In 1996 I created Sonnet's first web site in Adobe PageMill. As the Technical Support Manager at Sonnet I answered customer support phone calls, approved warranty exchanges and returns, and authored installation instructions and technical documentation. He later said I was the only candidate he interviewed, out of dozens, who could answer that question. In the interview the CEO, Robert Farnsworth, asked me how to reset the PRAM. In August 1995 I interviewed with Sonnet Technology (a leading manufacturer of Macintosh upgrades). The only reason I learned this bit of arcane knowledge was because I had this weird hybrid computer. To reset the PRAM you had to hold down Command-Option-P-R. If the DOS Card was assigned too much memory it could prevent the Mac from booting up you then had to reset the PRAM to get the memory back from the DOS card. (This was 1994 when the rule of thumb was $100 a megabyte (MB) for buying RAM.) Not having an extra $800 I opted to share the RAM on the Mac this setting was stored in the PRAM, a non-volatile random access memory chip. The DOS Compatiblity card could have it’s own RAM card or share the RAM on the Macintosh logic board. This computer had a second, Intel 486SX, CPU which allowed you run MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 on the same hardware as Mac OS 7.1. In 1994 I purchased my first Apple Macintosh computer a Quadra 610 DOS Compatible (only 25,000 were ever manufactured). I played King’s Quest, Karateka, Montezuma’s Revenge and Project Space Station games and even copied a version of Snake out of a BYTE magazine. On that computer I learned to write programs in Apple BASIC, Logo, and did simple animation in Brøderbund Fantavision. Survival horror, text adventures, synthesized music, journal articles - Clarke is truly a Renaissance man of the Apple II community! Catch him on tour in Australia later this year.In 1984 my father purchased an Apple IIe computer with a monochrome monitor and a dot matrix printer. Two years later, in Volume 17, Issue 2, he wrote a Juiced.GS article about his ensuing experience transitioning from Eamon to Inform for his interactive fiction exploits. It was this genre of game that inspired Clarke to develop Leadlight, the Eamon adventure that graced the cover of Juiced.GS‘s first color issue. In Clarke’s track notes for the Victric song "Nurse 2 Alyssa Type", he reflects on his experience with survival horror video games. More recently, Clarke contributed his art to the Drift demo disk that was bundled with the June 2012 issue of Juiced.GS.īut even that disk was not Clarke’s first appearance in the magazine. In 2007, he used Fantavision to create this music video for the song "Amay": Victris is only the latest embodiment of Clarke’s work in both digital and musical realms, as he’s been fusing the Apple II with his musical pursuits for the better part of a decade. The song "Heiress" also has ties to the Apple II, incorporating output from Paul Lutus’ Electric Duet. I’d just heard the riffs anew after rescuing my old Music Studio files from the decaying 3.5-inch floppy disk where they’d lived for twenty-something years. These intersecting lines were good enough that even two decades later I didn’t want or need to change a note when I had the idea to bring them into an Aeriae track. The synths I had playing these lines sounded bad, but in this case what I really valued was the composition itself. I did record some to cassette, but more often I transcribed them into music software on my family’s Apple II computer … in the early 1990s using the Apple IIGS program The Music Studio. I play by ear, so most of my compositions from back then were only stored in my head. Recently, Clarke pointed me to the liner notes for his album, Victris, where he describes the song "Ai no kuni" Since not all Clarke’s music is based on the Apple II, it makes it all the more fun when the computer does pop up in his work. Unlike chiptune musicians such as 8 Bit Weapon, who create music entirely from classic computers, Clarke is more free-range, drawing inspiration and instruments from synthesizers, real-world samples, video games, and more. Wade Clarke has long been unique in the intersection of musicians and Apple II programmers.
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