Hasta La Gadget!

The good, fun-loving folks at Mac software house Panic got an odd request in their inbox. Nerd artist Stewart Smith had spotted an old Apple ][e sitting in the Panic office in a photograph and asked if they would run some code on it for him and video the results. The code was used to make an amazing text-based animated promo for the band Grandaddy.

The Panic guys, being geeks to the core, agreed. There was one problem: how to get the software onto the computer? The code came in sonic form, meant to be loaded with a cassette player. Panic took a look around the office and saw the answer. An iPad.

They loaded up an MP3 of the program, plugged the iPad into the Apple and pressed play. Panic’s Cabel Sasser puts it thus “It’s an obvious solution in retrospect, but there is something very unreal and amazing about tapping a button on a multi-touch screen and watching an Apple //e fill up with data.”

And there is further irony. Panic’s flagship product is Transmit, an FTP program whose purpose is also to shift data from here to there. You’ll need to click on over to the Panic Blog to see the clip, as it comes in non-embeddable, non-Flash form and instead in nice clean HTML5-compliant H.264 or Ogg Vorbis.

An Apple //e, an iPad, and Jed [Panic Blog]