I thought this was interesting, and something that many tech/creative pastors and speakers would find interesting. This idea that even the antiquated Apple II can be used for making a suitable screen for presentations seems like it follows right along with some of the ideas we’ve posed before towards making the presentation screen something a good bit different, yet approachable by audiences.

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.

Read the rest of Apple II Presetnation at Weave’s World
What would you consider as being innovative and approachable uses of tech for presentations? Have you tried anything similar (or weirder)?