story engine and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice drawing/animation program, both of which were written by Jim Ferguson, who had been a teacher at the school the previous year. Jim has kindly given me permission to copy these programs (which you can get for yourself from the Downloads section below):
Reply to: RE: Otakou Software Licensing
Hi Chris
As they will only work on Apple IIe computers, and as there are very few of these still functioning, I have no problem with the software being copied freely. Of course, I would not allow it to be sold.
regards
Jim Ferguson
Many thanks to Jim for allowing this software to be freely distributed, and of course for writing it in the first place!
Thanks also to Miss Gooseman, who helped me locate all the old disks, which amazingly were still stored away in boxes at the school in 2000. Also amazing is that the data on the disks were still intact after 14 years.
I guess my main motivation for putting this page up is to allow other ex-students of Arthur Street to recapture a little of their past; here you can download all you need to play your old Twist-a-Plot stories (or compose new ones!). If any of you out there still have old Apple II disks lying around, you might want to see about copying those in order to preserve them, as the disks themselves may not last much longer! Feel free to send any relevant stuff to me and I can make it available for download as well.
The Apple II software here is provided as 140 kB disk images. To do anything useful with them, you’ll need either a real Apple II and some way of transferring the data to it, or some Apple II emulation software.
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This document last modified and © 2002-01-19 11:56:13 NZDT