One surprise on the front porch Thursday evening was the box from Swytch, the b-bike conversion from England. That was supposed to arrive in October. But, hey, I don't mind. There were three boxes from the auction site.
One was the "Apple IIc disk drive," (which included an entire Apple IIc and some manuals). The other two were an Apple IIe and an old Monitor III that were all part of one purchase.
Opening the IIc box was a disappointment familiar to many buyers from the auction site. Poor packaging. The external disk drive beat up the keyboard in transit. Several keys were broken and one switch was broken. The disk drive door was also broken. I can get replacements for the keys, but it's still disappointing. (Pack the IIc keyboard side down on some foam.) The good news is that it is otherwise fully functional. It was pretty dirty, but cleaned up well and seemed less yellowed than the other IIc I have. This was a 4000 model, which lacks the memory expansion connector on the motherboard. But it was one with an Alps keyboard (Which made the damage even more painful.)
The IIe was packaged even worse but, remarkably, arrived undamaged. The cpu was packaged with the two Disk ][ disk drives which are like Thor's hammer in terms of the amount of damage they can do. It even had the original monitor stand that Apple sold to support a Monitor III (designed for the Apple III) on top of an Apple II. Those things almost never survive.
The seller used 12-pack soda boxes (a first), and styrofoam peanuts, which I despise, as filler material. Some brown craft paper. None of which completely filled the empty volume in the box, and I don't know how everything made it here in one piece, but I'm grateful for small miracles. The Monitor III was in a separate box, similarly ill-packaged, but likewise intact.
After cleaning up the IIc and getting an inventory of keys I'll have to replace (Space bar may be a problem, there may be a piece missing.) I turned my attention to the Monitor III since that seemed like the thing that was least likely to actually work.
I plugged the IIe and the monitor in, expected the magic smoke and turned everything on. No smoke. After waiting a suitable interval for the monitor to warm up, an image appeared. Some fiddling with the controls got it stable and the damn thing works. Built in November, 1982. Image is a little biased to the left, but it works.
The Monitor III had a fabric anti-glare screen. It also had a bunch of crud on it. I used a toothbrush and warm soapy water to try and clean it. Failed. Watched a video of a guy opening one up to remove the screen and decided it was simpler to just use an Exacto knife. Screen was filthy under it, though it cleaned up pretty well; but there are still blemishes from some liquid that evidently got onto the glass. Not noticeable when the monitor is on. It's not "museum grade," but it's still pretty cool.
The IIe was intended to be an update to the ][+ that reduced costs and added modest improvements, presumably to make it more appealing for schools. It had 64K on the motherboard, while the ][+ was shipping with a max of 48K at the end of its run. You had to put a 16K "Language Card" in slot 0 to get 64K. The Language Card was developed to support Pascal as another operating system/programming language for the Apple ][.
People figured out how to bank-switch that 16K, and were creating RAM disks and expanded memory for Visicalc with it.
The Apple ][+ also shipped with 40-column uppercase only text. To get 80 columns, then the standard for "serious" computing, you had to install a video card in slot 3. The IIe added support for lower case text, and a low cost video card for 80 column text as an option. Further, that low cost 80 column card could also come with an additional 64K of memory onboard, for a total of 128K! Whoa!
When the IIe came out, I'd already sunk a bunch of money into my ][+. We're talking 80s dollars here. I bought a ][+ with one disk drive for $2500, which is north of $7k in today's money. On top of that, I put a Videx 80 column card in slot 3, bought a second disk drive, a Monitor III, and that funky plastic stand, all so I could use PIE: Writer as my word processor. So I was probably over $10k in today's dollars by the time I was done and the Apple IIe was announced. (I hesitate to consider what $5k invested in 1982 would be worth today. I could probably afford a house in the Finger Lakes.)
ChatGPT isn't so reluctant, though it does qualify everything:
Calculating the exact amount that $5,000 invested in a NASDAQ index fund in 1980 would be worth today is quite complex and would require specific data on the fund's performance, including dividends and stock splits, over the past 40+ years. However, as a rough estimate, we can consider that the NASDAQ Composite has grown from around 200 points in 1980 to over 14,000 points in 2021. This is a 70-fold increase. Applying this increase to a $5,000 investment would result in a value of approximately $350,000.
So, yeah, a house in the Finger Lakes.
While I was impressed with the expanded memory of the IIe, I didn't feel as though the additional capability really added anything to what I already had in my ][+.
Well, and this remains unclear to me even today, at some point the engineers at Apple realized they could make some relatively modest modifications to the motherboard involving the video timing signals, and they could use that 64K expansion card to increase the resolution and colors of Apple's "high resolution" graphics.
The original Apple IIe, the so-called "Rev A," shipped without those motherboard modifications, and is incapable of displaying double hi-res graphics. You're stuck with the original 280x192 in monochrome (though some fancy bit-twiddling in programming could make it appear as though the horizontal resolution was 560 pixels), and six colors (eight if you count two whites and two blacks), with the limitations of adjacent colors due to the NTSC artifacts Woz relied on to create color.
It was the addition of double hi-res graphics that made me decide I needed to get an Apple IIe. So my first IIe was a Rev B, and I bought it as a package from one of my neighbors who worked at a computer retailer. Prices had come way down, of course. I got the 128K IIe, two disk drives, and a Monitor II for $1595. I sold my ][+ setup for $900 to a co-worker. (I had that //e for probably over a decade, though I can't recall exactly what happened to it anymore. I eventually got a IIgs and used that for many years before we finally switch to a Mac with the much maligned Performa 6200CD.
I don't know how many Rev A models shipped, but they were supposedly only in the thousands; and Apple offered motherboard swaps for early buyers, so many of those were upgraded to Rev B motherboards.
Well, this IIe in my garage is a Rev A.
Wild.
It boots up with "Apple ][" at the top of the screen. When you "enhance" an Apple IIe ("enhanced" was supposedly what the originally stood for), you get a 65C02 processor, new ROMs and a new video character set that includes "Mouse Text" (for drawing GUI elements in text) and the screen shows Apple //e when you boot up.
I'm not exactly sure what I want to do about that yet, if anything at all. Presumably, I can still use the Aux Slot for memory expansion, and I could install the "enhancement" kit with the 65C02 and new ROMs. There's no real support for double hi-res graphics built into the ROM, you have to do everything in your own software but there are plenty of packages that do it for you.
I think I'm going to keep it as a Rev A machine, though I will install the 65C02. I can get the ROMxe for it, which allows you to switch in any number of ROM variations.
Anyway, seller didn't think it worked. It works. Came with two modem cards, a parallel printer interface card, a 64K aux slot card, and a disk controller card. I removed all the cards to boot it up. The RIFA caps in the power supply didn't pop, so no "magic smoke." At some point I'll have to open the power supply and deal with that. I think I still have some spares I didn't give away because I forgot I had them.
So why get a IIe if I already have two //c computers? Well, the IIe has more access to the real world. The joystick port is a 16-pin DIP connector with additional channels for game controllers, buttons and an annunciator. The cassette tape jacks repurpose-able and absent on the //c. The memory is more readily expandable than the //c, I have to wait for someone to build a new card for it, which happens from time to time. I've already got a 4MB expansion card from Garrett's Workshop.
If you want to play with Apple Pascal, the best way to do that is with a large RAM disk, so you're not always waiting for the editor, compiler, or filer to load from disk. I had a setup I really liked with a Transwarp accelerator card in that SUV-load of stuff I gave away. At the moment, I'm thinking that the IIe is going to be more about programming and real-world interfacing and less about game playing or graphics.
The "new" //c is a 4000 model. I'm thinking of getting another ROMXc, then seeing if I can "ROMify" Jef Raskin's "Swyftware" application. (Should be doable. It was originally available in a ROM on a peripheral card.) Then that //c could be kind of a Canon Cat. Might be fun. I'll need to see if it can talk to blank disk images on a FloppyEMU. It uses its own disk format, and the entire disk is one "file."
In the interim, there's still a lot of cleaning to do. I spent much of yesterday afternoon scrubbing nicotine off the Monitor III. The IIe is probably just as bad, and the motherboard is very dusty. Then I have to figure out where all this stuff is going to live. I need to significantly alter my "office," I'm even considering getting rid of the recliner.
Horrors!
Originally posted at Nice Marmot 05:29 Saturday, 14 September 2024