After 23 years, the Apple II gets another OS update

[Justin]

Yesterday, software developer John Brooks released what is clearly a work of pure love: the first update to an operating system for the Apple II computer family since 1993. ProDOS 2.4, released on the 30th anniversary of the introduction of the Apple II GS, brings the enhanced operating system to even older Apple II systems, including the original Apple ][ and ][+.

 

Which is pretty remarkable, considering the Apple ][ and ][+ don't even support lower-case characters.

 

You can test-drive ProDOS 2.4 in a Web-based emulator set up by computer historian Jason Scott on the Internet Archive. The release includes Bitsy Bye, a menu-driven program launcher that allows for navigation through files on multiple floppy (or hacked USB) drives. Bitsy Bye is an example of highly efficient code: it runs in less than 1 kilobyte of RAM. There's also a boot utility that is under 400 bytes—taking up a single block of storage on a disk.

 

 

 

From Ars Technica:

After 23 years, the Apple II gets another OS update

On 30th anniversary of Apple II GS, devoted developer releases ProDOS 2.4.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/after-23-years-the-apple-ii-gets-another-os-update/

[The Professor]

Blah blah blah headphone jack

[Keatah]

I'm a little hesitant to call anything "DOS" or "ProDOS" an operating system. More technically this (and DOS 3.3) are simply a set of instructions and routines to allow access to the disk hardware and nothing else. It doesn't handle sound, it doesn't handle graphics, nor anything keyboard or text-screen related. All that stuff is in the firmware.