The term vaporware may be a newly coined term but the concept is centuries old. In 1777, at the end of a self-published pamphlet, George Palmer promised a future “Chemical Treatise on the Art of Dying” and a transcript of a discussion with Samuel Johnson “concerning the production of black cloth.” T hey were mentioned as forthcoming by several other authors for the next twenty years but neither of the two products ever came into being.
A Speedy & Simple Serial Signal Stethoscope
An undocumented feature of the ImageWriter I is the ability to convert all ASCII received to hexadecimal format, 24 hex numbers to a line. This ability is useful when you need to test a terminal program, debug a print routine, or you just want to find out exactly which control codes are being sent out through serial port.
To get into this mode, hold the LINE FEED button down when you turn the printer on. When there are less than a line's worth of characters in the buffer, pressing SELECT will print those characters received. Get out of this mode by cycling the power off/on again. This function is a ROM holdover from the time when the ImageWriter was known as the ProWriter (built by C. Itoh). It was not documented then either.
Custom Airborne!
The game Airborne! has a file called StartupSong that can be replaced with any MacRecorder file shorter than 160K. Make the MacRecorder file from a speeded-up recording since Airborne! will play back at a slower speed. Use SetFile or FEdit to change the Type to WAVE and Creator to WVED, then copy the file to the game disk. There is nothing like a rousing chorus of Louie Louie before doing battle with the infinite horde.
