The Woz Machine is my love letter to the Apple //e and related machines.
I have fond memories of using Apple 2 series computers in school; they were the perfect school machines. They were almost impossible to render nonfunctional without mechanical damage, the operating paradigm was simple (disk in, turn on, do things, turn off) and the games were fun (looking at you, Oregon Trail and Carmen Sandiego).
As an adult, almost 50 years after the release of the Apple ][ hardware, I finally had the money to purchase a //e and //c for nostalgia purposes. And one of the things I want to do is program these wonderful computers.
The nice part about retro computers like this is that the architecture is generally much, much simpler than modern computers… more on par with embedded microcontrollers than a modern 64 bit machine.
The not so nice part about retro computers is that the documentation and programming manuals are also very old, out of print, hard to find, and usually exist as scanned PDFs if you can find them at all. Advice on programming these machines are scattered all over USENET, random defunct forums, The Internet Archive, and a couple of still functional interest groups, like CALL A.P.P.L.E.
This wiki is my notebook as I explore the Apple ][ architecture. This won't be a full replacement for those old books and references, as that would be a huge lift that's beyond my capability at this point. But hopefully it'll be a useful reference starting point for anyone else who wants to join me on this adventure.
– Zoey
About The Woz Machine
The name of this site is inspired by, but not a direct reference to, the Integrated Woz Machine, a single-chip implementation of Steve Wozniak's Disk ][ controller, which eventually was installed in the Macintosh for many, many years as the SWIM (Sanders-Wozniak Integrated Machine). The name, The Woz Machine, for the purposes of this wiki, instead refers to the Apple ][ and successors.