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It's festival season and there's a festival for everything - even one for Apple II users.
It's called Kansasfest and it has been going since 1989. It's one of the longest-running computer festivals out there and the amazing thing is the Apple II was discontinued in 1992.
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Hi, this is Leander Caney. I'm the editor and publisher of CultOfMag.com, and this is
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another edition of Caney's Corner. We're coming into the summer festival season, and you name it, there's a festival for everything
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including, you know, like Glastonbury. And I was surprised to find out there's actually
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a festival for Apple II users, which f***ing baked my noodle! I couldn't believe it! Apple
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II, there's still an annual festival. It's called Kansas Fest and it's held in the Midwest
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and it's been going since 1989. It's the longest running computer festival out there
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or one of them. And the amazing thing is that the Apple II was discontinued in 1992
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The Apple II, of course, was the machine that was designed by Steve Wozniak, and it's the machine that made Apple, you know, what it is today. It's the first big hit that they
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had, well before the Macintosh. And it was a command line interface, you hooked it up
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sometimes to your own monitor, although later models came with a monitor. And by today's
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standards, yeah, not the most user-friendly machine. But this thing is still going! I heard a bunch of stories about people who still run this. I heard that there are factories
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and workshops all across the country that are still running on Apple IIs. And I heard
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a great story about a psychiatrist in New York who bought one of these in the late 70s
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and he still runs his practice on the machine. He does all of his billing and all of his
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appointments and he keeps all of his patient records in it. And this is like a testament
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to this machine. It's bulletproof. To Apple fans, the Apple II was the original personal
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computer. And it's still going because it was simple, but it was also pretty sophisticated
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And there were people who built all kinds of programs in different software that kept
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it going. But it's easy to maintain. The hardware is pretty simple to fix. So I was amazed and
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delighted that the Apple II is still going, that they still have room for a festival every
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year where these people get together and they swap hardware and software and tips for
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keeping these things running. It's mostly hobbyists, but I also found a whole bunch of people that still run their businesses using the Apple II. And there is not only
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that, there's also a couple of spin-off festivals. There's one in France and there's one in South
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America. So Canada's test isn't huge. There's not hundreds of people coming to attend. Maybe
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there's 60 or 70 people. But they come year after year. And they're mostly hobbyists
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They're running this for sort of nostalgic reasons. These are the computers they used to use way back when. But they're also getting some new users. I was told about a kid who's
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learned how to program on it, and he's actually used it to program a robot that wanders around
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his house. And there's some other pretty fun projects. There's a guy that built a parallel
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computer out of 17 Apple II motherboards. And there's a couple of bands that use Apple
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IIs to record, chip tune bands. And they use that and some other old hardware to make these
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fun kind of 8-bit and 16-bit tunes. Even though I'm delighted that the Apple II is still going
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I'm pretty glad I don't have to use one day to day. So thanks to Steve Jobs for inventing the Mac and taking us out of the old command line era. But it's a testament really to that
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machine that it's still going. And there's a quarterly magazine. There are two or three festivals. I was actually wrong. It's actually in Australia, not South America. And there's
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a dedicated community to keep it running. I can't think of another Apple product that still does that. There used to be a Newton community for a while, but I don't think that
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is going anymore, although I'm going to look into that for my book. But yeah, the testament
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to the Apple II. It was pretty bulletproof. Apple II forever, like they said. That was
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another amazing Cane's Corner. So please check out Kult & Mac on the web and follow us on
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You're going to love it. I guarantee it
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