After 23 years, the Apple II gets another OS update

On 30th anniversary of Apple II GS, devoted developer releases ProDOS 2.4.

Sean Gallagher

• Hello, old friend

• The Bitsy Bye file launcher. Old school, new code.

• Bitsy Boot can boot the system off of ProDOS images on devices in any of seven slots.

• The utilities: the bare essentials for re-assembling your library of greatest Apple II hits.

• Apple Basic. Fun.

Yesterday, software developer John Brooks released what is clearly a work of pure love: the first update to an operating system for the Apple II computer family since 1993. ProDOS 2.4, released on the 30^th anniversary of the introduction of the Apple II GS, brings the enhanced operating system to even older Apple II systems, including the original Apple ][ and ][+.

Which is pretty remarkable, considering the Apple ][ and ][+ don't even support lower-case characters.

You can test-drive ProDOS 2.4 in a Web-based emulator set up by computer historian Jason Scott on the Internet Archive. The release includes Bitsy Bye, a menu-driven program launcher that allows for navigation through files on multiple floppy (or hacked USB) drives. Bitsy Bye is an example of highly efficient code: it runs in less than 1 kilobyte of RAM. There's also a boot utility that is under 400 bytes—taking up a single block of storage on a disk.

Ars is looking forward to booting up the physical Apple ][+ in our computer museum with the latest update, as soon as we straighten out the serial card and can write the disk image to floppy. But for now, we're giving ProDOS 2.4 a spin on Virtual ][, an Apple II emulator, using our (licensed) Apple ][+ ROM image.

In addition to the Bitsy Boot boot utility, the ProDOS 2.4 "floppy" includes a collection of utilities, including a MiniBas tiny BASIC interpreter, disk imaging programs to move files from physical floppies to USB and other disk storage, file utilities, and the "Unshrink" expander for uncompressing files archived with Shrinkit (helpful for using Apple II archives scattered about the Internet). All of this fits onto a single 140k 5.25-inch disk image.