Compiled and written by Steven Weyhrich
(C) Copyright 1991, Zonker Software
 

Csa2 FAQs resource file: R017V2HIST.HTML

The comp.sys.apple2 Usenet newsgroup Apple II FAQs
originate from the II Computing Apple II site. 1997 ...

Note: To facilitate easier reading, the extensive footnote
references have been removed from this document.
 
 
 
 

PRELUDE: THE APPLE III PROJECT

     As we continue our travels examining the history of the AppleII, let's fine tune the time-machine card on our souped-up AppleII to concentrate specifically on the next version of the II, the IIe.  As before, just accelerate the microprocessor speed to 88 MHz, and watch out for the digital fire-trails! Destination:  1982.
 

     Between the years 1979 and 1983, although no new versions of the AppleII were released, it enjoyed a broad popularity and annually increasing sales.  The open architecture of the computer, with its fully described hardware and firmware function via the Reference Manual, made it appealing both to hardware and software hackers.  Third-party companies designed cards to plug into the internal slots, and their function varied from making it possible to display and use 80-column text, to clocks and cards allowing the AppleII to control a variety of external devices.  During this time there was also an explosion of new software written for this easily expandable machine, from the realm of business (VisiCalc and other spreadsheet clones), to utilities, to games of all types.  Each month a host of new products would be available for those who wanted to find more things to do with their computer, and the AppleII was finding a place in the home, the classroom, and the office.

     At Apple Computer, Inc., however, the AppleII was not viewed with the same degree of loyalty.  By September 1979 the AppleII had continued to be a sales leader.  However, few at Apple believed that the II could continue to be a best seller for more than another year or two.  Since Apple Computer, Inc. was a business, and not just a vehicle for selling the AppleII computer, they began to enlarge the engineering department to begin designing new products.

     These new design efforts had begun as far back as late 1978.  Their first effort was an enhanced AppleII that used some custom chips, but that project was never finished.  They also began work on a different, more powerful computer that would use several identical microprocessor chips sharing tasks.  The main advantage would be speed, and the ability to do high precision calculations. This computer was code-named Lisa, and because it was such a revolutionary type of design, they knew it would take many years to come to actual production. Because of the power it was to have, Apple executives felt that Lisa was the future of the company.

     Because they knew that the Lisa project would take a long time to complete, and because the AppleII was perceived to have only a short remaining useful life as a product, they began a new computer project called the AppleIII.  Instead of building upon the AppleII as a basis for this new computer, they decided to start from scratch.  Also, although Wozniak made most of the design decisions for the II, a committee at Apple decided what capabilities the AppleIII should have.  They decided that the AppleIII was to be a business machine, and not have the home or arcade-game reputation that the II had.  It was to have a full upper/lowercase keyboard and display, 80-column text, and a more comprehensive operating system.  They also decided that since it would be a while before many application programs would be available for this new computer, it should be capable of running existing AppleII software.  In some ways this handicapped the project, since it was then necessary to use the same microprocessor and disk drive hardware as was used in the AppleII.

     Apple executives also decided that with the introduction of the AppleIII they wanted a clear separation between it and the AppleII in regards to marketing.  They did not want ANY overlap between the two.  The III would be an 80-column business machine and was predicted to have ninety percent of the market, while the AppleII would be a 40-column home and school machine and would have ten percent of the market.  Apple's executives were confident that after the release of the AppleIII, the AppleII would quickly lose its appeal.

     Because of their desire for a strong and distinct product separation, the AppleII emulation mode designed into the AppleIII was very limited.  The engineers actually ADDED hardware chips that prevented access to the III's more advanced features from AppleII emulation mode.  AppleII emulation couldn't use 80 columns, and had access to only 48K memory and none of the better graphics modes.  As a result, it wouldn't run some of the better AppleII business software, during a time when there wasn't much NEW business software for the AppleIII.

     The AppleIII engineers were given a one year target date for completion. It was ready for release in the spring of 1980, but there were problems with both design and manufacturing.  (It was the first time that Apple as a company tried to come out with a new product; the AppleII had been designed and built by Wozniak when he WAS the engineering department).  The first AppleIII computers were plagued with nearly 100% defects and had to be recalled for fixes. Although Apple took the unprecedented step of repairing all of the defective computers at no charge, they never recovered the momentum they lost with that first misstep, and the III did not become the success Apple needed it to be.

     Although all of the bugs and limitations of the AppleIII were eventually overcome, and it became the computer of choice within Apple, it did not capture the market as they had hoped.  At that point, they weren't sure exactly what to do with the II.  They had purposely ignored and downplayed it for the four years since the II Plus was released, although without its continued strong sales they would not have lasted as a company.  In a 1985 interview in Byte magazine, Steve Wozniak stated:
 

"When we came out with the AppleIII, the engineering staff cancelled every AppleII engineering program that was ongoing, in expectation of the AppleIII's success.  Every single one was cancelled.  We really perceived that the AppleII would not last six months.  So the company was almost all AppleIII people, and we worked for years after that to try and tell the world how good the AppleIII was, because we KNEW [how good it was]... If you looked at our advertising and R&D dollars, everything we did here was done first on the III, if it was business related.  Then maybe we'd consider doing a sub-version on the II.  To make sure there was a good boundary between the two machines, anything done on the II had to be done at a lower level than on the III.  Only now are we discovering that good solutions can be implemented on the II... We made sure the AppleII was not allowed to have a hard disk or more than 128K of memory.  At a time when outside companies had very usable schemes for adding up to a megabyte of memory, we came out with a method of adding 64K to an AppleIIe, which was more difficult to use and somewhat limited.  We refused to acknowledge any of the good 80-column cards that were in the outside world--only ours, which had a lot of problems."
 

     Wozniak went on in that interview to say that at one time he had written some fast disk routines for the Pascal system on the AppleII, and was criticized by the AppleIII engineers.  They didn't think that anything on the II should be allowed to run faster than on a III.  That was the mindset of the entire company at the time.

     Apple has been much maligned for the attention they gave the AppleIII project, while suspending all further development on the AppleII.  They pegged their chances for the business market in 1980 on the AppleIII.  Even Steve Wozniak had stated in another interview, "We'd have sold tons of [computers in the business market] if we'd have let the II evolve... to become a business machine called the III instead of developing a separate, incompatible computer. We could have added the accessories to make it do the business functions that the outside world is going to IBM for."

     Part of the problem was the immaturity of the entire microcomputer industry at the time.  There had NEVER been a microcomputer that had sold well for more than a couple of years before it was replaced by a more powerful model, usually from another company.  The Altair 8800 and IMSAI had fallen to the more popular and easier to use AppleII and TRS-80 and Commodore PET, as well as other new machines based on the Intel 8080 and 8088 processors.  It is entirely understandable that Apple's attitude between 1978 and 1980 would be of panic and fear that they wouldn't get a new computer out in time to keep their market share and survive as a company.  However, during the entire time when Apple was working on the III as a computer to carry the company through until Lisa would be ready, and during the entire time that the AppleII was ignored by its own company, it continued to quietly climb in sales.  It is a credit to both the ingenuity of Wozniak in his original design, and to the users of the AppleII in THEIR ingenuity at finding new uses for the II, that its value increased and stimulated yet more new sales.  The AppleII "beat" the odds of survival that historically were against it.
 

THE APPLE IIE: BEGINNINGS

     When Apple saw that the sales on the AppleII were NOT going to dwindle away, they finally decided to take another look at it.  The first new look at advancing the design of the II was with a project called "Diana" in 1980.  Diana was intended primarily to be an AppleII that had fewer internal components, and would be less expensive to build.   The project was later known as "LCA", which stood for "Low Cost Apple".  Inside Apple this meant a lower cost of manufacturing, but outsiders who got wind of the project thought it meant a $350 AppleII.  Because of that misconception, the final code name for the updated AppleII was "Super II", and lasted until its release.
 

THE APPLE IIE: HARDWARE

     Part of the IIe project grew out of the earlier work on custom integrated circuits for the AppleII.  When they finally decided to go ahead and improve the design by adding new features, one of the original plans was to give the AppleII an 80-column text display and a full upper/lowercase keyboard.  Walt Broedner at Apple did much of the original hardware planning, and was one of those at Apple who pushed for the upgrade in the first place.  To help maintain compatibility with older 40-column software (which often addressed the screen directly for speed), he decided to make 80-columns work by mirroring the older 40 column text screen onto a 1K memory space parallel to it, with the even columns in main memory and the odd columns in this new "auxiliary" memory.  To display 80-column text would require switching between the two memory banks.  Broedner realized that with little extra effort he could do the same for the entire 64K memory space and get 128K of bank-switchable memory.  They put this extra memory (the 1K "80-column card, or a 64K "extended 80-column card") in a special slot called the "auxiliary" slot that replaced slot 0 (the 16K Language Card was going to be a built-in feature).  The 80-column firmware routines were mapped to slot 3, since that was a location commonly used by people who bought 80-column cards for their AppleII's, and was also the place where the Apple Pascal system expected to find an external terminal.  The auxiliary slot also supplied some special video signals, and was used during manufacture for testing on the motherboard.

     The engineers that worked on the IIe tried hard to make sure that cards designed for the II and II Plus would work properly in the new computer.  They even had to "tune" the timing on the IIe to be slightly OFF (to act more like the II Plus) because the Microsoft CP/M Softcard refused to function properly with the new hardware.  A socket was included on the motherboard for attaching a numeric keypad, a feature that many business users had been adding (with difficulty) to the II Plus for years.  The full keyboard they designed was very similar to the one found on the AppleIII, including two unique keys that had first appeared with the III--one with a picture of an hollow apple ("open-apple") and the other with the same apple picture filled in ("solid-apple").  These keys were electrically connected to buttons 0 and 1 on the Apple paddles or joystick.  They were available to software designers as modifier keys when pressed with another key; for example, open-apple-H could be programmed to call up a "help" screen.  The newer electronics of the keyboard also made it easier to manufacture foreign language versions of the AppleIIe.

     Overall, Broedner and Peter Quinn (the design manager for the IIe and later the IIc projects) and their team managed to decrease the number of components on the motherboard from over one hundred to thirty-one, while adding to the capabilities of the computer by the equivalent of another hundred components.
 

THE APPLE IIE: FIRMWARE

     Peter Quinn had to beg for someone to help write the firmware revisions to the Monitor and Applesoft for the IIe.  He finally got Rich Auricchio, who had been a hacker on the AppleII almost from the beginning.  Quinn said in a later interview, "You cannot get someone to write firmware for this machine unless he's been around for three or four years.  You have to know how to get through the mine field [of unofficial but commonly used entry points].  He [Rick] was extremely good.  He added in all the 80-column and Escape-key stuff."  Quinn also got Bryan Stearns to work on the new Monitor.

     Changes were made in the ROMs to support the new bank-switching modes made necessary by having two parallel 64K banks of RAM memory.  To have enough firmware space for these extra features, the engineers increased the size of the available ROM by making IT bank-switched.  This space was taken from a location that had previously not been duplicated before--the memory locations used by cards in the slots on the motherboard.  Ordinarily, if you use the Monitor to look at the slot 1 memory locations from $C100 through $C1FF, you get either random numbers (if the slot is empty), or the bytes that made up the controller program on that card.  Any card could also have the space from $C800 through $CFFF available for extra ROM code if they needed it.  If a card in a slot did a read or write to memory location $CFFF, the $C800-$CFFF ROM that belonged to that card would appear in that space in the AppleII memory.  When another card was working, then ITS version of that space would appear.  On the IIe, they made a special soft-switch that would switch OUT all the peripheral cards from the memory, and switch IN the new expanded ROM on the motherboard.  The firmware in the new bank-switched ROM space was designed to avoid being needed by any card in a slot (to avoid conflicts), and much of it was dedicated to making the 80-column display (mapped to slot 3) work properly.

     Also added were enhancements to the ESC routines used to do screen editing. In addition to the original ESC A, B, C, and D, and the ESC I, J, K, and M added with the AppleII Plus, Auricchio added the ability to make the ESC cursor moves work with the left and right arrow keys, and the new up and down arrow keys. The new IIe ROM also included a self-test that was activated by pressing both apple keys, the control key, and RESET simultaneously.
 

THE APPLE IIE: SUCCESS

     The new AppleIIe turned out to be quite profitable for Apple.  Not only was it more functional than the II Plus for a similar price, but the cost to the dealers selling it was about three times the cost of manufacture.  They had gotten their "Low Cost Apple", and by May of 1983 the AppleIIe was selling sixty to seventy thousand units a month, over twice the average sales of the II Plus. Christmas of 1983 saw the IIe continue to sell extremely well, partly resulting from the delayed availability of the new IBM PCjr.  Even after the AppleIIc was released in 1984, IIe sales continued beyond those of the IIc, despite the IIc's built-in features.
 

THE APPLE IIE: MODIFICATIONS

     Early AppleIIe motherboard's were labelled as "Revision A".  Engineers determined soon after its introduction that if the same use of parallel memory was applied to the hi-res graphics display as was done with the text display, they could create higher density graphics.  These graphics, which they called "double hi-res", also had the capability of displaying a wider range of colors, similar to those available with the original AppleII lo-res graphics.  The IIe motherboards with the necessary modifications to display these double hi-res graphics were labelled "Revision B", and a softswitch was assigned to turning on and off the new graphics mode.

     Later versions of the IIe motherboards were again called "Revision A" (for some reason), although they HAD been modified for double hi-res graphics.  The difference between the two "Revision A" boards was that the latter had most of the chips soldered to the motherboard.  An original "Revision A" board that had been changed to an Enhanced IIe was not necessarily able to handle double hi-res, since the change to the Enhanced version involved only a four-chip change to the motherboard, but not the changes to make double hi-res possible.
 

THE APPLE IIE: THE ENHANCED IIE

     This version of the AppleIIe was introduced in March of 1985.  It involved changes to make the IIe more closely compatible with the AppleIIc and II Plus. The upgrade consisted of four chips that were swapped in the motherboard:  The 65c02 processor, with more assembly language opcodes, replaced the 6502; two more chips with Applesoft and Monitor ROM changes; and the fourth a character generator ROM that included graphics characters (first introduced on the IIc) called "MouseText".  The Enhanced IIe ROM changes fixed most of the known problems with the IIe 80-column firmware, and made it possible to enter Applesoft and Monitor commands in lower-case.  The older 80-column routines were slower than most software developers wanted, they disabled interrupts for too long a time, and there were problems in making Applesoft work properly with the 80-column routines.  These problems were solved with the newer ROMs.

     Monitor changes also included a return of the mini-assembler, absent since the days of Integer BASIC.  It was activated by entering a "!" command in the Monitor, instead of a jump to a memory location as in the older Apple ][.  Also added were an "S" command was added to make it possible to search memory for a byte sequence, and the ability to enter ASCII characters directly into memory. However, the "L" command to disassemble 6502 code still did not handle the new 65c02 opcodes as did the IIc disassembler.  Interrupt handling was also improved.

     Applesoft was fixed to let commands such as GET, HTAB, TAB, SPC, and comma tabbing work properly in 80-column mode. The new MouseText characters caused a problem for some older programs at first, until they were upgraded; characters previously displayed as inverse upper-case would sometimes display as MouseText instead.
 

THE APPLE IIE: THE PLATINUM IIE

     This version of the IIe, introduced in January 1987, had a keyboard that was the same as the IIGS keyboard, but the RESET key was moved above the ESC and "1" keys (as on the IIc), and the power light was above the "/" on the included numeric keypad (the internal numeric keypad connector was left in place).  The CLEAR key on the keypad generated the same character as the ESC key, but with a hardware modification it could generate a Ctrl-X as it did on the IIGS.  The motherboard had 64K RAM in only two chips (instead of the previous eight), and one ROM chip instead of two.  An "extended 80-column card" with 64K extra memory was included in all units sold, and was smaller than previous versions of that memory card.

     No ROM changes were made.  The old shift-key modification was installed, making it possible for programs to determine if the shift-key was being pressed. However, if using a game controller that actually used the third push-button (where the shift-key mod was internally connected), pressing shift and the third push-button simultaneously causes a short circuit that shuts down the power supply.
 

THE APPLE IIE: EMULATION CARD ON MACINTOSH LC

     In early 1991, Apple introduced a new version of the AppleIIe.  This one was designed to be exactly like the 128K Platinum IIe, with the modification that it had a color Macintosh attached to it.  This AppleIIe cost only $199, but the required Macintosh peripheral went for about $2,495, which makes the combination the most expensive AppleII ever made.  Apple engineers managed to put the function of an entire IIe onto a card smaller than the old Disk II controller card.  With version 2.0 of the AppleII interface software, more of the memory allocated to the Macintosh could be used by the IIe (strange way of designing an AppleII!).  However, unlike all previous versions of the IIe, there were no hardware-based slots on the IIe card; instead, it used software-based slots that were allocated by moving icons that represent various peripherals into "slots" on the Mac screen.  (Oh, yes; it ran some Mac software, too.  This was, of course, the Macintosh LC computer with its optional AppleIIe card).

     To use 5.25 disks with this AppleIIe, there was a cable that attached to the card.  The cable would split into a game connector (for paddles or joystick operation) and a connector that accepted IIc and IIGS style 5.25 drives.

     The IIe card ran at a "normal" (1 MHz) speed and a "fast" (2 MHz) speed. It had limitations, however.  For a 1991 AppleII, it was limited in being unable to be accelerated beyond 2 MHz (a Zip Chip can run a standard IIe at 8 MHz), and the screen response seemed slow, since it was using a software-based Mac text display instead of the hardware-based AppleII character ROM.  As a Macintosh it lacked the power and speed of the newer Macintosh II models (which also ran color displays).  But if having a AppleII and a Mac in one machine was important, this was the best way to do it.
 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 
 

PRELUDE: STEVE JOBS AND MACINTOSH

     Rewind back to 1982, before the AppleIIe was introduced, and adjust the tuning on our Flux Capacitor-enhanced peripheral card.  Before dealing specifically with the smallest AppleII, the IIc, it would help to take an aside and look at some other events happening at Apple Computers, Inc. at this time that affected its development.

     If you recall, the Lisa project was designated as the computer that was considered to be the future of Apple.  From a series of parallel processors and a "bit slicing" architecture, to a focus on the Motorola 68000 microprocessor as the controller of this advanced computer, the project had been progressing very slowly.  It was begun back in 1979 with the same focus as any other Apple product:  "Both [AppleIII and Lisa] had been conceived of as nifty pieces of hardware rather than as products to appeal to a specific market:  At Apple you designed a box and people bought it because it was neat, not because any thought had been given to what it would do for them."

     However, a significant change occurred in 1979 when Xerox bought a large chunk of Apple stock.  In return for being allowed this stock purchase, Xerox allowed some of their research ideas to be used in designing an office computer. After Steve Jobs visited the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1979 and saw the user-interface on their Alto computer--icons, graphics-based text characters, overlapping windows, and a pointing device called a "mouse"--the Lisa took on a distinct personality that made it possible to become the ultra-computer Apple needed.  This was important, since by 1981 Apple executives were getting sweaty palms worrying about the future.  The AppleIII was clearly NOT taking the business world by storm.

     Unfortunately for Jobs, who was excited about using the Xerox technology in designing a new computer, he was excluded from the Lisa project.  After the problems associated with the introduction of the AppleIII, a reorganization in 1980 moved the AppleII and III into one division, and the Lisa into another. Lisa was put under the control of John Couch, and Jobs was not allowed to participate.  Since Lisa had been taken away, Jobs in 1981 began to assemble a team to "out-Lisa the Lisa" by creating a smaller, less expensive computer that would do the same thing.  Jef Raskin, the engineer that helped design it, called it Macintosh.

     While the Macintosh developed as a pirate project with a smaller team and less money than Lisa, the concept of an "appliance" computer also emerged. Instead of those messy slots and a lid that popped off (which made the AppleII so popular with the hacker community), Jobs' team was sold on the idea that all necessary features should simply be built-in and the case sealed.  It would be something that you just plugged in, turned on, and started using.  With the Xerox Alto mouse/icon/window interface it would not only be easy to set up and turn on, but also easy to use.
 

THE APPLE IIC: BEGINNINGS

     What was happening with the AppleII during this time?  The efforts to make it less expensive to build were progressing, and the AppleIIe was in the formative stages.  In the summer of 1981 someone proposed a portable AppleII, a book-sized computer.  It wasn't until Steve Jobs became interested in it as engineering challenge, well after Macintosh was under way, that anything came of the idea:
 

"...one day late in '82, Paul Dali showed him [Jobs] a photograph of a Toshiba portable and they started fooling around with the idea of an AppleII that would look like the Toshiba but come with a built-in disk drive.  They took out a IIe circuit board and a disk drive and a keyboard and played with them until they arrived at a promising configuration--keyboard in front, disk drive in back, circuit board in between.  What got Jobs excited about this idea was the engineering difficulty of squeezing it all into a package not much bigger than a notebook.  And a machine so small wouldn't have the expandability that characterized all the other II's.  Like Macintosh, it could be taken out of the box, plugged in, and put to work--no extra parts to buy, no cables to figure out.  It was the II reinvented as an appliance."
 

     As with all Apple projects, the IIc went by various code names during its development, for the sake of internal communications and to keep outsiders from knowing what was going on.  The various names used included VLC (Very Low Cost), Yoda, ET, IIb (for "Book"), and Teddy (which stood for "Testing Every Day"). Also, following a long standing tradition at Apple, some of the code names assigned to the project at various times were names of children of people at Apple:  Chels, Jason, Lolly, Sherry, and Zelda.  These names persist in the source code for the firmware for the IIc as later printed in the technical reference manual; the serial port driver is called a "Lolly" driver.

     During the time the IIc was under development, Apple was working on a change in the look of their products.  They planned a more European styling, and a color scheme called "Snow White".  The IIc would be the first product with the new appearance and color.
 

THE APPLE IIC: HARDWARE

     As mentioned earlier, the IIc had its origins while the IIe project was going on.  When Steve Jobs became involved, he felt they should continue with the open IIe as they had planned, but do this other AppleII as a product "focused" to a specific group of customers, primarily new users.  Originally he had planned a closed AppleII that had a built-in mouse port, one serial port, and some other features.  What they ended up with at that point was just a computer and a keyboard.  Walt Broedner, the engineer who pushed for the AppleIIe to be produced, used some of their previous work with custom IC's for the disk controller and combined both projects together to make the IIc.

     Although he was told it was not be possible, Jobs strongly pushed for the mouse in this closed AppleII to be compatible with the Macintosh mouse--and they managed to make it work.

     Regarding the plans for a single serial port, however, Apple's marketing people pointed out to Jobs that many people were going to want both a printer AND a modem, so they added a second port to the original design.  They decided to use serial ports on the IIc instead of parallel ports for a couple of reasons.  First, the socket for a serial port is smaller than a parallel port, and it would fit better onto a small box like the IIc.  Also, Apple's general direction at the time was to get consistency in its hardware, and they had decided to make everything they made use a serial interface.

     They began work on the AppleIIc in earnest right after the IIe was finished.  Because they were trying to squeeze an AppleIIe with 128K, 80 column routines, two serial cards, disk controller, and a mouse card into an 11 by 12-inch case, the design challenges were greater than with the IIe (recall that this was what appealed to Steve Jobs).  The size of the case was determined by the decision to make it able to fit into a standard-sized briefcase.

     Apple also had the international market in mind when they designed the IIc. A special chip containing the keyboard map could easily be changed depending on the country where the computer would be sold, to make it consistent with regional keyboard differences.  The external pushbutton would switch between the two different keyboards, between a UK and German layout, for example.  In the U.S. version of the IIc it switched from a standard Sholes keyboard (also known as "QWERTY") to a Dvorak keyboard (which allows faster touch typing).  The decision for the foreign keyboards came first; the added bonus for American versions of getting Dvorak came as an extra bonus, to save having two different cases (one for US and one for foreign versions).

     One problem in creating such a compact computer was dealing with heat production.  Apple engineers wanted it to be able to function in environmental temperatures up to 40 degrees Celsius (about 104 degrees Fahrenheit).  One article published at the time of its introduction mentioned jokingly that the designers wanted to make the IIc capable of doing a long disk sort (sorting data in a disk file) while on the beach in Florida in the summer!  Their major obstacle was the heat generated by the internal 5.25 disk drive.  They tried some special low power drives (which would have been much more expensive), but they didn't overcome the heat problem even with them.  Eventually they tried a complicated venting scheme that was designed by drilling holes into a case and putting it into an oven to let them measure internal temperatures.  The engineers were surprised when they found that the normal power disk drive worked and generated less overall heat within the case than the special low power drive did.  The only explanation they could come up with was that the normal power drive generated enough heat to cause it to rise, which pulled cool air in through the vents by convection.
 

THE APPLE IIC: FIRMWARE

     Since they used the newer 65c02 chip, which ran cooler and had 27 additional commands that could be used by assembly language programs, Apple's programmers had some new power to use in firmware design.  Such power was needed to squeeze in all the firmware code for the IIe, plus code for the disk controller, serial cards, mouse card, and 80 column card into 16K of ROM space.

     The firmware for the IIc was written by Ernie Beernink, Rich Williams, and James Huston.  They designed it to look (to a software application program) exactly like a IIe with an Apple Super Serial Card in slots 1 and 2, an 80-column card in slot 3, a mouse in slot 4, and a Disk II in slot 6 (though there were NO slots in hardware).  Since these first IIc's had nothing emulated in slot 5, the firmware authors immortalized themselves by making a "ghost" peripheral appear to be present in that slot.  Entering this Applesoft program:

100  IN#5 : INPUT A$ : PRINT A$

and running it would print the names of the authors.  (They used a decoding scheme to extract the names, character by character, so a simple ASCII scan of the ROM would not show their little trick).  This "feature" had to be removed in later revisions of the IIc ROM, because an actual disk device was added then to slot 5.

     What about the unassigned slot 7?  Here they put a small piece of code to allow booting from the external 5.25 drive by typing "PR#7" from Applesoft.

     The programmers fixed some known bugs in the IIe ROMs, and added 32 graphics characters they called MouseText.  To make MouseText fit they removed the ability to use flashing characters (when in 80 column mode) and replaced those characters with MouseText.  Apple veteran Bruce Tognazzini designed the MouseText characters, which included a picture of a running man (perhaps to suggest "running" a program).  He later sent a letter to Call-A.P.P.L.E. magazine to warn programmers that the Running Man characters (assigned to "F" and "G") had been determined to be unnecessary and would probably be replaced eventually.  (This did eventually happen, but not with the IIc).

     Beernick, Williams, and Huston also made some minor changes to the Applesoft part of the ROM.  They fixed things so Applesoft commands could be entered in lowercase (and translated into uppercase).  They removed the Applesoft commands that were specific to the obsolete cassette interface (which was absent in the IIc) and made Applesoft more compatible with 80 columns.

     They did NOT go so far as to make any major changes in Applesoft to use the newer 65c02 commands and therefore fix known bugs or add features to this seven year old language.  Their reluctance stemmed from the fact that historically many BASIC programs had made use of undocumented assembly language entry points in Applesoft, and any changes they would make here made it more likely that older programs would crash unexpectedly.
 

THE APPLE IIC: PRODUCT INTRODUCTION

     Apple's introduction of the new IIc came at an "event" at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco on April 24th, 1984.  It was entitled "AppleII Forever", and was described as "part revival meeting, part sermon, part roundtable discussion, part pagan rite, and part county fair".  Apple's objectives here were to introduce the AppleIIc, describe how it fit into the company's marketing strategy, show off new software that was made to work with the new computer, and emphasize that Apple was still firmly behind the AppleII line of computers.  (Steve Jobs also took some of the time to report on the sales of the Macintosh in its first 100 days).

     One of the interesting things they did at the "AppleII Forever" event was the actual introduction of the IIc.  Giant video screens were used to show previews of Apple's TV commercials for the IIc, as well as slides and images of the speakers, including Wozniak, Jobs, and Apple's new president, John Sculley. Sculley spoke of "sharing power", and then demonstrated that in a unique way: "After holding up the tiny IIc for everyone to see and eliciting a response that they'd like to see it better, Sculley ordered the house lights on.  As the light burst forth, nearly every fifth person in the audience stood up, waving high a IIc.  As startled dealers cheered uproariously, the Apple plants passed the IIcs to them.  Within seconds of its introduction, more than a thousand Apple dealers had a production-line IIc in their hands."

     When Jobs gave his report on the Mac, it revealed some interesting statistics.  He told them that the first industry standard was the AppleII, which sold fifty thousand machines in two and a half years.  The second standard was the IBM PC, which sold the same amount in eight months.  Macintosh had done sold its fifty thousand machines only 74 days after its introduction.  Although sales would not be nearly as good, Apple took orders that day for fifty thousand AppleIIc's in just over seven HOURS.

     At the "AppleII Forever" event, they also had a general software exhibition and a setup called the AppleII Museum.  This contained Apple memorabilia, and included Woz's original Apple I, and a reproduction of Steve Jobs' garage where it was built.  Although not on the schedule, "AppleII Forever" included an early-afternoon earthquake centered south of San Jose that measured 6.2 on the Richter scale.
 

THE APPLE IIC: SUCCESS?

     Their original goal had been to sell the IIc for $995.  As productions costs turned out, they found that they couldn't hit that price, so they came up with $1,295, balancing the decision with the number of people who were predicted to buy the optional Monitor IIc or an external Disk IIc drive.

     The only problem was that although the IIc was a technological breakthrough in miniaturization, customers at that time didn't value smallness.  They viewed something that was too small as also being cheap and lacking power.  Although the AppleIIc was equivalent to a IIe loaded with extra memory, a disk drive, two serial cards, and a mouse card, most customers seemed to want the more expandable IIe.  Apple marketing went to much effort to make the IIc attractive, but it didn't sell as well as the IIe.  Just as IBM overestimated the market when producing its PCjr (which eventually failed and was discontinued), so did Apple when producing the IIc (and the original Macintosh).
 

THE APPLE IIC: OVERCOMING LIMITATIONS

     Although the IIc did not have any slots for plugging in peripheral cards that had traditionally been used in the AppleII, the ports that were built-in had the capability to do much of what the slots had often been used for.  The serial ports were compatible with any serial device; this included common ones such as printers and modems, and uncommon ones like security controllers, clocks, and speech synthesizers.  Some third party companies also supplied serial-to-parallel converters for IIc owners who wanted to use parallel printers made by Epson, Okidata, and C. Itoh that were popular elsewhere in the computer world.

     There was, of course, the AppleMouse IIc sold by Apple.  It plugged into the game port on the IIc.  Also available were two types of touch tablets:  The Power Pad (Chalkboard) and Koala Pad (Koala Technologies), though the latter sold best.  The Koala pad would appear to a program to be the same as a joystick, but could not emulate the mouse.

     The disk port on the original IIc was only designed to control an external 5.25 disk drive.  Apple sold the Disk IIc for $329, and other companies later sold similar drives for less.  Despite this firmware limitation, Quark Engineering released a 10 MB Winchester hard drive called the QC10 that would work with this disk port, and was the first hard disk available for the IIc.

     The video port worked with a standard monitor, but had access to all video signals.  Included with the original IIc was an RF modulator that allowed it to be connected to a standard television (for color games).  An RGB adapter box attached to the video port would allow a true RGB monitor to be attached, giving color and sharp, readable 80 column text on the same monitor.  Apple also sold a flat-panel liquid crystal display for the IIc that attached to this video port. It was capable of 80 columns by 24 lines, as well as double hi-res graphics. Apple's price was about $600, but it looked somewhat "squashed" vertically, and did not sell well.  Another company marketed a better flat panel liquid crystal display called the C-Vue.

     With a battery attached to the 12V input, and a liquid crystal display, the IIc could be made into a truly portable computer.
 

THE APPLE IIC: ENHANCEMENTS

     The earliest change made available for the IIc was a motherboard swap that fixed a hardware bug causing some non-Apple modems to fail if used at 1200 baud. This modification was made only if the owner could show they needed the change (that is, they owned a 1200 baud modem that wouldn't work).

     The first significant upgrade available for AppleIIc owners was also available as a free upgrade for previous owners.  Changes were made to the disk port firmware to accommodate the new 800K UniDisk3.5.  Using Apple's Protocol Converter scheme (later called "Smartport"), this new IIc could handle four 3.5 disk drives, or three 3.5 disk drives and one 5.25 drive.

     With the UniDisk3.5 upgrade, the internal 16K ROM was increased in size to a 32K ROM that was bank-switched to make space for the extra code necessary to implement the Smartport.  Also added were additional serial port commands to improve compatibility with the older Super Serial Card.  The Mini-Assembler, absent from the AppleII ROMs since the days of the original Integer BASIC AppleII, was added back in, with support for the extra commands provided by the newer 65c02 processor (the disassembler had always supported those new commands).  The STEP and TRACE Monitor commands made a comeback, having also been a casualty of the 1979 Autostart ROM for the AppleII Plus.  Rudimentary firmware was also included to allowing the IIc to be attached to an AppleTalk network (a message that said "AppleTalk Offline" would appear if you typed "PR#7" from BASIC), but it was never completed, and did not appear in future revisions of the IIc ROMs.  Lastly, the new IIc ROMs included a built-in diagnostic program to do limited testing of the computer for internal failures, and had improved handling of interrupts.

     The next AppleIIc upgrade was known as the Memory Expansion AppleIIc.  This came as a response to requests for the ability to add extra memory to the IIc. Applied Engineering had already produced a Z-80 coprocessor for the IIc (to allow access to CP/M software), and an expanded memory card, up to 1MB, which would either act as a RAMdisk for ordinary ProDOS applications, or as extra memory for the AppleWorks desktop (through a special patching program).  Seeing the popularity of this, Apple released this third version of the IIc ROMs and motherboard, this time with a RAM expansion slot included.

     The AppleIIc Memory Expansion Card could take up to 1MB of RAM, in 256K increments.  The firmware in the new ROMs made it work as a RAMdisk automatically recognized by ProDOS and following the Smartport protocol that had been designed for the UniDisk3.5.  Apple even included code in the new ROM to patch DOS 3.3 so it could be used as a RAMdisk with that system (400K maximum size), and did the same with Pascal v1.3.  Also, because this firmware was in the motherboard ROM, ANY company could make memory cards to attach to this version of the IIc.

     Other changes made in this version of the IIc ROM included moving the mouse firmware from slot 4 to slot 7, and putting the RAMdisk firmware into slot 4. Also fixed was a bug that caused a write-protected 3.5 disk to be incorrectly identified with early versions of the UniDisk3.5.

     Since code as complex as ROM firmware rarely makes it out the door without at least one bug, Apple had to make one final improvement to the IIc ROM.  The Revised Memory Expansion AppleIIc (ROM version 4) included changes which made it easier to identify if no RAM chips had been installed on the memory card.  A problem with keyboard buffering was also fixed.  Lastly, this version of the ROM resolved an obscure bug in the slot 2 firmware that was supposed to allow the IIc to function as a simple terminal (with a modem attached to that port).  The previous version of the IIc ROM had been assembled with a couple of wrong addresses in the code, and the terminal mode produced garbage.  Few people used this feature, so it was not noticeable to most users, and the corrected ROM chip was therefore not as quickly available as the original Memory Expansion upgrade.
 

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ADVANCES IN APPLE II DISK STORAGE

     Since Steve Wozniak's DiskII floppy drive changed the AppleII from a hobbyist toy to a serious home and business computer in the late 1970's, the progress of disk storage has been slow for the AppleII series.  In 1978, the year the DiskII was released, Mike Scott (Apple's president) and Randy Wigginton were asked at a user group meeting whether they were going to go to the larger capacity eight-inch floppy drives (which had been around before the 5.25 floppy drives).  They answered that no, the AppleII was not going in that direction, but felt it might get a hard disk by 1979 or 1980, and possibly earlier than that a double sided, double density 5.25 disk with 500K per disk.

     Of course, this never did happen; as we saw in part 7 of this historical overview, the AppleIII project began to overtake the hearts and minds of Apple executives by 1979, and anything newer, bigger, or better was reserved for that machine.  As a result, DOS 3.2 and 3.3 was hard-coded to work specifically with the DiskII and its 143K of available storage, and never enhanced to easily access larger capacity drives.  (Later, when we examine the evolution of AppleII DOS, we will see that it was possible from the beginning for DOS 3.2 and 3.3 to access up to 400K per disk in its catalog structure; however, the low-level disk access routines built-in to DOS were ONLY for the DiskII).

     So what changes DID occur in AppleII disk storage?  Between 1978, when Apple released their original Shugart 5.25 inch floppy drives, and 1984, nothing much changed.  Third party company produced patches that modified DOS 3.2 (and later DOS 3.3) to work with larger drives; from eight-inch floppy drives to hard disks (a whole 10 megabytes for only $5,350 from Corvus!) to other various short-lived innovations, all made to try to end the "floppy shuffle".  (One of the more interesting ones put five floppy disks into a cartridge, and through software made them appear to the computer as one large disk drive).

     Eventually Apple decided that the aging DiskII mechanism needed a face lift, and they introduced in the DuoDisk in May of 1984.  This was essentially two DiskII drives in a single cabinet, with a special controller card.  The drive mechanism was improved to better read half-tracks on disks (which some copy-protected software used), and at $795 was priced to be less expensive than buying two of the older DiskII drives with a controller card.

     The most important advantage of this new design was an elimination of the "fried disk drive" problem that happened constantly with the older design.  The old DiskII controller had two connectors, one for each DiskII drive that could be connected.  The problem was the in the design of the connector; like the game paddle plugs for the original AppleII and IIPlus, the plugs for the DiskII drives were simply a series of pins that had to be properly aligned for the drive to function (similar to the delicate pins on a computer chip).  If you tried to attach the plug in such a way as to accidentally shift the pins over by one, it would burn out the motor on the disk drive, requiring a trip for repairs to the local Apple dealer.  The new DuoDisk design made connection of the disk mechanism to the controller fool-proof.

     With the release of the AppleIIc in April 1984 came an external DiskII drive that was designed to plug into the new disk port in the back of the IIc, and was the same color and design as the IIc case.  The DiskIIc was specific to the AppleIIc and could not be used with any older version AppleII, since it used a new, unique connector.  However, since it was more expensive than a used DiskII drive, many users found out how to make a conversion cable to connect the older drive to the disk port; some even went the other direction and found ways to connect the new drive to the older DiskII controller cards for the IIPlus and IIe.

     The next small evolutionary step in disk storage technology for the AppleII was introduced in June 1985, with the release of the UniDisk5.25.  This drive was designed with the same appearance as the DuoDisk, but was a single 5.25 drive.  It was also designed to allow one drive to be "daisy-chained" to another (one disk could plug into the back of another, forming a "chain"), instead of the older method of connecting each drive separately to the disk controller card.  Its beige color was designed to match the original AppleIIe.

     The last version of the DiskII was called the Apple5.25 drive.  It was identical to the UniDisk5.25 drive, except for its case, which was designed in the platinum color to match the AppleIIGS and the platinum IIe.  The connector it used allowed it to also be connected in a daisy-chain fashion.
 

NOW A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR: BASICS OF DISK STORAGE

     Let's diverge for a moment from discussing specific Apple disk products and turn to a description on how the data are stored on a disk.  There are two important concepts that you need to understand to see why some methods of data storage are "faster" than other methods.  The first concept is the physical data layout on the disk, and the second concept is the "logical" data layout.

     The physical layout of data on a disk is important to the hardware of the disk drive.  If the computer tells the disk drive to retrieve data from the disk, it has to be able to tell the drive exactly WHERE on the disk surface that data are stored.  Most disk drives in use today (and when Steve Wozniak designed the original DiskII) store data on disks that are round, magnetically coated pieces of plastic that spin within a protective sleeve.  The older 5.25 inch and 8 inch disks were "floppy" disks because they used a flexible protective sleeve (unlike the older yet but larger capacity "hard" or fixed disks, which usually could not be removed).  The newer 3.5 inch disks are also made of the same magnetically coated plastic, but their protective sleeve is a hard shell. Within its sleeve the thin plastic disk spins around rapidly while the disk drive motor is on.

     When a disk is formatted, certain addresses are written to the disk surface in a pattern that is known to the program (the disk operating system) used by the computer controlling the disk drive.  Most computers divide the disk surface up into concentric rings (called "tracks"), and each track is divided up into segments called sectors or blocks.  Each segment holds a specific number of bytes of data; for the AppleII, this has been either 256 bytes (sectors on 5.25 disks) or 512 bytes (blocks on newer disk devices).  The number of sectors or blocks per track differs, depending on the device in question; what is important is that the disk operating system knows how to get to the right block when a request is made of it.

     The second concept, that of the "logical" layout of the disk, has to do with the way in which the disk operating system organizes the physical blocks on each track.  Imagine a phonograph record on a turntable (some of you still own those, don't you?)  It physically resembles a floppy disk; it is just larger in size and is not "floppy".  Mentally take a white marking pen and draw lines through the center of the record, across the entire surface from side to side, making the record resemble a pizza that has been cut up into wedges.

     Now draw a series of concentric circles, from the outside of the record down to the center.  Each ring will, of course, be smaller than the previous ring.  The rings you have drawn represent "tracks" on our simulated floppy disk, and the lines running through the center of the record represent the division of each track into blocks.  Suppose we drew enough lines to divide the record up into twelve "pieces" (of pizza).  That means that each "track" has twelve "blocks".

     Now that you have your disk divided up (you just "formatted" it!), let's store some data on it.  Numbering each "block" from one to twelve (like the numbers on a clock), let's put a checker into each block on the first (outermost) "track" (yes, a checker.  You know--from the game?)  Repeat the process on the second track, then the third, and so on, as far as you can go. Eventually you won't be able to fit checkers into the blocks, because they will get too small.  (This points out one of the limits of floppy disks; at some point the available space on the disk becomes so small it is unusable.  A standard 5.25 disk for the AppleII can have anywhere from 35 to 40 tracks (Apple has always supported only 35 tracks), while the 3.5 disk has 80 tracks.  The checkers we have put in the "blocks" on this disk have also been labelled, but with the letters "A" through "L" for the first track, and "M" through "X" for the second track, and so on.

     Turn on the record player.  If you hold your hand over one spot on the first track on the record, you can see the lettered checkers as they move past. As it goes by, grab the "A" checker, then the "B" checker, and so on.  Likely, after picking up checker "A" (on block 1), you had to wait for an entire rotation of the record before "B" comes by on block 2.  The same goes for "C", "D", and so on.  In computer terms, the "interleave" on this disk is 1 to 1 (written as 1:1).

     If you were EXTREMELY fast, you could pick up "A", "B", "C", etc. as quickly as they went by, without having to wait for the next revolution of the record.  While few of us would be that fast, many of us could pick up a checker after about four went by that we didn't need.  "Reload" your data on this disk, this time putting checker "A" on block 1, then checker "B" on block 5, checker "C" on block 9, checker "D" on block 2, check "E" on block 6, and so on.  Now, as the record spins, you might be able to pick up "A", "B", "C", and so on without having to wait for the next revolution of the record.  This would be (approximately) a 4:1 interleave.  With this "logical" layout, you can pickup (load) checkers from the disk, and replace (store) checkers on the disk more efficiently.  If your hands are still not fast enough, you may need to increase the interleave to 6:1 or even 8:1.  If your hands are faster, you could possibly use a 3:1 or 2:1 interleave.

     This is roughly what happens with disk access.  A disk device and operating system that is extremely quick about processing the data it reads off a disk can have a short interleave (1:1 or 2:1).  A slower disk device or operating system may need to use a 4:1 or higher interleave to work most efficiently.

     One last note:  Because a track on a disk contains a continuous stream of data bits, Apple drives were designed from the beginning to use "self-synchronization" to be able to tell one byte from the next.  This continuous series of bits would be similar to having a paragraph of text with no spaces between words.  If a sentence read "GODISNOWHERE", does it mean "GOD IS NOWHERE" or "GOD IS NOW HERE"?  Some method is needed to let the computer doing the reading know where the "spaces" between bytes exists.  I won't go into detail on exactly how this is carried out, but suffice it to say that some bytes on the disk are reserved for this decoding process, and so the true data bytes are specially encoded to not be mistaken for the self-sync bytes.

     The process of decoding these "raw" data bytes is called de-nibblization, and translates about 700 of the raw bytes read directly from the disk into 512 true data bytes.  This is another part of the overhead necessary when reading from or writing to the disk; it would be similar to having to draw something on each checker with a marker as it was removed from the spinning record described above.
 

THE UNIDISK 3.5 AND APPLE 3.5

     The first new disk drive that Apple released after the original DiskII was a 400K, single-sided 3.5 inch drive for the original Macintosh.  Then, in September 1985 Apple finally released a similar drive for the AppleII series, one that was not simply a cosmetic improvement of the original DiskII drive. The UniDisk3.5 drive was a double-sided version of the Mac drive, and could hold 800K of data.  The only connection that this new drive had with the original 5.25 drives was a chip used on its controller card; this IWM chip (for "Integrated Woz Machine") put the function of the original DiskII controller onto a single chip, plus the enhancements needed to operate this higher density drive.

     Apple's design for the UniDisk3.5 was unique, in that it used a modification to Sony's design that varied the speed of disk rotation, depending on which concentric track was being accessed.  This change made it possible for data to be packed compactly enough in the smaller inner tracks to gain an extra 80K beyond the 720K that was originally possible.

     The UniDisk was directly supported by the newer AppleIIc motherboards (as mentioned in the previous part of this History), but for the older AppleII's a special controller card was required.  The UniDisk3.5 was designed as an "intelligent" drive, and had a self-contained 65c02 processor and memory to temporarily store ("buffer") data being read from or written to the disk.  This was necessary because of the slow 1 MHz speed of the 6502 processors in the AppleII; they could not keep up with the faster data transfer rates possible with the 3.5 disk mechanism, plus the overhead of de-nibblization.  This extra processing did cut down the speed in the UniDisk data transfer rate, but compared to the older DiskII drives it seemed MUCH faster.

     With the release of the AppleIIGS in September 1986 came a new version of the 800K 3.5 drive called the Apple3.5.  This mechanism could be used on either a Mac or AppleII, fitting into the trend at Apple at making peripherals compatible between the two computers.  The major difference between this drive and the original UniDisk3.5 was that it had been lobotomized to be a "dumb" drive.  Gone was the internal 65c02 processor chip used in the UniDisk3.5 (which made it an "intelligent" drive) and the ability of the drive to buffer its own read and write operations.  The newer Apple3.5 drive did away with the extra circuitry, leaving it to the computer to handle direct control of the drive.

     This could be done in the IIGS because of its faster 65816 microprocessor, which could keep up with the higher rate of data transfer.  Recall the above discussion of interleave?  The original UniDisk3.5 worked best with an interleave of 4:1, but the Apple3.5 used 2:1 interleave and could do disk reads and writes faster.  Disks formatted with either drive were usable with the other one, but would be slower on the "foreign" drive.

     Overall, Apple released four versions of 3.5 drives between 1984 and 1986. First was the 400K drive used on the original Macintosh, then the 800K UniDisk3.5 (which wouldn't work on the Mac), then an 800K drive for the Mac (which wouldn't work on the Apple II), and finally the Apple3.5 drive, which worked on the Apple IIGS and the Mac, but not the IIe and original IIc.
 

THE APPLE IIC PLUS: HARDWARE

     Recalibrating our special time-travel card to focus on the final 8-bit version of the AppleII, let's travel to mid-1987.  It was at this time that someone at Apple decided that the IIc needed to be upgraded.  Shortly before July, three years after its original 1984 introduction, it was felt that the AppleIIc would benefit from the larger capacity Apple3.5 drive as its internal drive.  The primary intent was to make only this change, while leaving the rest of the IIc as it was.  As with most other Apple projects, this went by various internal code names during its development, includine Pizza, Raisin, and Adam Ant.

     Trying to use the Apple3.5 drive in the AppleIIc was certainly an engineering problem.  As mentioned above, the 1 MHz 65c02 was simply not fast enough to take raw data off the Apple3.5 drive, de-nibblize it into usable data, and pass it to the operating system.  The "intelligent" 3.5 drive was designed in the first place for that very reason.  To solve the problem, Apple contracted with an outside firm to design a special digital gate array that made it possible for the 1 MHz 65c02 to just barely keep up with the data transfer rate from the Apple3.5 drive.  In accomplishing this, it needed an extra 2K of static RAM space to de-nibblize the raw data from the 3.5 drive.  This extra memory had to be available OUTSIDE the standard AppleIIe/IIc 128K RAM space, since there was simply not enough free memory available to spare even that little bit of space.

     The code Apple engineers wrote to use the drive was SO tight that there were EXACTLY enough clock cycles to properly time things while controlling the drive.  (Each assembly language instruction takes a certain number of clock cycles; these cycles have to be taken into account for timing-sensitive operations such as disk and serial port drivers).

     To support older AppleII software that came only on 5.25 disks, the disk port on the back was now changed to handle not only external 3.5 drives (either UniDisk3.5 or Apple3.5), but also up to TWO Apple5.25 drives which could be chained together (the same drives used with the AppleIIGS).  These could be chained together as could the 3.5 drives.  The IIcPlus, then, could have three additional drives attached, in any mixture of Apple3.5, UniDisk3.5, or Apple5.25 drives.

     The IIcPlus design was not thought out completely from start to finish, however.  After they did the work with the special gate array to make the original IIc architecture work properly, someone decided that it was not a good idea to release a 1 MHz computer in 1987.  People want speed, they reasoned; look at the world of the IBM PC and its clones, where each year faster and faster models are released.  They decided then to retrofit the new IIc with a faster 4 MHz version of the 65c02.  That change, had it been done from the start, would have made engineering the internal 3.5 drive simpler; they could have just used the processor at 4 MHz for 3.5 drive access, and then used the true system speed (as selected by the user) for all other functions.  The complicated gate array would not have been necessary.  But, since the faster speed was added as an afterthought, and the project was under a tight schedule, the gate array design was not changed.

     To accomplish the faster processor speed for the IIcPlus, Apple went to another outside firm, Zip Technologies.  This company had already marketed an accelerator, the Zip Chip, that was popular as an add-on product for existing AppleII computers.  Users could simply remove the 6502 or 65c02 chip in their computer, replace it with the special Zip Chip, and suddenly they had a computer that ran up to four times as fast.  Apple licensed this technology from Zip, but engineers balked at actually using the Zip Chip itself for the IIcPlus.  Part of this was because of the size of the Zip Chip.  The chip was shaped like a standard integrated circuit, but was thicker vertically than a basic 65c02. Inside the extra space was a fast 65c02 processor, plus some caching RAM, all squeezed into a space that would fit even into the original AppleIIc (where space was at a premium).  (The Zip Chip "cache" is a piece of RAM memory that is used to hold copies of system memory that the processor is frequently accessing. For instance, if a lot of graphics manipulation is being done by a program, the caching RAM would hold a copy of part of the graphics RAM, and could access it much faster than the standard RAM.  This is part of what makes an after-market accelerator work).

     Zip had wanted Apple to buy their Zip Chip and simply use that product in the IIcPlus.  Obviously, this would have been to Zip's advantage financially. However, the thicker vertical size of the Chip made testing the completed computer more difficult, and it would be a problem to isolate product failures to the Zip Chip, instead of something else on the motherboard.  By using a 4 MHz 65c02 and two 8K static RAM chips as separate components in the IIcPlus, Apple engineers could ensure that it would work and be available in a large enough volume for production.  When they were designing the IIcPlus, Zip Technologies could not guarantee they could provide reliable products in the volume Apple needed.

     The IIcPlus did not have the 12 VDC input on the back panel as did the earlier IIc's; instead, the power supply was built-in.  This was not because it was necessarily a better design, as an internal power supply was actually less reliable ultimately than the external power supply.  (It exposes the internal components to higher levels of heat over the lifetime of the product).  But because many people had criticized Apple about the IIc external power supply (called a "brick on a leash" at Apple), that they had decided to make it internal on the IIcPlus as it was on all their other products.  This change apparently did not cause any significant problems, as few people were actually trying to use the IIc as a "portable" computer (with a battery pack).

     The memory expansion slot on the IIcPlus was not compatible with the memory cards that Apple had produced for the older IIc.  This was primarily a timing problem; it was not because the RAM chips in the memory card were not fast enough to keep up with the 4 MHz speed of the IIcPlus.  (Older IIc users can use an Apple Memory Expansion card with an 8 MHz Zip Chip with no problems).  The IIcPlus also had an additional connector at the opposite end of a memory card plugged into the expansion slot.  Signals from port 2 were made available at that end, so third party companies could make a card that was a combination RAM card and internal modem.  However, this never did come about (see below).

     Other changes in the IIcPlus included a slightly redesigned keyboard and mini-DIN-8 connectors on the back panel for its serial ports (to be more compatible with Apple's new Macintosh and IIGS keyboards).

     One interesting note:  John Arkley, one of the engineers working on the project and a long-time Apple employee, campaigned long and hard to take things a step further.  He wanted them to take an AppleIIGS motherboard, remove the slots, change the ROM to support only the internal "slots", and release a IIGS in a IIc case.  He felt it would have made a great portable, non-expandable IIGS, but could not get anyone who could approve the plan to get interested in the idea.
 

THE APPLE IIC PLUS: FIRMWARE

     The IIcPlus ROM was called revision 5 (the previous Revised Memory Expansion IIc was labelled as revision 4).  The main changes present were the ones that supported the internal Apple3.5 drive.  Firmware on the new IIc was not any larger than the 32K on the previous models, but it did use the entire space (the previous IIc didn't use the last 8K available in the ROM).

     One minor bug that slipped by in the IIcPlus firmware was an inability to deal with 400K (single-sided) 3.5 disks.  There were few commercial software packages that came on such disks, however.
 

THE APPLE IIC PLUS: INTRODUCTION

     In September 1988 the AppleIIc Plus was introduced to considerably less fanfare than the original IIc was in April 1984.  There were no promises of "AppleII Forever" this time; instead, it warranted little more than a press release in various AppleII magazines of the time.  Its selling price was $675 (or $1,099 with a color monitor).  This was remarkable, considering that the original AppleIIc WITHOUT a monitor sold for nearly double the price ($1,295) and had far less capacity and power than this new version.  Some models of the IIcPlus were even shipped with 256K of extra memory already added.  It was faster than any other AppleII ever produced (including the 2.8 MHz IIGS), and was probably the finest 8-bit computer Apple ever produced.
 

THE APPLE IIC PLUS: LESS THAN A SUCCESS

     Early on, the AppleIIc Plus was a big seller, and by January 1989 it was above forecasted sales levels.  However, the biggest hurdle that the IIcPlus had to overcome was not the external marketplace, but rather the internal market opinions at Apple Computer, Inc.  Since Macintosh-mania was still in full swing at Apple, and that younger brother of the AppleII was getting most of the attention from management, the IIcPlus (as well as the IIGS) suffered.  It was not because of a lack of capability, but primarily from failure to thrive due to inadequate home nutrition, so to speak.  Also, the IIcPlus had the same problem as the original AppleIIc; customers seemed to want the IIe with its slots, or the greater power of the IIGS.

     There were some products that were designed by third-party developers for both the IIc and IIc Plus that never made it to the market for various reasons. Applied Ingenuity (later known as Ingenuity, Inc) had two products that would have markedly increased the portability of the IIc/IIcPlus.  One was an internal hard disk they called "CDrive", which would have replaced the AppleIIc or IIcPlus internal floppy disk drive (converting it into an external floppy drive).  Even more unique was "CKeeper", which was a multi-function card with many features.  It could hold up to 1.25 MB of extra RAM; it had a clock/calendar chip that was ProDOS compatible; it had firmware routines to support dumping text or graphics screens to the printer; it could function as a built-in assembly language program debugger; and best of all, a feature called RAMSaver, which maintained power to the RAM chips during a power failure or if the power switch was turned off.  Both of these products never saw the light of day, primarily because the company went out of business before they could be finished.

     Chinook Technologies actually finished design on an internal modem for the IIcPlus, but never released it.  This card, 1.5 by 6 inches in size, would have mounted inside the disk drive shield.  It connected to a small box attached to the outside of the IIc case, where there were cut-outs provided by Apple for connection of an "anti-theft" cable.  This external box had phone jacks for the phone line and a telephone, just like most external modems.  Undoubtably it never was released because of Apple's indifference towards the IIcPlus.

     With inadequate support by Apple marketing, third-party hardware and software developers had little motivation in designing any new products for the IIcPlus.  Therefore, no unique products ever emerged on the market to take advantage of its features.  Finally, in September of 1990 the IIcPlus was discontinued by Apple, leaving the platinum AppleIIe and the AppleIIGS as the remaining bearers of Wozniak's legacy.
 

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THE APPLE II EVOLVES

     While the capabilities of the AppleII slowly advanced as it changed from the II up through the IIc, the one thing that remained essentially unchanged was the 6502 microprocessor that controlled it.  Even though the 65c02 had more commands than the 6502, as an 8-bit processor it was inherently limited to directly addressing no more than 64K of memory at one time.  (As an 8-bit processor, the 6502 could handle only 8 bits, or one byte at a time.  However, its address bus was 16 bits wide, which made for a maximum address of 1111 1111 1111 1111 in binary, $FFFF in hexadecimal, or 65535 in decimal.  If you divide 65536 bytes by 1024 bytes per "K", you get 64K as the largest memory size). When Wozniak designed it, 64K was considered to be a massive amount of memory, even for some mainframe computers.  (For example, the old mainframe on which I learned programming during college back in 1975 was a ten-year-old IBM 1130 with 8K of memory; this was used for both the operating system AND user programs!) Most hackers of the time would not have known what to DO with four megabytes of memory, even if it had been possible (or affordable) to install that much. Consequently, programs of the day were compact, efficient, and primarily text-based.

     The non-AppleII computer world had developed and advanced, and Apple grudgingly allowed the AppleII to make its small, incremental advances. Occasionally, efforts were made within Apple to make a more powerful AppleII, but the lure of "better" computers always turned the attention of management away from allowing such a project to actually make any progress.  First the AppleIII, then Lisa, and finally Macintosh swallowed the research and development dollars that Apple's cash cow, the AppleII, continued to produce. The latter two computers were based around the 16-bit Motorola 68000 microprocessor, which had the capability to address far more than 64K of memory. The AppleII could make use of more memory only through complicated switching schemes (switching between separate 64K banks).  Although "Mac-envy" hit many AppleII enthusiasts both inside and outside of Apple, causing them to move away from the II, there were still many others who continued to press for more power from the II.

     Eventually, a company called Western Design Center revealed plans to produce a new microprocessor called the 65816.  This chip would have all of the assembly language opcodes (commands) of the 65c02 through an "emulation" mode. However, it would be a true 16-bit processor, with the ability handle 16 bits (two bytes) at a time and to address larger amounts of continuous memory.  The address bus was enlarged from 16 to 24 bits, making the 65816 capable of addressing 256 times more memory, or 16 megabytes.  The power to make a better AppleII was finally available.
 

THE RETURN OF WOZNIAK

     Back in early 1981, Steve Wozniak was involved with several projects at Apple.  He had helped write some fast math routines for a spreadsheet product that Apple had planned to release in competition with Visicalc.  Also, Steve Jobs had managed to convince Wozniak to participate with his fledgling Macintosh project.  Then, in early February, Wozniak's private plane crashed.  He was injured with a concussion that temporarily made it impossible to form new memories.  He could not recall that he had an accident; he did not remember playing games with his computer in the hospital; he did not remember who visited him earlier in the day.

     When he finally did recover from the concussion, he decided it was time to take a leave of absence from Apple.  Wozniak married, and returned to college at Berkley under the name "Rocky Clark" (a combination of his dog's name and his wife's maiden name).  He decided he wanted to finally graduate, and get his degree in electrical engineering and computer science.  When he was done with that, he formed a corporation called "UNUSON" (which stood for "Unite Us In Song") to produce educational computer materials, wanting to make computers easier for students to use.  He also decided use UNUSON to sponsor a couple of rock music events, and called them the "US Festival".

     Held on Labor Day weekend in 1982 and 1983, these music and technology extravaganzas were invigorating for Wozniak, but he lost a bundle of money on both occasions.  Though nowhere near drying up the value of his Apple Computer stock, he decided that he was ready to return to work.  In June of 1983, Wozniak entered the building on the Apple campus where the AppleII division was housed and asked for something to do.
 

THE APPLE IIX

     When Wozniak returned, he discovered the latest of the AppleII modernization projects, which was code-named "IIx".  When he saw what the 65816 could do, he became excited about the potential of the new AppleII and immediately got involved.  It was a tremendous boost in morale for the division to have their founder return to work.  However, the IIx project was plagued by several problems.  Western Design Center was late in delivering samples of the 65816 processor.  First promised for November 1983, they finally arrived in February 1984--and didn't work.  The second set that came three weeks later also failed.

     Other problems came out of the engineering mindset that still existed at Apple at the time.  Recall that people there liked designing boxes that would do neat things, but there was not enough of a unified focus from above to pull things together.  The marketing department wanted the IIx to have a co-processor slot to allow it to run different microprocessors.  The code name of the project by this time was "Brooklyn" and "Golden Gate" (referring to the ability to make it a bridge between the AppleII and Macintosh).  The co-processor slot could allow the IIx to easily do what third party companies had done for the original AppleII with their Z-80 boards (which allowed them to run CP/M software). Co-processor boards considered were ones for the Motorola 68000 (the chip used in the Macintosh), and the Intel 8088 (used in the IBM PC).  The IIx project got so bogged down in trying to become other computers, they forgot it was supposed to be an advanced AppleII.  Politically it also had problems at Apple, because it was being aimed as a high-end business machine, which was where they wanted the Macintosh to go.  Wozniak lost interest as things ran slower and slower, and eventually the project was dropped.
 

THE 16-BIT APPLE II RETURNS

     When the IIx project was cancelled in March 1983, some of the AppleII engineers were assigned the task of reducing the cost of the AppleII.  Engineers Dan Hillman and Jay Rickard managed to put almost the entire AppleII circuitry onto a single chip they called the MegaII.  Meanwhile, after the "AppleII Forever" event that introduced the IIc, interest in the AppleII revived and sales were quite good.  Management saw that sales of the open IIe were better than the sales of the closed IIc, so they were agreeable to the idea of another try at the 16-bit AppleII, possibly utilizing the MegaII chip.  By late summer 1984 it was revived with the code name "Phoenix" (rising from the ashes of the IIx project).
 

THE APPLE IIGS: GOALS OF THE DEVELOPMENT TEAM

     The people involved in the Phoenix project were very knowledgeable about the AppleII, from the days of the ][ through the //c.  They knew what THEY wanted in a new computer.   It should primarily be an AppleII, not just something NEW that tried to be all things to all people.

     Dan Hillman, who had also been involved as the engineering manager for the IIx project, stated in an interview, "Our mission was very simple.  First we wanted to preserve the AppleII as it exists today.  It had to work with AppleIIe software and AppleIIc software.  That was goal number 1.  But we recognized that the AppleII was an old computer.  It had limitations.  The new machine needed to address those limitations, break through those barriers--and the barriers were very obvious:  We needed to increase the memory size.  We had to make it run faster.  We needed better graphics.  And we had to have better sound.  That was our mission."  Since advanced graphics and sound were what would make this new Apple really shine, the name eventually assigned to the final product was "AppleIIGS".

     Having learned from their experience in building the AppleIIe and IIc, they knew what would make the new 16-bit AppleII more powerful.  The AppleIIc was easy to use because the most commonly needed peripherals were already built-in. The AppleIIe, however, excelled in its ability to be easily expanded (via the slots) to do things that were NOT commonly needed or built-in.  Harvey Lehtman, system software manager for the project, stated, "We... wanted the AppleIIGS to be easy to set up, like the IIc, and easy to expand, like the IIe."
 

THE APPLE IIGS: ARCHITECTURE

     Wozniak was quite involved in designing the general layout of the IIGS. Insisting on keeping it simple, he recommended AGAINST a built-in co-processor (as they tried to do with the IIx).  He also wanted to keep the 8-bit part of the machine separate from the 16-bit part.  To accomplish this, he and the other engineers decided to design it so the memory in the lower 128K of the machine was "slow RAM", which made it possible for it to function just as it did on the older AppleII's.  This included the memory allocation for the odd addressing schemes used in the text and graphics modes and (which made sense in 1976, but not in 1986).  The rest of the available memory space would be fast, and could be expanded to as much as 16 megabytes.  With a faster microprocessor, it would also be possible to run programs more quickly than on the older AppleII's.
 

THE APPLE IIGS: GRAPHICS

     One area they decided to focus on was bringing the quality of graphics on the new AppleII up to modern standards.  Rob Moore, the Phoenix project hardware group manager, helped define the new graphics modes of the IIGS.  Because a change that increased the vertical resolution from 200 dots to 400 dots would make the computer too expensive (it would require a special slow-phosphor monitor), they purposely decided not to go in that direction.  Instead, they increased the horizontal resolution, and created two new graphics modes (called "super hi-res"); one was 320 x 200 and the other was 640 x 200.  This decision also made it easier to keep compatibility with older graphics modes.

     As mentioned above, the text and graphics addressing on the old AppleII was odd, from a programming standpoint.  When Wozniak originally designed the II, he made the memory allocation for text and graphics to be "non-linear", since this saved several hardware chips and made it less expensive to build.  This meant that calculating the memory address of a specific dot on the hi-res graphics screen or a character on the text screen was not as simple as most programmers wanted.  The hi-res screen began at $2000 in memory, and the first line on the hi-res screen (line 0) started at that address.  Each line on the hi-res screen was made up of 40 bytes of 8 bits each, and seven bits of each byte represented a dot or pixel on the screen, giving a possible 280 dots horizontally.  Since 40 bytes is $28 in hex, line 0 then ran from $2000 to $2027 in memory.  However, the second line (line 1) of the hi-res screen did NOT start at $2028 as one would expect, but at $2080.  The hi-res screen line represented by memory locations $2028 to $204F was line 8, and $2050 to $2077 was line 16.  The last eight bytes of this 128 byte section of memory was unused.  The next 128 bytes were allocated to screen lines 1, 9, and 17, and so on.

     Because this complicated things considerably for programmers, the design team for the IIGS wanted linear addressing, which would allow the memory addresses of line 0 to be followed by the addresses for line 1, and so on. Because the graphics resolution and range of available colors planned was much greater than either of the older graphics modes (hi-res or double hi-res), they needed 32K of continuous memory to use.  Because they planned on a minimum memory configuration of 256K for the IIGS as it would be shipped, they could not come up with that much memory in one single block.  Engineer Larry Thompson designed a special Video Graphics Controller (VGC) to solve the problem.  The chip combined two separate 16K blocks of memory and make it appear as a single continuous 32K block of memory, as far as the graphics programmer was concerned.

     The new super hi-res graphics modes also gave far more color choices than either the old hi-res mode (which had six unique colors) or even the double hi-res mode (which had sixteen colors).  In the 320 x 200 super hi-res mode, each line could have sixteen colors out of a possible 4,096, and in the 640 x 200 mode, each line could have four colors out of 4,096.  This gave graphics power that was not even available on a Macintosh (which was still black and white at the time).
 

THE APPLE IIGS: SOUND

     The second major area of focus for enhancements over the old AppleII was sound reproduction.  The original sound chip that had been proposed for the IIGS would have given it the sound quality of a typical arcade game.  However, this was no better than what other computers in 1986 could do.  Rob Moore suggested using a sound chip made by Ensoniq, one that was used in the Mirage music synthesizer.  He had to push hard to get this included in the final design, but was able to convince management of its importance because he told them it would be "enabling technology" (borrowing a phrase from a Macintosh marketing book). He told them "it would enable people to do things they'd never dreamed of doing."

     The Ensoniq chip was capable of synthesizing FIFTEEN simultaneous musical voices.  To help it in doing such complex sound reproduction, they gave the chip a separate 64K block of RAM memory dedicated specifically for that purpose.
 

THE APPLE IIGS: MEMORY

     The 65816 is designed to address up to 16 MB of memory.  The IIGS, however, was designed to support only 8 MB of RAM, and up to 1 MB of ROM (in high memory).  With cards specially designed by third-party companies, up to 12 MB of RAM could be added, but the memory manager in ROM was only aware of the first 8 MB.  A special patch was needed to allow the system to use memory beyond that point.

     Building on the traditional memory organization from 6502 days, memory in the IIGS was usually referred to in banks, from $00 through $FF.  Each bank refers to a 64K chunk of memory.  The lowest bank, $00, was identical to the 64K memory space in the original AppleII.  The next bank, $01, was the same as the auxiliary memory bank used on the AppleIIe and IIc.  (Additionally, the super hi-res graphics display was found in 32K of the memory in bank $00, from $2000 to $9FFF).  The banks from $02-$7F were also for RAM storage, and covered things up to the 8 MB limit.  Banks $80-$DF could be used for another 4.25 MB of RAM, but as mentioned above they were unusable (without a patch) because the memory manager didn't know how to access it.

     The memory expansion slot designed for the IIGS only had two lines to decode addresses.  This allowed for direct access to each of four 256K RAM chips, or four 1 MB RAM chips.  In order to make use of the next 4 MB of RAM some special logic was needed to find and use it.  RAM cards with more than 4 MB were never directly supported by Apple.

     Banks $E0 and $E1 were a special part of RAM that was used to duplicate ("shadow") banks $00 and $01.  This RAM was designed as "slow" RAM, and would better be able to run some of the older 8-bit AppleII software.  When shadowing was active, anything a program did to addresses in banks $00 and $01 was duplicated in banks $E0 and $E1.  Although it appeared to a program that it was running in the lower two banks, it was really running in the slow RAM in banks $E0 and $E1.

     Banks $E2-$EF were undefined.  The last one MB from $F0-$FF was allocated to ROM.  The lower 512K (banks $F0-$F7) were set aside for a ROMdisk.  (A ROMdisk is just like a RAMdisk, except it will not lose its contents when power is turned off).  For a ROMdisk to be installed, a device driver for the disk had to be located at the beginning of bank $F0 (at address $F0/0000), and the driver had to start with the phrase "ROMDISK".  The most common way this was used by third-party hardware providers was to take some of the GS memory, protect it with a battery (so its contents didn't disappear when the computer was turned off), and designate it properly to the IIGS as a ROMdisk (even though it was simply protected RAM, and not true ROM).

     The rest of the space from $F8-$FF was reserved for system ROM.  The original IIGS had ROM code only from $FE-$FF, while later versions expanded this space to include $FC and $FD.
 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
 

THE APPLE IIGS: MISCELLANEOUS HARDWARE

     Other features Apple engineers added to make the AppleIIGS a next generation computer included a built-in clock, slot space for internal expansion cards, and the electronic equivalents of seven more expansion cards.

     Taking the cue from their experience with the AppleIIc, they included as built-in features the peripherals that most users would want to use.  They allocated serial ports to slots 1 and 2, the classic 80-column firmware to slot 3, the mouse controller to slot 4, a Smartport controller to slot 5, a 5.25 inch disk controller to slot 6, and AppleTalk capability to slot 7.  (AppleTalk was Apple's network protocol that had been designed originally for use with the Macintosh).

     Because the engineers wanted to make the IIGS capable of connecting to the AppleTalk network, the serial ports they planned were based on a different communications controller chip than was used in the older Super Serial Card and the AppleIIc serial controller.  Although the new controller chips were more capable than the older ones used on the 8-bit AppleII's, telecommunications programs written for those older Apple's wouldn't work.  This was because most terminal programs, for the sake of speed, were written to directly control the old Super Serial Card (rather than going through the slower, built-in firmware commands).  The controlling commands necessary to manage the newer chip were very different, and so caused such software to "break".

     The case and motherboard used in the AppleIIGS was made smaller than that found in the IIe, both in order to make a smaller "footprint" on a desktop, and also to make it easier to make an upgrade available for IIe owners.  They had wanted to make it possible even for AppleII and IIPlus owners to upgrade, but in the end it turned out to be just too expensive and difficult to execute.

     The Macintosh engineering group was at this time designing a protocol for interfacing standard input devices, such as keyboards, mice, and graphics tablets.  This protocol, called the "Apple Desktop Bus", was first implemented on the AppleIIGS.  It made possible the interchangability of hardware devices between the Macintosh and AppleII lines, allowing Apple to sell a common set of peripherals that both computers could use.
 

THE APPLE IIGS: FIRMWARE

     Firmware, you may recall, is that layer of controlling programs in ROM on a computer that sits between an application program and the hardware it is trying to control.  On the IIGS, the firmware was designed after the hardware was finalized.  Unlike the older ROM that Wozniak included with the original AppleII, the IIGS software engineers tried to make it more than just a set of addresses to call to carry out a function (such as clearing the screen). Rather, they wanted to make a more comprehensive system (called a "toolbox") which could be more flexible for future enhancements of the hardware and firmware.

     In particular, they didn't want to have the addresses for carrying out certain functions to be fixed in a single location as on the older Apples.  This toolbox would have a single address to call, and a specific command would be passed on through that address.  Set up like this, it would allow Apple's firmware programmers to modify the ROM in the future without having to take trouble to make multiple addresses in the ROM "line up" properly.  Additionally, they made it easy to "patch" the toolbox code in the ROM using code loaded from disk, allowing programmers to fix errors that were later found without having to replace the physical ROM chips.

     At first, they were given 64K of space for the ROM, over four times as much as was available on the original AppleII.  Later, they had to go back and ask for 128K of ROM, because of the many things that they needed and wanted to do. Of course, Applesoft had to be present in ROM in order to maintain compatibility with the older AppleII software.  Additionally, they also put all of the mouse-handling tools into the ROM (unlike the II, IIPlus, and IIe, which had to have the mouse firmware on a card in a peripheral slot).

     A boost to the firmware design of the IIGS came, unexpectedly, as a result of the merger between the AppleII and Macintosh divisions.  This merger came as part of the reorganization that coincided with the departure of Steve Jobs from Apple.  Since the Macintosh team was now working in the same place as the IIGS designers, they were available to offer help and ideas.  Bill Atkinson, the programming wizard who wrote MacPaint and many of the mouse tools for the Macintosh, helped in the creation of the mouse tools and QuickDrawII for the IIGS.  (This was the name given to the ROM tools used to draw on the super hi-res screen, and was borrowed from the older QuickDraw routines on the original Macintosh).

     To allow the user to easily configure certain features of the IIGS to their own tastes, a "control panel" was designed (another idea borrowed from the Macintosh).  It was used to set the clock, the system speed (between a "normal" 1 MHz and a "fast" 2.8 MHz), change the standard text display from 40 to 80 columns, set colors for the text screen, set sensitivity of the mouse and keyboard, and make the standard settings for the printer and modem ports.  These preferences were saved in a special battery-powered RAM that would survive even when the system power was turned off.
 

THE APPLE IIGS: SYSTEM SOFTWARE

     ProDOS needed to be updated to better take advantage of the additional memory on the IIGS, as well as the larger storage devices that were not very available when ProDOS was originally written.  Back then, five megabytes was felt to be quite a large disk size.  By the time the IIGS was designed, 40 megabytes was becoming a common standard.  The new IIGS-specific version, called "ProDOS16", would also be able to handle any number of open files at the same time (the older version of ProDOS was limited to eight files open simultaneously).

     The first version of ProDOS16 was more limited than Apple's designers wanted it to be, but they didn't want to hold up the new IIGS until a better version was ready.  The version of ProDOS that would run 8-bit AppleII software (on the IIGS or older Apple II's) was renamed "ProDOS8".  That version was modified to handle system interrupts better, which was important on the IIGS because of the control panel feature and the way in which the Apple Desktop Bus worked.  (An interrupt refers to a special signal that is sent to the microprocessor by a hardware device.  This signal "interrupts" what the processor is doing, redirects it to do something else, and then returns the processor to what it was previously doing.  The mouse on the IIc and the mouse card for the other AppleII's use interrupts to handle movements of the mouse).

     (Further details about ProDOS16 and its later replacement system, GS/OS, will be found in an upcoming part of the AppleII History).
 

IIGS PROJECT CODE NAMES AND TEAM MEMBERS

     The earliest name used internally at Apple for the IIGS project was Phoenix (as mentioned earlier).  It was also known as "Rambo" (when the design team was fighting for final approval from the executive staff), "Gumby" (from an impersonation done at Apple's Halloween-day parade), and "Cortland".

     Some of the members of the design team not yet mentioned here include Nancy Stark (an early and energetic champion for the IIGS project); Curtis Sasaki (IIGS product manager); Ed Colby (CPU product manager); Jim Jatczynski (Operating System group manager); Fern Bachman (who worked to ensure compatibility with existing AppleII software); Gus Andrate (who developed the sound tools and the unified drive firmware); and Peter Baum, Rich Williams, Eagle I. Berns, John Worthington, and Steven Glass, who each developed part of the IIGS system software and firmware.
 

THE APPLE IIGS: PRODUCT INTRODUCTION

     In September of 1986, Apple introduced the new AppleIIGS, bundled with an Apple 3.5 drive, for $999 (not including a monitor).  Apple management, somewhat surprised by the response that occurred in their "AppleII Forever" event two years earlier, made the decision to heavily promote this new AppleII.  Why they came to this change of heart was unclear.  Although they showed no slowing in their plans for the Macintosh (which was making steady progress in gaining acceptability in the business world), a multi-million dollar marketing and media blitz was arranged to promote the new IIGS as the ultimate home and recreational use computer.

     Even employees at Apple who had worked on the IIGS project were startled (but pleased) at the marketing intensity that was begun, and the order for this came directly from the top.  John Sculley himself had insisted that the AppleIIGS be given highest priority.  (Apple's CEO since 1983, he had just a year earlier ousted founder Steve Jobs from day to day responsibilities at Apple).  Rumors flew, but were never confirmed, about a shaken Sculley who had come to an executive staff meeting in July of 1986 with stories of strange things he had experienced.  He had supposedly received a frightening nighttime visit from a yellow-garbed alien who called himself "Darth Vader" from the planet Vulcan.  "He told me that he would meld my brain if I didn't put all I could into marketing the AppleIIGS!  I have to do it!!", he was reported to have said, white-fisted and pale, at that meeting.  Despite the obvious references to science-fiction movies and television of the 1960's and late 1970's, the executive staff bowed to his requests (which were no less firm after Sculley had taken a Valium and had a couple of Diet Pepsi's.  After all, he WAS the boss).

     Of course, the IIGS was received by the AppleII community with enthusiasm. After initial sales broke all previous records, including those for the Macintosh, Apple re-doubled its efforts to promote this as the computer for nearly everyone.  After all, it had ties into the past (compatible with Steve Wozniak's 4K Integer BASIC AppleII at its core), and ties into the future (with the 16-bit technology and expanded memory).  Within a year it was outselling the Macintosh (which had also received a boost in sales, thought to be benefiting from the wave of IIGS sales).

     By 1988, a significantly enhanced AppleIIGS was released, with more advanced system software (which worked more like the easy-to-use Macintosh interface) and higher density graphics (the cost of better color monitors had come down considerably since the initial design of the IIGS back in 1985). Apple even decided to take the unprecedented move of licensing the AppleII technology to a couple of other companies, who worked on producing IIGS emulators for other computers, including IBM and its clones!  Software and hardware sales hit a spiraling upward curve, which stimulated more sales of computers from Apple, which increased software and hardware sales further. Apple even produced a IIGS emulator of its own for the Macintosh and MacintoshII series of computers. Eventually...

(Hold it.  Something just doesn't seem right.  I don't recall things going NEARLY that well for the IIGS.  Computer!

APPLE IIC:    [ Tweedlesquirge ] State request, please.

AUTHOR:       Compare time events just outlined in previous section with known events in database notes.

APPLE IIC:    Working... [ Blinkitydinkitydinkityzeerp ]  Events just described are from a parallel timeline, which diverged from our own timeline in July 1986.

AUTHOR:       Hmmm.  Any way of moving into that timeline?

APPLE IIC:    Negative.  Insufficient energy available in my power supply brick to actually make changes necessary to alter the events in our timeline to allow the above scenario to actually occur.

AUTHOR:       Then HOW did we come across that information in the first place?

APPLE IIC:    Flux capacitor was affected by a momentary surge in power lines due to a nearby thunderstorm.

AUTHOR:       Interesting.  Well, maybe someday I'll have to beef up this power supply a bit and have a talk with Mr. Sculley if I can find my yellow radiation suit...  So how do we get back to the correct information?

APPLE IIC:    You could effect a complete shutdown and memory purge, then reload correct data from protected archives.

AUTHOR:       Very well.  Make it so.

APPLE IIC:    Working... [ Blinkitydinkitydinkityzeerpity... ]

PROOFREADER:  Your Apple TALKS???

AUTHOR:       What?  Yes, well I had a CPU conversion done in the early 24th century...

APPLE IIC:    Data reload completed.  You may proceed when ready.

AUTHOR:       Now, let's see if we can get it right this time...)
 

THE APPLE IIGS: PRODUCT INTRODUCTION (Take 2)

     In September of 1986, Apple introduced the new AppleIIGS, bundled with an Apple 3.5 drive, for $999 (not including a monitor).  The AppleII community was excited about the new computer, and inCider magazine featured a exuberant Steve Wozniak on the cover of its October 1986 issue with the caption, "It's Amazing!"

     Apple, for its part, did do some advertising for the new computer in the pages of current AppleII publications of the time.  However, there was no major push for the new computer, and again it seemed destined to be dwarfed by Apple's preoccupation with the Macintosh.

     Though announced in September, the IIGS was not widely available until November.  Early production models of the IIGS had some problems; one of the new chips did not work properly, and necessary changes to fix them caused a delay. The upgrade that would turn an AppleIIe into a IIGS was also delayed until early 1987.
 

THE APPLE IIGS: ENHANCEMENTS

     In September 1987 Apple made an incremental improvement to the IIGS with the release of a new ROM.  The ROM 01 revision made a few changes in the original IIGS ROMs and included an improved video controller chip.  Bugs in the ROM code were fixed, and a problem with a "pink fringe" effect with certain graphics displays was fixed.  The new ROMs were not compatible with any IIGS System Disks earlier than version 2.0.  The new ROM was identified by a message at the bottom of the screen when booting the IIGS that said "ROM Version 01". The original IIGS had no message in this location.

     The next change came with the release of the ROM 03 version of the IIGS in August of 1989.  This new IIGS computer came standard with 1 meg of RAM on the motherboard, and twice as much ROM (256K versus 128K on the older IIGS).  This allowed more of the operating system to be in ROM, rather than having to be loaded from disk when booting.  Additionally, fixes were made to known bugs in the ROM 01 firmware.  (The latest version of the IIGS system software made patches to ROM 01 to fix those bugs, but these patches still had to be loaded from disk, which slowed startup time.  Having the latest new tools and fixed new ones already in ROM made booting the version 03 IIGS a bit quicker).

     The new AppleIIGS also had the capability of using both the internal slot firmware as well as using a peripheral card plugged into a slot.  The ROM 01 IIGS could, of course, use cards plugged into the slots, but only at the expense of being unable to use the internal firmware for that slot.  With so much useful system firmware built-in, a ROM 01 user who wanted, for example, to add a controller card for a hard disk would have to give up either AppleTalk in slot 7 or use of 5.25 disks in slot 6.  Almost everything else had to be set in the control panel to the internal firmware.

     The ROM 03 IIGS also included enhancements for disabled users.  A feature called "sticky keys" made it possible to do multiple keypresses.  (To execute an "Option-Control-X" sequence, for example, required pressing three keys at once. This was something that a paralyzed user with a mouth-stick to press keys could not previously do).  Also, more things that had required a mouse now had keyboard equivalents (using the keypad).  The new IIGS also had somewhat "cleaner" sound and graphics.  However, because the improvements made were minimal compared to the cost of providing upgrades to previous owners, no upgrade program was announced by Apple.  In any case, many of the new features could be obtained on older IIGS's by upgrading the memory to at least one megabyte and using GS/OS System Software 5.0.2 or greater.

     A feature that was added to the ROM 03 firmware that was entirely fun, instead of functional, was accessed by a specific key-sequence.  If the computer was booted with no disk in the drive, a message that said "Check startup device" appeared, with an apple symbol sliding back and forth.  At that point, if the user pressed the keys "Ctrl", "Open Apple", "Option", and "N" simultaneously, the digitized voices of the AppleIIGS design team could be heard shouting "AppleII!"  Also, the names of those people would be displayed on the screen. If running GS/OS System 5.0 or greater, the user would have to hold down the "Option" and "Shift" keys, then pull down the "About" menu in the Finder.  It would then say "About the System".  Using the mouse to click on that title would cause the names to be displayed and the audio message to be heard.
 
 

Formatting by Ground Apple II FAQs site, 1999