A co-worker used an iPad to give a presentation. I thought: why
take a machine as powerful as an early Cray to do something as
low-overhead as display slides?
Why not use something with much less computing power?
From this asoft_presenter was born.
The code is a series of C programs that read text files and generate
a large Applesoft BASIC program that actually presents the slides.
All the code can be found in my
dos33fsprogs package.
The venue was the ICL Lunch Talk.
ICL is a high-performance computing group; you've probably heard
of the Top 500 Supercomputer list that they release each year.
They have a 3-projector setup for talks. The Apple II hooked into
the composite input of the center, while I used an eeePC to project
"higher quality" slides to the outside two screens (mostly in case people
wanted more details on the graphs). This worked well.
The machine I used was an Apple IIe Platinum. It has a
CFFA3000
card in it instead of floppy disks.
I did the initial code development under Linux and an emulator,
but used a real live Apple II at the talk.
The talk itself was on measuring Power and Energy with the
PAPI library.
Source Code:
The code to generate the slides can be found
here.
This video shows some background on the Apple II, how the slides
were made, and a brief runthrough of the presentation.
It's not a video of the actual lunch talk (that would be
much longer and less exciting).
The video was amateurly put together using KDEnlive in a bit of a rush.
No one called me out on the left/right mistake toward the end of
the video. All Apple II sequences were recorded using a video capture
card gathering actual Apple II output.
