The Autotopian — “the ultimate car-culture website run by obsessive car nerds who want nothing more than to make people laugh while teaching them about geeky car minutiae” — offers various perks to incentivize readers to become paying subscribers. Among those rewards for those who pay a minimum of $25/month or $250/year:
… every year you’re going to get a new custom drawing, but it’s going to be something Jason creates with the help of one of his ridiculous old computers. This year you’ll get your very own robot and robot name, created by Jason, who hand-drew a bunch of unique elements that one of his old Apple IIs will randomize and put together, making you a unique bit of Jason/computer-generated art.
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The Jason in question is Jason Torchinsky, who in a separate article details both his rationale and methodology for offering these retro robots:
I don’t want to use some AI image generator like Midjourney or whatever – that feels wrong, and part of what we want to offer our members is something personal, something that actually comes from me, because I appreciate every member, dammit. Some cold, unfeeling AI can’t do that!
That’s when I realized I could leverage my other, non-car obsession — archaic computers — into helping me out, for a change. I could automate the process of art-making by hand-making a lot of graphical pieces, and then writing a program in BASIC to randomly put those parts together to make something unique and fun! That way, members get a unique bit of art — or at least something art-adjacent — that I hand-made, while at the same time could be automatically generated in quantity.
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His article describes both the unique video qualities of the Apple II as well as his migration process from one computing environment to another — that is, “How Do I Get It From That Old-Ass Computer To You?”
Torchinsky has long incorporated the Apple II into a variety of unlikely artistic pursuits. Before co-founding The Autopian in 2022, Torchinsky spent 11 years writing for car culture website Jalopnik, where he inserted Apple II art and source code into many of his articles.
And in July 2011, he produced the “Apple II Beeptacular Spectacular”:
We are gathering as many Apple II computers as possible together in the FlatPak House for what can only be called a “Beeptacular Spectacular” concert using vintage computers as an orchestra.
As a grand “musical” experiment, Jason Torchinsky has written a crude 16-tone sequencer for the Apple II, and will try and gather up as many Apple IIs as possible to perform a live, dynamic sort-of concert/musical event. Machine Project’s resident music guru, Chris Kallmyer, will be on hand to discuss the nature of music, and generally help make things somewhat listenable. Who knows what the end result will sound like? A chorus of angels, poking at touch-tone phones? All the computers from the background of every sci-fi movie from the 50-80s going off at once? A serenade by a truckload of R2-D2s? You’ll have to come and listen for yourselves. Please bring your own Apple II if you’ve got one!
Machine Project
Although Apple Inc. may have abandoned its pursuit of an autonomous vehicle, we’re heartened to know the Apple II will always have a place in car fandom at The Autopian.
(Hat tip to Sean Fahey on Facebook, as well as Apple II Bits from 2015 and 2016.)