KansasFest alumna Anne Giselle Marks shared some sad news today:

My greatly beloved husband Stanley passed away this morning after a massive heart attack. It was completely unexpected, as there had been absolutely no warning signs. He will be sorely missed by me, his son Ian, daughters Evelyn Marks Johnson, Kathryn Marks Bohannon, and Rachel Marks, granddaughters Darbie Elizabeth Woods and Samantha, and his mom Elsie Marks.

Funeral arrangements for Stanley are as follows:

Visitation will be on Tuesday, April 24, 10-11 am, with memorial service following at 11 am at Ellisville Funeral Home, 1204 Avenue B, Ellisville, MS 39437. The obituary will be posted on their Web site.

Donations to the Boy Scouts of America, Pine Burr Area Council, are requested in lieu of flowers.

Born February 15, 1952, Stan Marks graduated from college with a degree in music education. When he wasn't teaching, he was an active member of many of the Apple II's online communities, with tales of his stewardship preceding him. At Stan's first KansasFest in 1997, Joe Kohn "expressed incredulity at being in the presence of someone who had purchased some two dozen Apple IIes in a school liquidation auction," Stan later wrote. "I was even more incredulous at being in the presence of an Apple II 'living legend'!" It was not unusual for Stan to pull out a guitar and serenade his fellow geeks with tunes of growing up on the Mississippi Delta. His affability and willingness to help earned him a seat on the event's planning committee, where he helped organize KansasFests 1998–2001.

Giselle and Stan Marks (right row, middle couple) at KansasFest 2003.

At KansasFest 1999, Stan met Giselle Schnaubelt, an international attendee representing Austria. The two Apple II users hit it off and committed themselves to each other, despite the geographic distance. Giselle moved to Mississippi, and the two married on January 4, 2003. They attended KansasFest 2003 to announce a new generation of Apple II user; a few months later, their son Ian was born on January 29, 2004, with the new family attending their last KansasFest later that summer. A year later, they were quick to let the KansasFest community know that they had survived Hurricane Katrina and were safe and well.

Stan was 60 when he passed and had touched many people in his life. As he described himself on Facebook: "I am a retired high school band director who decided that 30 years of hard-headed, hyperactive, hormonal teenagers was enough for me!" We know his students will miss him as much as we do. The KansasFest community extends its condolences to Giselle, Ian, and the rest of the Marks family on their loss.

KANSAS CITY, MO — March 7, 2012 — KansasFest, the 23rd annual convention dedicated to the Apple II computer, is now open for registration. Users, programmers, hobbyists, and retrocomputing enthusiasts are invited to Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri, from Tuesday, July 17, through Sunday, July 22, for six days and five nights of sessions, demos, announcements, contests, and camaraderie.

The week kicks off with a keynote speech by John Romero, co-founder of id Software and creator of Wolfenstein 3D, Dangerous Dave, and nearly a hundred other popular computer and video games. Romero will be available immediately afterward for a Q&A and autograph session.

The week then offers a variety of presentations and workshops, including but not limited to:

• The history of AppleWorks, presented by Randy Brandt
• Andy Molloy looks at the best of the Apple II demo scene
• Apple II Road Show — Tony Diaz shows you how to tell authentic hardware from a fake
• Build your own Apple II WordPress site with Ken Gagne
• Learn to program interactive fiction in Inform 7 with Carrington Vanston
• A Kickstarter brainstorming session
• HackFest, an annual programming challenge open to coders of all skill levels
• A vendor fair and exhibit hall for attendees and the general public to show off, play with, and buy and sell new or unusual hardware and software

Attendees are encouraged to share their knowledge by presenting their own hardware and software sessions, especially of the Apple II but including Macintosh, Windows, Linux, iOS, and others. All KansasFest sessions are presented by the attendees, who are known for unscheduled events and debuts, too. Whether it's a behind-the-scenes look at new software, preorder opportunities for new hardware, a live-action text adventure, a podcast recording session, GShisen and Dueltris tournaments, or an athletic round of Bite the Bag, there are experiences to be had and memories made at KansasFest that aren't possible except in the company of surprising, brilliant, diehard Apple II fans.

Register before June 1 to guarantee a price of $375 for a double room or $445 for a single, which includes admission to all sessions as well as most meals. Official KansasFest shirts are extra and optional and must be ordered by May 31; registration for staying on-site closes July 8. Veterans of the event are invited to bring a first-time attendee; if each indicates the other's name on the registration form, both will receive a $25 referral rebate at the event. To register, please visit the official Web site at http://www.kansasfest.org/

KansasFest sponsor 16 Sector invites any and all Apple II users, fans, and friends to attend the world's only annual Apple II conference. For photos, videos, schedules, and presentations from past year's events, to sign up for the email list and for inquiries, please visit the event's Web site.

CONTACT:
Register: http://www.kansasfest.org/register/
Email: http://www.kansasfest.org/contact/
Twitter: @KansasFest
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/events/382225585123061/

When Jason Scott began delivering his KansasFest 2009 keynote speech, Paul Zaleski leaned over to a committee member and asked, "Is anyone recording this?"

It was a simple and obvious question, but one that resulted in many foreheads being slapped. The quick deployment of a Flip camera captured Scott's keynote, but there was no other official effort made in that or previous years to create and publish a video record of KansasFest. The planning committee set out to make 2009 the last year this opportunity was overlooked.

The result: in 2010, nearly two dozen videos were captured and uploaded to Vimeo, all of them under Creative Commons, with the 2011 album currently under development. Although these videos are no substitute for actually attending KansasFest, they preserve the history and knowledge produced at the event and makes it accessible to those who, due to geographic, financial, or other reasons, cannot participate in KansasFest themselves.

In recent months, the committee has undertaken several changes to make this collection more discoverable. First, these files are now listed in our file archive; now you can find the audio and video of sessions right alongside the same handouts and presentation media the speakers used. (We've also broken the HackFest media out of this table and into its own.)

Second, we have begun duplicating our Vimeo library's contents to YouTube. Although Vimeo offers several benefits over YouTube, we believe the videos are more likely to be stumbled upon on Google's service. Choose whichever video channel you prefer!

Third, the Echoes of KFest audio podcast, which offers audio from past KansasFest sessions, is now complemented by the Echoes of KFest video podcast. With so many presentations dependent on visuals, you can now watch them as they were intended to be seen. These are the same video files that can be downloaded from Vimeo, except now you can conveniently subscribe via iTunes — although be prepared for some big downloads! Expect videos to be published regularly as we bring this channel up to date with our existing archives.

Finally, the best way to preserve any piece of history is to put it in as many hands as possible. It's insufficient for these videos to reside solely on KansasFest.org or even Vimeo.com. To correct that oversight, all KansasFest videos are now available from the Internet Archive, a non-profit library dedicated to the preservation of digital media.

KansasFest 2012 is already in the works, with the hope and intention for the event to continue for many years. Courtesy the above A/V efforts and repositories such as the Internet Archive, the record of KansasFest will exist for all to enjoy and reference for lifetimes to come.

[Over the course of a few weeks, this blog is presenting written profiles and vignettes from KansasFest 2010, written from that year's perspective. These excerpts compose a larger feature story written for a general audience looking to be introduced to the Apple II and KansasFest, while also offering community members and alumni a memorable retrospective of the event. Enjoy!]

The Apple II once represented a thriving industry to programmers and businessmen who have since moved on, plying their trade elsewhere or having moved into different fields entirely. But those for whom the Apple II was never more than a hobby or a tool still have a small budget and enough interest in which to engage in a micromarket. On the last day of the event, the community's merchants set up shop at the annual vendor fair.

Eric Shepherd operates Syndicomm, a one-man show that publishes utilities by several programmers, including "Sheppy" himself. Syndicomm is also a clearinghouse for software abandoned by their original publishers who have sold Syndicomm the distribution rights, saving the products from abandonment. For Sheppy, it's easy to see KansasFest as a business venture: the sales of one new product, released at each year's vendor fair, pays for the trip to Kansas City. The rest of the year, Sheppy pays the bills as the developer documentation lead for Mozilla, creators of the popular Firefox Web browser.

Henry Courbis of ReactiveMicro.com has a more challenging lot. Whereas Sheppy can easily burn CDs to meet demand, Courbis must build each of his products by hand. Although the Apple II is easier to program than modern machines, the only way to expand its capabilities and make it interface with today's world is through hardware. Developers like Courbis fulfill that need with expansion cards that put the Apple II on high-speed Internet networks, or read the same high-capacity memory cards used by digital cameras and cell phones. Other items in Courbis's catalog are clones or replicas of original Apple II parts, meant to replace failed hardware.

A vibrant community also needs good literature; that too was at KansasFest. In one corner of the vendor fair was a stack of back issues of Nibble, an Apple II magazine that was published from 1980 to 1992. The issues were free for the taking, courtesy of attendee Stavros Karatsoridis, a doctor of internal medicine who has driven to Kansas City from Defiance, Ohio, and is unloading duplicates from his collection. Near this offering was another magazine, one that was still taking subscriptions: Juiced.GS, a black-and-white quarterly that looks more like a hobbyist newsletter next to the slicker, fatter Nibble. But whereas Nibble was published in the heyday of the Apple II, Juiced.GS has been published continuously since 1995, making it the longest-running Apple II publication ever, and the only one still in print. At KansasFest, its publisher announced that Juiced.GS will be kicking around for another year and is taking orders for the 2011 volume. Later, he asked Melissa Barron to contribute an article about Oregon Trail.

After a week together, the KansasFest attendees were familiar to each other, but it wasn't too late to welcome a newcomer. The vendor fair prompted one gentleman from St. Louis to make a day trip to the conference with a box full of 5.25-in. floppy disks, containing documents unreadable for decades. Having long ago parted with his Apple II in favor of a modern computer, he hoped to find something at KansasFest that would make it possible to once again read these archaic media. Neither Sheppy's nor Courbis's inventory suited that need, and Juiced.GS's how-to on the subject was not immediate enough for the visitor. But the event's many expert attendees, loving a challenge, were quick to break out their own computers and custom hardware. Ten minutes later, the floppies of AppleWorks files become a CD-ROM of Microsoft Word documents.

History comes alive at KansasFest.

---

After six days and five sleepless nights, the geeks were geeked out. Classic computers were carefully disassembled, cars and suitcases packed to the brim, and fond farewells exchanged.

For the next 359 days, these living artifacts would walk and work among people who have never known anything but the graphic user interfaces and fast processing speeds of today's computers. The beneficiaries of these developments recognize Apple's early computers for only their historical value, not as a modern hobby. In early November 2010, former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov, who for years battled IBM's supercomputers in the ancient strategy game, cited the Apple II as America's last significant technological revolution. A few weeks later, one of the computer's predecessors, an original Apple-1, was auctioned at Christie's of London for $213,600.

When these computers were new, they attracted people of a certain mindset and spirit. These pioneers were inspired with a creativity, resilience, dedication, history and non-conformity that is often lacking among today's increasingly technocentric society.

There's no returning Silicon Valley to those early days, but for a week in Kansas City, oldtimers and newcomers alike can remember the excitement that spurred a technological revolution — one that, to them, has not yet ended with the Apple II. Their batteries recharged, they will keep the Apple II alive.

[Over the course of a few weeks, this blog is presenting written profiles and vignettes from KansasFest 2010, written from that year's perspective. These excerpts compose a larger feature story written for a general audience looking to be introduced to the Apple II and KansasFest, while also offering community members and alumni a memorable retrospective of the event. Enjoy!]

One KansasFest alumni who couldn't be present at the 2010 event is Steve Weyhrich, a physician whose visage adorns roadside billboards throughout Omaha, advertising the local hospital. Like Melissa Barron and unlike Mark Simonsen, "Dr. Steve" has made the Apple II a complement to, not the focus of, his career. Thirty years ago, he found himself a student at a medical school that used an IV labeling utility for the Apple II that was no longer being supported by the program's developer. Weyhrich taught himself enough programming to rewrite the software to accommodate the school's evolving needs. He earned enough from that side job to buy his own Apple II.

Since then, it has been his mission to document the history of the Apple II. His Web site, Apple2History.org, is an exhaustive chronology of the software, hardware, publications, people, and stories to which the Apple II has given rise. Even nearly twenty years after the last Apple II rolled off the production line, Weyhrich finds more preservation work to be done, whether it's scanning out-of-print magazines, restoring lost text files, or interviewing former Apple II luminaries. "I keep wanting to search out the pieces that I didn't already know, and fit them in," said Weyhrich. "[It's] like completing a jigsaw puzzle, to get the full pictures."

Though Weyhrich can't attend KansasFest 2010 in person, he had a video chat with attendees Saturday afternoon during a session reserved for product announcements. He came on camera wearing a Bill Gates mask, parodying the 1997 Macworld expo in which the Microsoft founder appeared via satellite to announce a $150 million investment in Apple Computer Inc. "We're committed to writing Microsoft Office for the Apple II," Weyhrich joked. "All we ask in exchange is that you get a million of your friends to buy a Zune and promise to buy Windows Phone 7 when it comes out."

After the laughter subsided, Weyhrich made his real announcement: the unveiling of a remodeled Apple II History site. The site, whose content has evolved considerably from its roots as a 1991 series of newsletter articles, had nonetheless sported the same aesthetics and functionality since 2001. Weyhrich revealed to the audience a project that for months, he'd been importing the site's many articles, interviews, and assets into WordPress, a modern Web site content management system that offers improved reading, sharing, navigation and multimedia features. The Apple II History site is now a more comprehensive and accessible resource than ever before.

Never satisfied with a static Web site — the equivalent of a musty history book — Weyhrich's attitude toward the Apple II is similar to his desire to stretch his capabilities, learning whatever tools are needed for the job, whether as a med school student or an amateur historian. "There's always something new to learn," said Weyhrich. "Like Mark Simonsen's story in his keynote. It just feels like there is more to the story to preserve, to give credit to those outside of Apple who worked to make the Apple II the great machine it was."

[Over the course of a few weeks, this blog is presenting written profiles and vignettes from KansasFest 2010, written from that year's perspective. These excerpts compose a larger feature story written for a general audience looking to be introduced to the Apple II and KansasFest, while also offering community members and alumni a memorable retrospective of the event. Enjoy!]

Ivan Drucker, who Melissa Barron's session so impressed, is also concerned with bridging the gap between eras. He's something of an anachronism himself: whereas KansasFest marks an initiation to the Apple II for Barron, for Drucker, it is a return.

"My Apple IIe had been in storage for 15 years … and it was finally this year that we made friends again," says Drucker. It's the latest blip in Drucker's long list of hobbies; he previously played in a New York City band named Dimestore Scenario. "I get passionate about things and then give them a rest for a while and then come back to them again."

Dusting off his Apple II was his way of swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction in which Apple Inc. has taken it. The overwhelming sales of the iPhone and iPad have popularized the concept of a closed system, in which every program must have Apple's seal of approval before being made available for mass consumption. It's a grand departure from the open architecture of the Apple II, whose plastic case has no screws or glue to keep it shut — with the press of a tab, its innards are revealed. There, creator Steve Wozniak had laid the groundwork for infinite possibilities: seven expansion slots into which additional hardware could be plugged, giving the computer capabilities that hadn't even been invented yet in 1977.

On Thursday morning at KansasFest, Drucker is one of three panelists in a session entitled "Apple's Growing Divide Between Users and Programmers". Along with a network administrator from the US Fish and Wildlife Service and a publishing services architect from the California Digital Library, Drucker is debating Apple's gradual transition from open to closed systems, and the consequences these design philosophies have had on not just their products, but also their customers. Among the topics are whether open platforms encourage creativity and customization; if closed platforms, or "curated computing", are more digestible by the mass market; and whether there can be any compromise between the two.

When the panel's over, Drucker hurriedly excuses himself and returns to his room. His next session is Saturday morning, and he's not yet done writing the Apple II software that he'll be demonstrating and distributing on floppy disks to interested attendees.

Given Drucker's flighty track record, one might expect the demands of KansasFest to exhaust his interest in the Apple II, sending him once again to another hobby. But he doesn't see his Apple II going into storage this time — not because of the computer, but the people. "What's a bit different for me now is that there's actually a community to be part of," he says. "[There are] people who not only have the same passion for this obsolete computer, but are actually cool and fun."

When Drucker gets home from KansasFest, he begins writing the next version of his new program.

[Over the course of a few weeks, this blog is presenting written profiles and vignettes from KansasFest 2010, written from that year's perspective. These excerpts compose a larger feature story written for a general audience looking to be introduced to the Apple II and KansasFest, while also offering community members and alumni a memorable retrospective of the event. Enjoy!]

KansasFest is generally populated by older men. Like Mark Simonsen, most attendees made their careers in computers; more than a few are now retired. Some of the younger guys were born in the seventies and learned to type on their elementary school's cutting-edge computers.

Melissa Barron's attendance at KansasFest significantly disrupted those demographics. The Apple II was already 11 years old when she was born; she was five when the last Apple II rolled off the production line. A few aging units were still left when she got to grade school, where she played Number Crunchers and Oregon Trail. It wasn't long before she?d outgrown the Apple II as a part of her childhood.

But, as with Simonsen, the Apple II left a lasting impression on Barron, one that was waiting to make itself felt. She was studying for a BFA in new media at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago when she needed inspiration for her final project, an art gallery display. Something tickled her brain and made her remember the Apple II.

What if she took this computer, so representative of its era, and adapted it to modern media? She found a copy of Oregon Trail and starting hacking it to replace all the game's text with LOLspeak, a pidgin English used on the Internet to make funny pictures of cats. Along the way, she encountered several visual glitches in Oregon Trail and other programs. When Barron next sat at a loom in her fiber and material studies course, she began weaving tapestries depicting her favorite programming bugs. The melding of software and softwear had never been so natural.

In researching other ways to unite these two media, Barron's Internet wanderings brought her to the KansasFest Web site. "I wanted to meet other Apple II fans and to see first-hand what the old-school Apple community was up to," she said. The interest was mutual, as word of her accomplishments had preceded her. Not long after the young hacker registered to attend, she received an email from the event's coordinator with a request: "Would you give a session explaining to us how you hacked Oregon Trail?" She timidly accepted.

Barron's presentation was not what attendees were expecting. The older men in the audience were hardcore programmers from before Barron was born: they could disassemble Oregon Trail in their sleep. Barron had no such programming experience, requiring unconventional approaches to accomplish her goals. Her tools were not assembly language routines or decompilers, but simply a word processor. The original approach, its significant limitations, and the amazing results astounded her audience. "This might be the greatest thing I've ever seen," said Ivan Drucker, a former Apple employee, only eight minutes into Barron's session.

"I knew that people were going to have more knowledge of the system than I did," said Barron. "I was kind of nervous about it — but I think my unconventional use of text editors and emulators made me a bit unique."

Barron's gallery was later on display at Chicago's Sullivan Galleries and features not only Jacquard weavings with an Apple II theme, but an actual Apple II, acknowledging the source of her inspiration. She is looking at graduate schools at which to study art therapy while continuing to use and explore her childhood computer.

[Each Monday for the next few weeks, this blog will present written profiles and vignettes from KansasFest 2010, written from that year's perspective. These excerpts compose a larger feature story written for a general audience looking to be introduced to the Apple II and KansasFest, while also offering community members and alumni a memorable retrospective of the event. Enjoy!]

On the surface, KansasFest looked like a typical computer convention, if smaller in scale. A few dozen software developers, hardware hackers, and enthusiasts from across North America arrived at Rockhurst University in Kansas City, Missouri. Over the course of one week in July, this academic setting served as a camp in which they educated each other and themselves on the latest developments in their field by giving presentations, selling merchandise, and engaging in programming contests.

The illusion of normalcy began to break down upon an examination of the hardware being used. Where you’d expect an overclocked behemoth with the latest cutting-edge upgrades was just the opposite: an Apple II, a thirty-year-old artifact running at a single megahertz and with no more than four megabytes of memory — literally 0.1% of what today is considered the minimum to get any real work done. Attendees traded files not on slick USB thumb drives, but on 5.25-in. floppy disks that hold only 140 kilobytes. It would take both sides of 14,980 floppies to equal the capacity of a single DVD.

The Apple II, Apple’s first mass-produced personal computer, was sold from 1977 to 1993 and established the company as a powerhouse among consumers in business and education alike. The machine was eventually discontinued in favor of the incompatible Macintosh line, yet a small but vibrant "retrocomputing" community continues to support and enjoy the Apple II to this day, including at the 21st annual KansasFest.

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Mark Simonsen did not expect to find himself in the middle of the Midwest in the middle of the summer, telling his life story to a room full of strangers. When he received the invitation to KansasFest, his first response was, "How did you find me?"

It's not that he'd kept a low profile. In a twenty-year career as a serial entrepreneur, Simonsen has bought, built, and sold companies for Gibson Musical Instruments, Monster.com, and Sonic drive-in restaurants. His most recent acquisition, iPreserve, is a media restoration company that's about to expand internationally.

Yet such high-profile offline dealings haven't left much of an online trail: do a Google search on Simonsen's name, and you won't get many hits. But one of them is his LinkedIn résumé, where if you scroll back to his first job in 1982, you'll find the role that has brought him to KansasFest: Owner, Beagle Bros Microsoftware, Inc. It was there that Simonsen produced some of the Apple II’s best-known programs.

"I wanted to spend every waking minute programming the Apple II," Simonsen told the audience during his keynote speech, kicking off the week-long conference. He'd been introduced to the machine while taking a business class at Brigham Young University. Accustomed to the unwieldy mainframe computers found in the computer science department, Simonsen found the Apple II immensely more enjoyable to use. He immediately bought his own but was disappointed to find that, without an expensive hardware accessory, its monitor could display only 40 columns of text. Simonsen’s frugality and creativity combined to create a program that managed to squeeze 70 characters onto the screen.

After selling that first program to software publisher Beagle Bros, Simonsen was invited by owner Bert Kersey to move from Arizona to California to create more utilities for the Apple II. Beagle Bros went on to make a name for itself with programming tools such as Program Writer, Beagle BASIC, and ProntoDOS, as well as productivity utilities that included Platinum Paint and TimeOut, which expanded the capabilities of Apple's own AppleWorks office suite.

Kersey, impressed with Simonsen's versatility, sold the company four years later to Simonsen, who continued publishing software until Apple ended production of the Apple II line in 1993. Shortly thereafter, the company's alumni reclassified the entire Beagle Bros software catalog, making it free and legal to distribute.

Simonsen moved on — but the Apple II community did not. Almost twenty years later, Beagle Bros software is still in use, and its users wanted to meet the man behind the legend. Of the seven Mark Simonsens on LinkedIn, they found the one who matched their historical records, and an invitation was extended.

So Simonsen went down to his basement and blew the dust off some boxes. There he found an extensive archive indicative of his programming origin: the receipt for his first printer; the rejection letters for his first program; and the magazine where he first found an advertisement for Beagle Bros, prompting him to try again.

At KansasFest, Simonsen was surprised to find people still using the Apple II. Participants in the HackFest programming contest stayed up all night writing code to make the computer do things it was never intended to do. It was reminiscent of Simonsen's own youth, prompting memories he hasn't thought of in years.

"The happiest time of my career life was programming the Apple II," he recalled to the audience before concluding his speech. "This conference has inspired me. It really makes me want to do some more 6502 programming. I am going to turn all three [of my] Apple II's back on."

iPreserve, still in its fledgling stages, can't run unsupervised for long, so Simonsen left KansasFest on Thursday, missing the event's final 72 hours. But the community hadn't heard the last of him. The next day, Simonsen emailed everyone:

"I'm sitting here at work doing important things but wishing I was still at KFest! I'm having withdrawals … I was surprised by the range of ages and number of young people. It was a pleasure to meet you and everyone else at KFest!"