Apple II History
Compiled and written by Steven Weyhrich
© Copyright 1991, Zonker Software
(PART 1 -- PRE-APPLE HISTORY)
[v1.1 :: 12 Dec 91]
INTRODUCTION
This project began as a description of how the Apple II evolved into
a IIGS, and some of the standards that emerged along the way. It has grown
into a history of Apple Computer, with an emphasis on the place of the
Apple II in that history. It has been gleaned from a variety of magazine
articles and books that I have collected over the years, supplemented by
information supplied by individuals who were "there" when it happened. I
have tried not to spend much time on information that has been often
repeated, but rather on the less known stories that led to the Apple II as
we know it (and love it) today. Along the way I hope to present some
interesting technical trivia, some thoughts about what the Apple II could
have been, and what the Apple II still can be. The Apple II has been
described as the computer that refuses to die. This story tells a little
bit of why that is true.
If you are a new Apple II owner in 1991 and use any 8-bit Apple II
software at all, you may feel bewildered by the seemingly nonsensical way
in which certain things are laid out. AppleWorks asks which "slot" your
printer is in. If you want to use the 80 column screen in Applesoft BASIC
you must type an odd command, "PR#3". If you want to write PROGRAMS for
Applesoft, you may have some of those ridiculous PEEKs and POKEs to contend
with. The disk layout (which type is supposed to go into which slot) seems
to be in some random order! And then there is the alphabet soup of disk
systems: DOS 3.3, CP/M, Pascal, ProDOS, and GS/OS (if you have a IIGS). If
you use 16-bit software EXCLUSIVELY, you will probably see none of this;
however, even the most diehard GS user of the "latest and greatest" 16-bit
programs will eventually need to use an 8-bit program. If you can tolerate
a history lesson and would like to know "the rest of the story," I will try
to make sense of it all.
I think one of the Apple II's greatest strengths is the attention
they have paid over the years to be backward compatible. That means that a
IIGS "power system" manufactured in 1991, with 8 meg of memory, a hand-held
optical scanner, CD-ROM drive, and 150 meg of hard disk storage can still
run an Integer BASIC program written in 1977, probably without ANY
modification! In the world of microcomputers, where technology continues
to advance monthly, and old programs may or may not run on the new models,
that consistency is amazing to me. Consider the quantum leap in complexity
and function between the original 4K Apple ][ and the ROM 03 IIGS; the
amount of firmware (built-in programs) in the IIGS is larger than the
entire RAM SPACE in a fully expanded original Apple ][!
This strength of the Apple II could also be considered a weakness,
because it presents a major difficulty in making design improvements that
keep up with the advances in computer technology between 1976 and the
present, and yet maintain that compatibility with the past. Other early
computer makers found it easy to design improvements that created a better
machine, but they did so at the expense of their existing user base
(Commodore comes to mind, with the PET, Vic 20, Commodore 64, and lastly
the Amiga, all completely incompatible). However, this attention to detail
is just one of the things that has made the Apple II the long-lived
computer that it is.
In examining the development of the Apple II, we will take a look at
some pre-Apple microcomputer history, the Apple I, and the formation of
Apple Computers, Inc., with some sideroads into ways in which early users
overcame the limits of their systems. We will follow through with the
development of the Apple IIe, IIc, and IIGS, and lastly make some comments
on the current state of affairs at Apple Inc. regarding the Apple II.
PRE-APPLE HISTORY
Let's begin our adventure in history. I've designed a special
interface card that plugs into slot 7 on an Apple II. It contains an item
its inventor called a "Flux Capacitor" (something about the being able to
modify flux and flow of time). The card derives its power from a
self-contained generator called "Mr. Fusion" (another item I dug out of the
wreckage from a train/auto accident in California a couple of years ago).
Connected to the card via a specially shielded line, Mr. Fusion runs on
trash (and is, therefore, the ultimate computer peripheral, if you recall
the old principal of "garbage in, garbage out"). Let's put a few issues of
PC MAGAZINE into Mr. Fusion, and switch on the Flux Capacitor.
(Incidentally, for this to work, it needs an Apple II equipped with a
specially modified Zip chip running at 88 MHz). Boot the disk and set the
time circuits for 1975. Ready? Set? Go! ** CRACKADOOM ** !!
Did you make it all right? (Just don't touch anything -- you don't
want to disrupt the space-time continuum, you know!) Now, since the first
Apple II wasn't released until 1977, what are we doing back in 1975? Well,
to understand how the Apple II came about, it helps to know the environment
that produced it. In 1975, the microcomputer industry was still very much
in its infancy. There were few "home computers" that you can choose from,
and their capabilities were very much limited. The first microprocessor
chip, the 4-bit 4004, had been released by Intel back in 1971. The first
video game, Pong, was created by Nolan Bushnell of Atari in 1972. Also in
1972, Intel had gone a step further in microprocessor development and
released the 8-bit 8008, and then the 8080 in 1973. The year 1974 saw
Scelbi Computer Consulting sell what some consider to be the first
commercially built microcomputer, the Scelbi 8-H, based on Intel's 8008
chip. However, it had limited distribution and due to the designer's
health problems it didn't go very far. The first home-built computer, the
Mark 8, was released that same year. The Mark 8 used the Intel 8080 chip,
but had no power supply, monitor, keyboard, or case, and only a few
hobbyists ever finished their kits. Overall, the microchip had yet to make
much of an impact on the general public beyond the introduction of the
hand-held calculator.
With the start of 1975 came a significant event in microcomputer
history. If you will consider the early microprocessors of the years 1971
through 1974 as a time of germination and "pregnancy" of ideas and various
hardware designs, January of 1975 saw the "labor and delivery" of a special
package. The birth announcement was splashed on the front cover of a
hacker's magazine, Popular Electronics. The baby's parents, MITS, Inc.,
named it "Altair 8800"; it measured 18-inches deep by 17 inches wide by 7
inches high, and it weighed in at a massive 256 bytes (that's one fourth of
a "K"). Called the "World's First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial
Models," the Altair 8800 used the Intel 8080 chip, and sold for $395 (or
$498 fully assembled). MITS hoped that they would get about four hundred
orders for clones of this baby, trickling in over the months that the
two-part article was printed. This would supply the money MITS needed to
buy the parts to send to people ordering the kits (one common way those
days of "bootstrapping" a small electronics business). This "trickle" of
orders would also give MITS time to establish a proper assembly line for
packaging the kits. However, they misjudged the burning desire of Popular
Electronic's readers to build and operate their own computer. MITS
received four hundred orders in ONE AFTERNOON, and in three weeks it had
taken in $250,000.<1>
The Popular Electronics article was a bit exuberant in the way the
Altair 8800 was described. They called it "a full-blown computer that can
hold its own against sophisticated minicomputers now on the market... The
Altair 8800 is not a 'demonstrator' or souped-up calculator... [it] is a
complete system." The article had an insert that lists some possible
applications for the computer, stating that "the Altair 8800 is so
powerful, in fact, that many of these applications can be performed
simultaneously." Among the possible uses listed are an automated control
for a ham station, a digital clock with time zone conversion, an autopilot
for planes and boats, navigation computer, a brain for a robot, a
pattern-recognition device, and a printed matter-to-Braille converter for
the blind.<2> Many of these things will be possible with microcomputers by
1991, but even by then few people will have the hardware add-ons to make
some of these applications possible. Also, despite the power that micros
will have in that year, the ability to carry out more than one of these
applications "simultaneously" will not be not practical or in some cases
even possible. The exaggeration by the authors of the Popular Electronics
article can perhaps be excused by their excitement in being able to offer a
computer that ANYONE can own and use. All this was promised from a
computer that came "complete" with only 256 bytes of memory (expandable if
you can afford it) and no keyboard, monitor, or storage device.
The IMSAI 8080 (an Altair clone) also came out in 1975 and did fairly
well in the hobbyist market. Another popular early computer, the Sol,
would not be released until the following year. Other computers released
in 1975 that enjoyed limited success were the Altair 680 (also from MITS,
Inc., based on the Motorola 6800 processor), the Jupiter II (Wavemate),
M6800 (Southwest Technical Products), and the JOLT (Microcomputer
Associates), all kits.<3> The entire microcomputer market was still very
much a hobbyist market, best suited for those who enjoyed assembling a
computer from a kit. After you assembled your computer, you either had to
write your own programs (from assembly language) or enter a program someone
else wrote. If you could afford the extra memory and the cost of buying a
BASIC interpreter, you might have been able to write some small programs
that ran in that language instead of having to figure out 8080 assembly
language. If you were lucky (or rich) you had 16K of memory, possibly
more; if you were REALLY lucky you owned (or could borrow) a surplus paper
tape reader to avoid typing in manually your friend's checkbook balancing
program. Did I say typing? Many early computer hobbyists didn't even have
the interface allowing them to TYPE from a keyboard or teletype. The
"complete" Altair 8800 discussed above could only be programmed by entering
data via tiny little switches on its front panel, as either octal (base 8)
bytes or hexadecimal (base 16) bytes. With no television monitor available
either, the results of the program were read in binary (base 2) from lights
on that front panel. This may sound like the old story that begins with
the statement, "I had to walk five miles to school through snow three feet
deep when I was your age," but it helps to understand how things were at
this time to see what a leap forward the Apple II really was (er, will be.
Time travel complicates grammar!)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NEXT INSTALLMENT: The Apple I
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NOTES
<1> Steven Levy, HACKERS: HEROES OF THE COMPUTER REVOLUTION, pp.
187-192.
<2> H. Edward Roberts and William Yates, "Altair 8800 Minicomputer,
Part 1", POPULAR ELECTRONICS, January 1975, pp. 33, 38. The
article is interesting also in some of the terminology that is
used. The Altair is described as having "256 eight-bit words" of
RAM. Apparently, the term "byte" was not in common use yet.
<3> Gene Smarte and Andrew Reinhardt, "15 Years of Bits, Bytes, and
Other Great Moments", BYTE, September 1990, pp. 370-371.
This is the ENTIRE series of articles that make up the Apple II
History. They are readable in either AppleWorks 2.x or 3.0, but will
require an expanded desktop for some segments.
Please feel free to make comments (on GEnie's A2 Roundtable, Category
2, Topic 16) or in E-mail (S.WEYHRICH) about the contents of these files.
PLEASE, if you detect any errors or have any corrections, let me know about
it. I would like to have as accurate a history as possible.
If you would like to print any of these files in a user group
newsletter, I only ask that you print any segment you use in its entirety,
and that you give me as the author credit for the work. Also, please send
me a copy of any newsletter in which it is printed. My address is:
Steven Weyhrich
Zonker Software
2715 N. 112th St.
Omaha, NE 68164-3666
(402) 498-0246
Enjoy!
APPLE II HISTORY
===== == =======
Compiled and written by Steven Weyhrich
(C) Copyright 1991, Zonker Software
(PART 2 -- THE APPLE I)
[v1.1 :: 12 Dec 91]
THE APPLE I: DEVELOPMENT
At the Homebrew Computer club in Palo Alto, California (in Silicon
Valley), Steve Wozniak, a 26 year old employee of Hewlett-Packard and a
long-time digital electronics hacker, had been wanting to build a computer
of his own for a long time. For years he had designed many on paper, and
even written FORTRAN compilers and BASIC interpreters for these theoretical
machines, but a lack of money kept him from carrying out his desire. He
looked at the Intel 8080 chip (the heart of the Altair), but at $179
decided he couldn't afford it. A decision to NOT use the 8080 was
considered foolhardy by other members of the club. Consider this
description of the microcomputer "world" as it was in the summer of 1975:
"That summer at the Homebrew Club the Intel 8080 formed the
center of the universe. The Altair was built around the 8080 and
its early popularity spawned a cottage industry of small
companies that either made machines that would run programs
written for the Altair or made attachments that would plug into
the computer. The private peculiarities of microprocessors meant
that a program or device designed for one would not work on
another. The junction of these peripheral devices for the Altair
was known as the S-100 bus because it used one hundred signal
lines. Disciples of the 8080 formed religious attachments to the
8080 and S-100 even though they readily admitted that the latter
was poorly designed. The people who wrote programs or built
peripherals for 8080 computers thought that later, competing
microprocessors were doomed. The sheer weight of the programs
and the choice of peripherals, so the argument went, would make
it more useful to more users and more profitable for more
companies. The 8080, they liked to say, had critical mass which
was sufficient to consign anything else to oblivion."<1>
Another chip, the Motorola 6800, interested Wozniak because it
resembled his favorite minicomputers (such as the Data General Nova) more
than the 8080. However, cost was still a problem for him until he and his
friend Allen Baum discovered a chip that was almost identical to the 6800,
while considerably cheaper. MOS Technology sold their 6502 chip for $25,
as opposed to the $175 Motorola 6800. Wozniak decided to change his choice
of processor to the 6502 and began writing a version of BASIC that would
run on it. A friend over at Hewlett-Packard programmed a computer to
simulate the function of the 6502, and Wozniak used it to test some of his
early routines. When his BASIC interpreter was finished, he turned his
attention to designing the computer he could run it on. Except for some
small timing differences, he was able to use the hardware design he had
earlier done on paper for the 6800.<2>
To make the computer easier to use, Wozniak favored a keyboard over
the front panel switches that came on the Altair. He also made it simple
to use a television for a video terminal. (Recall that at this time the
most common mechanism used for input/output was a teletype, which consisted
of a keyboard, typewriter, and if you were lucky, a paper tape
reader/puncher). Functionally, it was a television terminal attached to a
computer, all on one printed circuit board (another enhancement over the
Altair). Wozniak used two 256 x 4 PROM (programmable read-only memory)
chips to create a 256 byte program (called a "monitor") that looked at the
keyboard when the computer was turned on. This monitor program could not
do much more than allow entry of hex bytes, examine a range of memory, and
run a program at a specific address.<3> (The Altair needed these
"bootstrapping" instructions to be entered by hand each time the computer
was turned on).
Because there were no cheap RAMs available, Woz used shift registers
to send text to the TV screen. Consequently, his video terminal was
somewhat slow, displaying characters at about 60 characters per second, one
character per scan of the TV screen. (This speed would be similar to
watching a computer communicate via a modem at 1200 baud). It was slow by
1991 standards, but an advancement over the teletypes that could only type
10 characters per second. The computer had 8K of dynamic RAM. You could
load BASIC into 4K of memory and have 4K left over for your own programs.
It had a video connector, but you had to connect a monitor on your own.
You also had to buy the keyboard separately and wire it into a 16-pin DIP
connector. The power supply had to be connected to two transformers to get
5 volts and 12 volts for the motherboard. There was no speaker, no
graphics, and no color. There was a single peripheral slot, and when it
was first released there was nothing available to plug into this slot. It
was entirely contained on a single printed circuit board, about six by
eight inches in size (most hobby computers of that time needed at least two
boards), used only 30 or 40 chips, and because it could run BASIC programs
it got people's attention.<4>
THE APPLE I: MARKETING
Let's adjust our time circuits for 1976, and jump forward in time.
By now, Steve Wozniak had completed his 6502-based computer and would
display enhancements or modifications at the bi-weekly Homebrew Computer
Club meetings. Steve Jobs was a 21 year old friend of Wozniak's and also a
visitor at the Homebrew club. He had worked with Wozniak in the past
(together they designed the arcade game "Breakout" for Atari) and was very
interested in his computer. During the design process Jobs made
suggestions that helped shape the final product, such as the use of the
newer dynamic RAMs instead of older, more expensive static RAMs. He
suggested to Wozniak that they get some printed circuit boards made for the
computer and sell it at the club for people to assemble themselves. They
pooled their financial resources together to have PC boards made, and on
April 1st, 1976 they officially formed the Apple Computer Company. Jobs
had recently worked at an organic apple orchard, and liked the name because
"he thought of the apple as the perfect fruit--it has a high nutritional
content, it comes in a nice package, it doesn't damage easily--and he
wanted Apple to be the perfect company. Besides, they couldn't come up
with a better name."<5>
Jobs approached the owner of a new computer store in the bay area
called "The Byte Shop." This businessman, Paul Terrell, expressed an
interest in the Apple Computer (to be known later as the "Apple I"), but
wanted only fully assembled computers to sell. If they could provide this,
Terrell told them he would order fifty Apples, and pay cash on delivery.
Suddenly, the cost of making (and selling) this computer was considerably
more than they expected. Jobs and Wozniak managed to get the parts on "net
30 days" (30 days credit without interest), and set themselves up in Job's
garage for assembly and testing of the Apple I. After marathon sessions of
stuffing and soldering PC boards, Jobs delivered the computers to the Byte
Shop. Although these "fully assembled" computers lacked a power supply,
keyboard, or monitor, Terrell bought them as promised. In July of 1976 the
Apple I was released and sold for $666.66, which was about twice the cost
of the parts plus a 33% dealer markup.<6> Two hundred Apple I computers
were manufactured, and all except twenty-five of them sold over a period of
ten months.<7>
Although the Apple I was easier to begin using than the Altair
(thanks to its built-in ROM code), it was still a time consuming process to
set it up to do something useful. Steve Wozniak would have to type in
about 3K of hexadecimal bytes before BASIC was ready to use. He could do
it in about 20 to 30 minutes, but he almost knew the code by heart. The
typical user was more limited in ability to use BASIC on the Apple I. To
broaden the appeal of the Apple I (and at the insistence of Paul Terrell),
Wozniak designed a cassette interface. It was mounted on a small
two-inch-high printed circuit board and plugged into the single slot on the
motherboard. The card sold for $75 and a cassette tape of Woz's BASIC was
included with it. The advertisement Apple included with the card stated,
"Our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal
cost." The interface worked, but worked well only with cassettes running
on expensive tape recorders. To further try to enhance sales, the Byte
Shop stores found a local cabinetmaker that made some koa-wood cases for
the Apple computer (so it would no longer be just a "naked" circuit
board).<8>
Interestingly, although most of the action in the micro world was
going on in Silicon Valley, news of the Apple I made its way east. Stan
Veit, owner of the east coast's first computer store, bought an Apple I and
took it to a meeting of the Association of Computer Machinery. Those
attending were quite skeptical that a REAL computer could fit into a small
briefcase; they were sure that the machine was just a portable terminal,
attached by a hidden phone line to a mainframe somewhere!<9>
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NEXT INSTALLMENT: The Apple II
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NOTES
<1> Michael Moritz, THE LITTLE KINGDOM, p. 123.
<2> Moritz, pp. 124-127.
<3> Williams & Moore, p. A69.
<4> Gregg Williams and Rob Moore, "The Apple Story, Part 1: Early
History", BYTE, Dec 1984, pp. A68-A69.
<5> Frank Rose, WEST OF EDEN: THE END OF INNOCENCE AT APPLE COMPUTER,
p. 33.
<6> Moritz, pp. 138-144.
<7> Williams & Moore, pp. A69.
<8> Moritz, pp. 147-149.
<9> Chien, Philip, "Apple's First Decade: A Look Back", THE APPLE II
REVIEW, Fall/Winter 1986, p. 12.
APPLE II HISTORY
===== == =======
Compiled and written by Steven Weyhrich
(C) Copyright 1991, Zonker Software
(PART 3 -- THE APPLE II)
[v1.1 :: 12 Dec 91]
THE APPLE II: HARDWARE AND FIRMWARE
Moving our time machine on to 1977, we can now look at Steve
Wozniak's next generation Apple. Even as the Apple I was completed and was
slowly selling, Wozniak was already working on making enhancements that
would make his computer faster and more functional. He wanted to make it
display in color. He worked to combine the terminal and memory functions
of the Apple I by moving the display into main memory, allowing instant
screen changes. Many of his changes were not added with the end user
specifically in mind. Wozniak stated:
"A lot of features of the Apple II went in because I had designed
Breakout for Atari. I had designed it in hardware. I wanted to
write it in software now. So that was the reason that color was
added in first--so that games could be programmed. I sat down
one night and tried to put it into BASIC. Fortunately I had
written the BASIC myself, so I just burned some new ROMs with
line drawing commands, color changing commands, and various BASIC
commands that would plot in color. I got this ball bouncing
around, and I said, 'Well it needs sound,' and I had to add a
speaker to the Apple II. It wasn't planned, it was just
accidental... Obviously you need paddles, so I had to scratch my
head and design a simple minimum-chip paddle circuit, and put on
some paddles. So a lot of these features that really made the
Apple II stand out in its day came from a game, and the fun
features that were built in were only to do one pet project,
which was to program a BASIC version of Breakout and show it off
at the club."<1>
Wozniak added other features that he felt were important for a
computer that was useful, one that he would want to own. Since the 6502
processor could address a total of 64K of memory, he designed the computer
with the ability to use either 4K RAM chips, or the newer (and more
expensive) 16K RAM chips. The first Apple II's came standard with 4K of
memory, and more could be added, to a maximum of 12K (if using the 4K
chips) or 48K (if using the 16K chips). Specially wired strapping blocks
attached to the motherboard told the Apple II how much memory was present
and where it was. According to the 1981 edition of the APPLE II REFERENCE
MANUAL, the Apple could have memory in the following sizes: 4K, 8K, 12K,
16K, 20K, 24K, 32K, 36K, or a full 48K. (These sizes were determined by
the different ways that three RAM chips, either 4K or 16K, could be
installed). The strapping blocks were even designed with the flexibility
of allowing blank spots in memory if there were no RAM chips available to
fill those spots.
The first 4K of memory always had to have RAM present, since it was
used by the 6502 processor, the ROM routines, and the text screen display.
If, for example, you only had two other 4K RAM chips to install and you
wanted to display hi-res graphics, you could strap one chip to the lower
half of hi-res memory from $2000-$2FFF, and the other to the upper half of
hi-res memory from $3000-$3FFF.<2> Since 16K RAM chips cost about $500
when Wozniak designed the Apple II, not many users could afford them.
Whereas the Commodore PET and the Radio Shack TRS-80 could not easily be
expanded beyond the 4K they came with, the Apple II from the beginning was
designed with expansion in mind.<3>
The row of eight expansion slots was another feature about the
Apple II that was a strong selling point. Unlike the TRS-80 or PET, you
could easily expand the Apple II by simply plugging a card into one of
these slots. This degree of expandability made it more expensive to build,
however. Steve Jobs didn't believe that anyone would ever need more than
two slots, one for a printer and one possibly for a modem. Wozniak knew
from his experience with computers at Hewlett-Packard that computer users
would always find SOMETHING to fill those extra slots, and insisted that
they keep the number at eight.<4>
One problem Apple had to deal with was getting FCC approval for the
computer. The RF (radio frequency) modulator that had been designed gave
off too much interference, and it was probable that the FCC would not
approve it. (The RF modulator allowed a user to attach the Apple to a
standard television receiver, instead of requiring the purchase of an
expensive computer monitor). Rather than have the release of the Apple II
delayed for re-engineering of the RF modulator to get that FCC approval,
Apple gave the specifications for the RF modulator to Marty Spergel. He
ran a small company (called M&R Electronics) that specialized in obtaining
hard-to-get parts that electronics and computer hackers wanted for their
projects. Their agreement allowed M&R to make and sell the RF modulators,
while Apple could concentrate on making and selling the Apple II. Dealers
would sell an Apple II with a "Sup'r Mod" (costing about $30) if the buyer
wanted to see the graphics on their color TV. Jobs assured Spergel that
the item would sell well, maybe as many as fifty units a month. (Years
later Spergel estimated that he had sold about four hundred thousand Sup'r
Mods).<5>
Other features that Wozniak (and Allen Baum, who helped him with the
project) included in the Apple II ROMs included the terminal software to do
screen text display, expanded Monitor functionality, and cassette
input/output routines. They added the ability to split the screen into
different sized windows. They also wrote a disassembler, which was one of
the most important features of the Apple II from the beginning and a
significant part of its open design. It allowed ANYONE to view the 6502
code that ANY program used, and matched the philosophy of the Homebrew Club
of making all computer knowledge available to everybody. In the Apple I
days, when Apple was supplying software "free or at minimal charge",
Wozniak and Baum published an early version of their 6502 disassembler in a
hacker's magazine. It was designed to be loaded in memory on the Apple I
from $800 to $9D8 and the routine could be executed from the monitor. This
early code was quit similar to the disassembler that was later included in
the Apple II ROM.<6>
Having an expanded Monitor program in ROM and color graphics were not
the only features in the Apple II that attracted people to it. Having
Wozniak's BASIC language in ROM, available immediately when the power was
turned on, made it possible for non-hackers to write programs that used the
Apple II's color graphics.
An interesting bit of trivia about Wozniak's Integer BASIC was that
he never had an assembly language source file for it. He wrote it in
machine language, assembling it by hand on paper:
"I wrote this BASIC processor, and I wrote a little ALGOL
simulator and got it simulated. It looked like it would work,
but I had forgotten to build the machine. I had no assembler,
that was another thing. To use an assembler, they figured that
somebody was going to buy this processor [the 6502] to use for a
company, and their company can pay a few thousand dollars in
time-sharing charges to use an assembler that was available in
time-share. I didn't have any money like that, so a friend
taught me that you just sort of look at each instruction, you
write your instructions on the right side of the page, you write
the addresses over on the left side, and you then look up the hex
data for each instruction--you could assemble it yourself. So I
would just sit there and assemble it myself. The [Integer]
BASIC, which we shipped with the first Apple II's, was never
assembled--ever. There was one handwritten copy, all
handwritten, all hand-assembled. So we were in an era that we
could not afford tools."<7>
Even to this day there is not an official source code listing of
Integer BASIC at Apple. And interestingly, the only error I am aware of in
the Integer interpreter is one involving a single byte. If a line is
entered that has too many parentheses, the "TOO LONG" error message is
displayed instead of the "TOO MANY PARENS" message.<8>
NOW A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR: BACK TO THE BASICS...
I want to take a short break in this discussion of the Apple II
firmware to look at some other items that will make further descriptions
easier to understand. If you are a programmer already, you may want to
skip this section, since you probably already know this stuff. First we
will examine some definitions of terms that are commonly known to
programmers, but possibly not to you. Next will be a brief excursion into
the realm of hexadecimal, and finally a look at the memory map of the
original Apple II.
First, let's look at definitions of some words that I have been
loosely throwing around:
BIT The smallest piece of information that a computer can deal
with, it is either a "0" (off, clear) or a "1" (on, set).
BYTE The most convenient piece of information (for humans) that
computers use. One byte consists of eight bits, and ranges
from "00000000" (0 decimal) to "11111111" (255 decimal).
NIBBLE (also spelled "nybble"). One half of a byte, consisting of
four bits, ranging from "0000" (0 decimal) to "1111" (15
decimal).
WORD Two bytes (or four nibbles, if you prefer), consisting of
sixteen bits, and ranging from "00000000 00000000" (0
decimal) to "11111111 11111111" (65535 decimal). Not used
much in microcomputers.
BINARY A system of counting using only two digits, "0" and "1"
(base 2). Computers speak in binary at their most basic
level; anything else is translated into binary, so the
computer can understand it.
DECIMAL A system of counting using ten digits, "0" through "9"
(base 10). Most of the Western world uses this system.
HEXADECIMAL A system of counting using sixteen digits, "0" through "9"
and "A" through "F" (base 16). Programmers use this system
as a convenient way of organizing groups of binary numbers.
KILOBYTE Abbreviated "K", "KB", or "Kbytes", it refers to 1,024
bytes. A 64K computer has 64 x 1024 = 65536 bytes.
MEGABYTE Abbreviated "M", "MB", or "meg", it refers to 1,024 Kbytes,
or 1,024 x 1,024 = 1,048,576 bytes. A 32 MB hard disk, the
largest size volume that ProDOS can handle, holds 32 x 1,024
= 32,768 Kbytes, or 32 x 1,024 x 1,024 = 33,554,432 bytes.
GIGABYTE Abbreviated "G", "GB", or "gig", it refers to 1,024 MB, or
1,048,576 Kbytes, or 10,737,441,824 bytes. The Apple II
Smartport (which will be mentioned later in this history)
can handle disk devices up to 4 gig in size (although the
software to handle that type of size has yet to be written).
RAM Random Access Memory. Any data stored in this memory
disappears when the computer is turned off.
ROM Read Only Memory. Data cannot be stored in this type of
memory, but instead it usually contains programs or other
information that does not disappear when the computer is
turned off.
HARDWARE The physical electronic components and mechanical parts
that make up a piece of computer equipment. Examples would
be the keyboard, disk drive, or television monitor (also
called CRT, or Cathode Ray Tube).
SOFTWARE The digital instructions executed by the computer in RAM.
They may act on the hardware that is attached to the
computer. Examples would be a BASIC or Pascal program, an
assembly language routine to read a clock, or a disk
operating system. Since software is executed in RAM, it
disappears from memory when the computer is turned off.
FIRMWARE The same as software, except it is executed from ROM, and
does not disappear when the computer is turned off. Almost
any software could be in ROM, except programs that modify
themselves as they run.
Next, let's look at hexadecimal numbers in more detail. Since
computers deal in binary (base 2), the true language of computers is either
in terms of "0" (off) or "1" (on). However, it quickly becomes cumbersome
to refer to large numbers in binary; the base 10 number "458" is
"111001010" in binary. So programmers have decided to group numbers in
such a way as to make it easy to convert part or all of that number to
binary if necessary, but still have numbers (almost) as easy to deal with
as our standard base 10 system.
Now, in the familiar base 10 system there are ten digits, 0 through
9. When counting, after you pass 9, you add one to the digit to the left
of the 9, change the 9 to a 0, and continue. So, "09" becomes "10", "19"
becomes "20", and so on. However, in the base 16 system there are sixteen
digits, 0 through 9, and then A through F (representing decimal 10 through
15). When counting, then, you go 7, 8, 9, then A (not 10), B, C, D, E, F,
10, 11, 12, and so on. In the Apple world we have traditionally used a
preceding dollar sign to signify a hexadecimal number, so "25" means
twenty-five, but "$25" means thirty-seven (2 x 16, plus 5). To translate a
hexadecimal number to decimal, use powers of 16:
$B65F = (11 x 16^3) + (6 x 16^2) + (5 x 16^1) + (15 x 16^0)
= (11 x 4096) + (6 x 256) + (5 x 16) + (15 x 1)
= 45056 + 1536 + 80 + 15
= 46687
The same thing can be done in reverse to convert base 10 to
hexadecimal, starting by dividing the number by 4096, then the remainder by
256, then 16. If the number is greater than 65536, you need a bigger power
of 16 (and you are probably not dealing with an 8-bit Apple II!) Or you
can just get a programmer's calculator like mine that automatically does
the conversion for you...
When dealing with memory addresses on an Apple II, we usually
designate them as four digit hex numbers (such as the $B65F example above).
Numbers less than $1000 often are printed without the leading blank ($400
instead of $0400), and numbers less than $100 are treated the same way ($32
instead of $0032).
THE APPLE II: MEMORY MAP
To understand the memory layout of the Apple II, consider this
analogy: Imagine a cabinet with sixteen shelves, and sixteen separate
slots or pigeon holes on each shelf (similar to those found in old roll-top
desks). Each slot refers to a specific address in memory on the computer,
and each slot can hold a number between 0 and 255. (Since a byte is eight
bits wide, the largest number that can be represented by eight binary bits
is 255). The bottom shelf is row "0", and the leftmost slot in that row is
slot "0". The address of that slot, then, is $00. As we move to the
right, the addresses increase, $01, $02, $03, and so on to $0F at the end.
We then go up to the next row, (row "1"), and the addresses continue in the
same fashion with $10, $11, $12, and so on as before. The sixteenth row is
row "F", the rightmost slot in that row is slot "F", and the address of
that slot is $FF. This cabinet has, then, 256 slots (16 x 16), and
represents what is called a "page" in the Apple memory. The cabinet itself
has an address (since computers need addresses for everything), and this
one's address is "00". The full address of row "5", slot "A" on cabinet
"00" is $005A.
Only the Altair 8800 came with just 256 bytes of memory, so we have
to account for the entire 64K memory space that the 6502 chip in the
Apple II can handle. There is a cabinet sitting on top of cabinet "00",
and it is laid out in the same fashion with its 256 slots in sixteen rows.
This is cabinet "01", and on top of that one is cabinet "02"; this
continues on up until we reach cabinet "FF" way up at the top. Apple
programmers refer to these cabinets as "pages" of memory. There are 256
pages of memory, each with 256 bytes on a page, making a grand total of 256
x 256 = 65536 bytes of memory (or slots that can hold a number, if you
prefer the analogy).
In discussing the memory map on the Apple II, we can refer to pages
of memory with a hexadecimal two-digit number for shorthand if we wish.
The general layout of the Apple II memory is as follows:
Page $00: used by the 6502 processor for storage of information that
it can access quickly. This is prime real-estate that is
seldom available for general use by programmers without
special care.
Page $01: used by the 6502 for internal operations as a "stack."
Page $02: used by the Apple II firmware as an input buffer when using
the keyboard from BASIC, or when a program uses any of the
firmware input routines.
Page $03: general storage area, up to the top three rows (from $3D0
through $3FF) which are used by the disk operating system
and the firmware for pointers to internal routines.
Pages $04-$07: used for the 40 column text screen.
Pages $08-$BF: available for use by programs, operating systems, and for
hi-res graphics. Within this space, Woz designated pages
$20-$3F for hi-res "page" one, and pages $40-$5F for hi-res
"page" two.
Page $C0: internal I/O and softswitches
Pages $C1-$C7: ROM assigned to each of the seven peripheral cards
Pages $C8-$CF: switchable ROM available for any of the seven cards
Pages $D0-$D7: empty ROM socket #1
Pages $D8-$DF: empty ROM socket #2
Pages $E0-$F7: Integer BASIC ROM
Pages $F8-$FF: Monitor ROM
The memory space on the Apple II between $C000 and $CFFF was assigned
to handle input and output. From $C000 to $C0FF the space was reserved for
various soft-switches used to control the display, and various built-in I/O
devices, such as the keyboard, paddles, annunciators, and the cassette
port. (A soft-switch is simply a memory location that, when a number is
stored there, changes something in the computer--such as switching on
graphics mode). From $C100 to $CFFF the space was reserved for ROM on the
plug-in peripheral cards for each of the seven slots. Slot 1 was given the
space from $C100 to $C1FF, slot 2 from $C200 to $C2FF, and so on. The
$C800 to $CFFF space was special slot-selectable ROM that was uniquely
available for each of the seven peripheral cards. For example, a program
running on the card in slot 6 to control a device could use the $C800-$CFFF
space for its own purpose. When control passed to the card in slot 3, that
card could use a program of its own that ran in the same $C800-$CFFF space.
This was accomplished by allowing each card to have ROM code that covered
pages $C8-$CF, and making that space "switchable", depending on which card
wanted to use it. Having this space available made writing ROM code
simpler, since it would not have to be capable of running at various memory
locations (depending on which slot a card was plugged into).
The memory from $D000 to $D7FF and $D800 to $DFFF was empty on all
early Apple II computers. On the motherboard were two empty sockets that
were available for the user to plug in their own ROM chips. The
$D000-$D7FF space was most often used by a plug-in ROM chip sold by Apple,
known as "Programmer's Aid #1." It contained various utilities for Integer
BASIC programmers, including machine language routines to do the following:
Renumber BASIC programs
Append one BASIC program to the end of another
Verify a BASIC program that had been saved on tape (to confirm it was
an accurate save)
Verify non-program data that had been saved on tape
Relocate assembly language routines to a different location in memory
(most would only run in one place in memory)
Test the Apple II RAM
Generate musical tones through the built-in speaker
Handle hi-res graphics from BASIC, including code to clear the hi-res
screen, set colors, plot points and lines, draw shapes, and load
shapes from tape.
All the routines on the Programmer's Aid #1 ROM were written by
Wozniak between June 1977 (the RAM test routine) and April 1978 (program
renumber and append), except for the music routine, which was written by
Gary Shannon.
The other empty ROM socket (covering memory from $D800 to $DFFF) was
never filled by Apple. Various third-party vendors sold ROMs for that
socket (or for the $D000-$D7FF socket used by the Programmer's Aid #1 ROM),
but none made enough of an inroad to be preserved in the INTBASIC file that
would later be included on the DOS 3.3 System Master disk. In fact, the
$D800-$DFFF space in the INTBASIC file on that disk contains an image of
that same space taken directly from the Applesoft ROM! It is completely
useless to Integer BASIC, of course, but disk files being what they are,
Apple had to fill that space with SOMETHING!
The Integer BASIC interpreter lived in the ROM space between $E000
and $F7FF. However, BASIC only used the space up to $F424. Between
$F425-$F4FB and $F63D-$F65D could be found a floating-point math package
that was not used by Integer BASIC, but was available for BASIC programmers
who were astute enough to figure out how it worked. (An early Apple user
group, the Apple Pugetsound Program Library Exchange, or A.P.P.L.E., sold a
tape and notes by Steve Wozniak they called "Wozpak", that documented some
of the secrets of the Integer BASIC ROM). Between $F500-$F63C there was
code that was known as the "miniassembler", which was executed starting at
the ominous address $F666. The miniassembler allowed you to enter short
machine language programs using the standard 6502 mnemonics (the three
letter codes that referred to a specific type of operation; for example,
"LDA #" represented the 6502 opcode $A9) instead of entering the program
byte by byte in the monitor. The $F689-$F7FC space contained Woz's
SWEET 16 interpreter. Wozniak wrote SWEET 16 to simulate a 16-bit
processor; it simplified some routines he wrote for the Apple II ROMs,
including the Programmer's Aid #1 renumber, append, and relocate routines.
Simply put, he took a series of hex bytes, defined them as "opcodes" the
way HE wanted them to function, and when executing the code used his
SWEET 16 interpreter to translate the code into legal 6502 operations. It
ran slower than standard 6502 code, but when memory space was at a premium
it was better to have a slow program than to not have enough room for the
program at all.
For those who are keeping count, there are a few unreferenced bytes
in the latter part of the Integer ROM. Those bytes contained filler bytes
that were not used as any program code.<9>,<10>,<11>
The last part of the Apple II memory, from $F800-$FFFF, contained
Wozniak's Monitor program which has already been discussed above.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NEXT INSTALLMENT: The Apple II, cont.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NOTES
<1> Jack Connick, "...And Then There Was Apple", CALL-A.P.P.L.E., Oct
1986, p. 24.
<2> -----, "Memory Organization", APPLE II REFERENCE MANUAL, 1979,
1981, pp. 70-73.
<3> Val J. Golding, "Applesoft From Bottom To Top", CALL-A.P.P.L.E.
IN DEPTH #1, 1981, p. 8.
<4> Michael Moritz, THE LITTLE KINGDOM, p. 157.
<5> Steven Levy, HACKERS: HEROES OF THE COMPUTER REVOLUTION, pp.
260-261.
<6> Steve Wozniak and Allen Baum, "A 6502 Disassembler From Apple",
Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia, Sep
1976, pp. 22-25.
<7> Jack Connick, p. 23.
<8> Christopher Volpe, "Beep: A Tale of (T)ERROR", CALL-A.P.P.L.E.,
Mar 1983, p. 114.
<9> Bob Bragner, "Open Discussion", SOFTALK, Nov 1983, pp. 51-52.
<10> -----, PROGRAMMER'S AID #1, 1978.
<11> Dick Sedgewick, "SWEET 16 - Introduction", MERLIN USER'S MANUAL,
1982, pp. 103-109.
APPLE II HISTORY
===== == =======
Compiled and written by Steven Weyhrich
(C) Copyright 1991, Zonker Software
(PART 4 -- THE APPLE II, CONT.)
[v1.1 :: 12 Dec 91]
THE APPLE II: OTHER DESIGN FEATURES
Since Steve Wozniak was the designer of the Apple I and II, exactly
what contribution did Steve Jobs make to the effort? Unlike Wozniak, who
would not think much of extra wires hanging out of a computer that worked
properly, Jobs had an eye for the appearance of the final product. He
wanted the Apple II to be a product that people outside the Homebrew
Computer Club would want to own:
"Jobs thought the cigar boxes [housing the home-made computers]
that sat on the ... desk tops during Homebrew meetings were as
elegant as fly traps. The angular, blue and black sheet-metal
case that housed Processor Technology's Sol struck him as clumsy
and industrial ... A plastic case was generally considered a
needless expense compared to the cheaper and more pliable sheet
metal. Hobbyists, so the arguments went, didn't care as much for
appearance as they did for substance. Jobs wanted to model the
case for the Apple after those Hewlett-Packard used for its
calculators. He admired their sleek, fresh lines, their hardy
finish, and the way they looked at home on a table or desk."<1>
The final case design made the Apple II look quite different from
most of their competition. The other computers looked like they had been
assembled at home (and many of them were). The Apple had no visible screws
or bolts (the ten screws attached at the bottom). It had the appearance of
some variation of a typewriter, but still looked futuristic enough to be a
computer. The friendliness of the design even extended to the lid, which
popped off easily to allow access to the expansion slots, almost inviting
the user to look inside (unlike most electronic devices that held the
warning "CAUTION! NO USER SERVICEABLE PARTS INSIDE").<2>
Other aesthetics to which Jobs paid attention were the color of the
keyboard, vents for heat dissipation (avoiding the need for a noisy fan),
and a shape and color that would blend in with other items in a home or on
a desk. He also hired an engineer who was good with analog circuitry (not
Wozniak's area of interest) to design a reliable, lightweight power supply
that would stay cool. The engineer, Rod Holt, was working at Atari at the
time, but was convinced to help Jobs and Wozniak. He developed a new
approach (for microcomputers) by taking household current and switching it
on and off rapidly, producing a steady current that was safe for the
expensive memory chips. The final design of this switching power supply
was smaller than a quart carton of milk and was quite reliable. Holt also
helped design the television interface for the Apple II.<3>
The new company was racing to have the Apple II ready for the First
West Coast Computer Fair in April of 1977. Some last minute bugs had to be
eliminated; because of a static electricity problem affecting a sensitive
chip, the keyboards went dead every twenty minutes. Chris Espinosa and
Randy Wigginton, two high school students who were early employees of
Apple, had written programs to demonstrate the computer's color and sound.
They were hurriedly working to duplicate these programs on cassette.
People at Apple were working to fix blemishes in the computer cases that
had returned from the plastics molding company. The name for this new
computer was also finalized as "Apple II", following the example of Digital
Equipment Company, who had given each newer version of its PDP series a
higher number (PDP-1, PDP-6, etc.). They stylized the "II" in the product
name by using right and left brackets, and displaying it on the case as
"][". The final product bore the mark of each person at Apple:
"The computer that appeared at the West Coast Computer Faire was
not one person's machine. It was the product of collaboration
and blended contributions in digital logic design, analog
engineering, and aesthetic appeal. The color, the slots, the way
in which the memory could be expanded from 4K to 48K bytes, the
control of the keyboard and hookup to the cassette recorder, and
the BASIC that was stored in the ROM chip--in effect the
motherboard--was Wozniak's contribution. Holt had contributed
the extremely significant power supply, and Jerry Mannock the
case. The engineering advances were officially recognized when,
some months later, Wozniak was awarded U.S. Patent #4,136,359 for
a microcomputer for use with video display, and Holt was given
Patent #4,130,862 for direct current power supply. But behind
them all Jobs was poking, prodding, and pushing and it was he,
with his seemingly inexhaustible supply of energy, who became the
chief arbiter and rejector... [Finally,] the combination of
[Mike] Markkula [Apple's first president], Jobs, and the McKenna
Agency turned Apple's public bow [at the West Coast Computer
Faire] into a coup."<4>
THE APPLE II: PRODUCT INTRODUCTION
As they prepared for the display at the First West Coast Faire, it
was decided to create a new corporate logo. The original one, used in
sales of the Apple I, was a picture of Isaac Newton sitting under an apple
tree, with a phrase from Wordsworth: "Newton...'A Mind Forever Voyaging
Through Strange Seas of Thought...Alone.'" Jobs had been concerned that
the logo had part of the slow sales of the Apple I, and the Regis McKenna
Agency was hired to help in the design of a new one.
"Rob Janov, a young art director, was assigned to the Apple
account and set about designing a corporate logo. Armed with the
idea that the computers would be sold to consumers and that their
machine was one of the few to offer color, Janov set about
drawing still lifes from a bowl of apples ... He gouged a rounded
chunk from one side of the Apple, seeing this as a playful
comment on the world of bits and bytes but also as a novel
design. To Janov the missing portion 'prevented the apple from
looking like a cherry tomato.' He ran six colorful stripes
across the Apple, starting with a jaunty sprig of green, and the
mixture had a slightly psychedelic tint. The overall result was
enticing and warm ..."
"[Steve] Jobs was meticulous about the style and appearance
of the logo ... When Janov suggested that the six colors be
separated by thin strips to make the reproduction easier, Jobs
refused."<5>
For the Faire, Markkula had ordered a smoky, backlit, illuminated
plexiglas sign with the new logo. Although Apple had a smaller booth than
other companies displaying their products at the Faire, and some of the
other microcomputer makers (Processor Technology, IMSAI, and Cromemco) had
been in business longer, Apple's booth looked far more professional, thanks
to Markkula's sign. Some of the other participants, companies larger than
Apple, had done no more than use card tables with signs written in black
markers.
Because they had been one of the first to commit themselves to
displaying at the Faire, Apple's booth was near the entrance and was
visible to everybody entering the convention center. They demonstrated a
kaleidoscopic video graphics program (possibly an early version of "BRIAN'S
THEME") on a huge Advent display monitor, catching everybody's attention.
But, after the Faire its organizer Jim Warren (Homebrew club member and
editor of DR. DOBB'S JOURNAL) didn't think that Apple was a strong
exhibitor. Byte magazine, in their report of the show, failed to even
mention Apple. Despite these early opinions by influential people, over
the next few months Apple received about three hundred orders for the
Apple II, over a hundred more than the total number of Apple I's sold.<6>
THE APPLE II: COST
Prebuilt systems were also sold by Commodore (the 6502-based PET, for
$595), and Radio Shack (the Z80-based TRS-80, for $600). This was quite a
bit less than the Apple II's premium price of $1,298 for a 4K computer, a
pair of game paddles, and an audio cassette with demo programs. This price
did not include a cassette recorder or monitor (which both the PET and
TRS-80 did include). The hardware limitations and lack of expandability of
those machines, however, offset some of the price difference. Also, one
other hardware introduction for the Apple II that happened in mid-1978 set
it well ahead of its immediate competitors; we'll get to that shortly.
THE APPLE II: EXPERIENCES OF EARLY USERS
The original manual for the Apple II was sparse. It consisted of
thirty photocopied pages, including some handwritten notes from Woz. The
cover stated, "simplicity is the ultimate sophistication: introducing
Apple ][, the personal computer." In early 1978 these original photocopied
manuals were replaced with the new "Apple II Technical Reference Manual"
(also known as the "Red Book"), and copies were mailed to previous
customers. Steve Jobs realized that people often viewed the quality of a
product by the quality of its documentation, and so he took pains to get
manuals that were easy to read and had a professional appearance.<7>
Setting up an early Apple II was fairly simple. The lid popped off
easily, and one of the first things you would attach was the Sup'r Mod (RF
modulator). This was plugged onto two pins sticking up from the back rear
of the motherboard, near the video output jack (assuming that you did not
also buy a REAL computer monitor). The game paddles were two small black
boxes, with a knob on the top attached to a potentiometer (similar to
volume controls on a radio) and a tiny black button on the side. These
boxes were attached via a narrow cable to a plug that looked (and was)
fragile; this plug also went into a small socket in the motherboard.
Lastly, you attached your data storage device (the cassette recorder) to
the input and output jacks in the back of the computer.
After turning on the Apple II, the first thing to greet you was a
screen full of random alphabetic characters and symbols, and possibly some
colored blocks (lo-res graphics mode might be turned on). Here you had to
press the RESET key in the upper right hand side of the keyboard, which,
after releasing the key, would cause a "beep!" and an asterisk to appear in
the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. (If the lo-res graphics mode
had been on, it would now be off). Next to the asterisk (which was a
prompt to show that you were in the Monitor) was a flashing box, the
cursor. To get into BASIC, you had to press the "Ctrl" key and the "B" key
simultaneously. Now you would see a different prompt, one that looked like
a ">".
At this point, you could either begin entering a BASIC program, or
try to load one from cassette. To load from cassette was not always easy;
it took time to get the right volume and tone settings on the tape player
in order to avoid getting the "ERR" or "*** SYNTAX ERR" message. (And if
you didn't have much memory, you might get a "*** MEM FULL ERR" message!)
When you got it properly loaded, you could type RUN and see what happened.
Beyond that, it was more or less up to you to actually find something to DO
with your new toy.<8>
THE APPLE II: EARLY HARDWARE ADD-ONS
Aside from the M&R "Sup'r Mod" that allowed early Apple II users to
run their computer on their color TV's, some other enterprising hackers
designed their own versions of modulators. One used by an early member of
an Apple user group in Washington State (Apple Pugetsound Program Library
Exchange, or A.P.P.L.E.) was somewhat better shielded than the "Sup'r Mod".
It had its own power supply and plugged into the video output jack on the
back of the Apple. The "Sup'r Mod" was by far the biggest seller,
however.<9>
At first, there were no interface cards for any of Woz's eight slots.
With the limited funds that computer purchasers had then (and now) there
was not much they could afford after shelling out anywhere from $1200 to
$1800 just to get their own Apple II. But they were innovative, and like
many other hardware hackers of the day managed to make do with old or
surplus parts. Some people, for instance, had gotten their hands on used
teletype printers, such as the ASR-33 (called "battleships" because they
were so rugged and heavy). Since there weren't any printer interface cards
to plug into the slots to allow the computer to communicate with the
teletype, they used a trick they learned from Woz himself. The Apple II
had four single-bit output pins on the game controller socket that could be
used for various purposes. A schematic floated through the various user
groups that showed how to connect the teletype to an annunciator pin; along
with it was a machine language program that re-directed output from the
screen to that one-bit port, and on to the printer.<10>
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NEXT INSTALLMENT: The Disk II
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NOTES
<1> Michael Moritz, THE LITTLE KINGDOM, p. 186.
<2> Steven Levy, HACKERS: HEROES OF THE COMPUTER REVOLUTION, pp.
263-264.
<3> Moritz, p. 189.
<4> Moritz, pp. 190-191.
<5> Moritz, p. 188.
<6> Moritz, pp. 192-193.
<7> Philip Chien, "The First Ten Years: A Look Back", THE APPLE II
REVIEW, Fall/Winter 1986, p. 12.
<8> -----, APPLE II BASIC PROGRAMMING MANUAL, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981,
pp. 1-19.
<9> -----, "A.P.P.L.E. Co-op Celebrates A Decade of Service",
CALL-A.P.P.L.E., Feb 1988, pp. 12-27.
<10> Val J. Golding, "Applesoft From Bottom To Top", CALL-A.P.P.L.E.
IN DEPTH #1, 1981, p. 8.
APPLE II HISTORY
===== == =======
Compiled and written by Steven Weyhrich
(C) Copyright 1991, Zonker Software
(PART 5 -- THE DISK II)
[v1.1 :: 12 Dec 91]
THE DISK II
Let's put some more trash into Mr. Fusion to fuel the next leg of our
trip. How about one of those KIM-1 computers over there in the corner of
the Computer Faire auditorium? We might have to break it up a bit to make
it fit ... Okay, now we'll just make a small jump, to December of 1977. By
this time the Apple II had been generally available for about six months.
Most customers used their television as an inexpensive color monitor, and
used a cassette recorder to store and retrieve their programs and data.
Apple's major competitors were the TRS-80 and the Commodore PET. The
products made by these two companies, together with Apple, could be
considered as the second generation of microcomputers; they all came fully
assembled and ready to use out of the box, with a keyboard and cassette
interface. The TRS-80 and the PET even came with a monitors and cassette
recorders. The strength of the Apple was expandability and graphics, while
the strength of the others was cost (both the TRS-80 and the PET sold for
around $600, half the price of the Apple II).
By late 1977, Apple had introduced some enhancements to the II,
including their first version of a floating point BASIC (called
"Applesoft") on cassette, and a printer interface card to plug into one of
the slots on the motherboard. But the Apple II still needed something to
make it more attractive to buyers, to stand out above the TRS-80 and the
PET. One area that needed improvement was its program and data storage and
retrieval system on cassette; it was a continued source of frustration for
many users. The cassette system used on the TRS-80 was more sophisticated
than that of the Apple II, allowing named files and easier storage of files
and data on the same tape. On the Apple II it took VERY careful adjustment
of the volume and tone controls on the cassette recorder to get programs or
data to successfully load. The Apple cassette system also needed careful
attention to the location on the tape where a program was stored, and was
no more accurate than the number on the recorder's mechanical tape counter
(if it had one).
Apple president Mike Markkula was one Apple II user that was
dissatisfied with cassette tape storage. He had a favorite checkbook
program, but it took two minutes to read in the program from the tape, and
another two minutes to read in the check files.<1> Consequently, at the
executive board meeting held in December 1977 he made a list of company
goals. At the top of the list was "floppy disk". Although Wozniak didn't
know much about how floppy disks worked, he had once looked through a
manual from Shugart (a Silicon Valley disk drive manufacturer):
"As an experiment Woz had [earlier] conceived a circuit that
would do much of what the Shugart manual said was needed to
control a disk drive. Woz didn't know how computers actually
controlled drives, but his method had seemed to him particularly
simple and clever. When Markkula challenged him to put a disk
drive on the Apple, he recalled that circuit and began
considering its feasibility. He looked at the way other computer
companies--including IBM--controlled drives. He also began to
examine disk drives--particularly North Star's. After reading
the North Star manual, Woz knew that his circuit would do what
theirs did and more. He knew he really had a clever design."<2>
Other issues that Wozniak had to deal with involved a way to properly
time the reading and writing of information to the disk. IBM used a
complex hardware-based circuit to achieve this synchronization. Wozniak,
after studying how IBM's drive worked, realized that if the data was
written to the disk in a different fashion, all that circuitry was
unneeded. Many floppy disks sold at that time were "hard sectored",
meaning that they had a hole punched in the disk near the center ring.
This hole was used by the disk drive hardware to identify what section of
the disk was passing under the read/write head at any particular time.
Wozniak's technique would allow the drive to do self-synchronization ("soft
sectoring"), not have to deal with that little timing hole, and save on
hardware.
Wozniak asked Randy Wigginton for help in writing some software to
control the disk drive. During their week of Christmas vacation in 1977
they worked day and night creating a rudimentary disk operating system,
working hard to get the drive ready to demonstrate at the Consumer
Electronics Show in the first week of 1978. Their system was to allow
entry of single letter commands to read files from fixed locations on the
disk. However, even this simple system was not working when Wozniak and
Wigginton left for the show.
When they got to Las Vegas they helped to set up the booth, and then
returned to working on the disk drive. They stayed up all night, and by
six in the morning they had a functioning demonstration disk. Randy
suggested making a copy of the disk, so they would have a backup if
something went wrong. They copied the disk, track by track. When they
were done, they found that they had copied the blank disk on top of their
working demo! By 7:30 am they had recovered the lost information and went
on to display the new disk drive at the show.<3>,<4>
Following the Consumer Electronics Show, Wozniak set out to complete
the design of the Disk II. For two weeks, he worked late each night to
make a satisfactory design. When he was finished, he found that if he
moved a connector he could cut down on feedthroughs, making the board more
reliable. To make that move, however, he had to start over in his design.
This time it only took twenty hours. He then saw another feedthrough that
could be eliminated, and again started over on his design. "The final
design was generally recognized by computer engineers as brilliant and was
by engineering aesthetics beautiful. Woz later said, 'It's something you
can ONLY do if you're the engineer and the PC board layout person yourself.
That was an artistic layout. The board has virtually no feedthroughs.'"<5>
THE DISK II: COST
The Disk II was finally available in July 1978 with the first full
version of DOS, 3.1. It had an introductory price of $495 (including the
controller card) if you ordered them before Apple had them in stock;
otherwise, the price would be $595. Even at that price, however, it was
the least expensive floppy disk drive ever sold by a computer company.
Early production at Apple was handled by only two people, and they produced
about thirty drives a day.<6>,<7>
Apple bought the drives to sell with Woz's disk controller from
Shugart, right there in Silicon Valley. To cut costs, however, they
decided to go to Alps Electric Company of Japan and ask them to design a
less expensive clone. According to Frank Rose, in his book "West Of Eden":
"The resulting product, the Disk II, was almost obscenely
profitable: For about $140 in parts ($80 after the shift to
Alps) [not counting labor costs], Apple could package a disk
drive and a disk controller in a single box that sold at retail
for upwards of $495. Better yet was the impact the Disk II had
on computer sales, for it suddenly transformed the Apple II from
a gadget only hard-core hobbyists would want to something all
sorts of people could use. Few outsiders realized it, but in
strategic terms, Woz's invention of the disk controller was as
important to the company as his invention of the computer
itself."<8>
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NEXT INSTALLMENT: The Apple II Plus
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NOTES
<1> Gregg Williams and Rob Moore, "The Apple Story, Part 2: More
History And The Apple III", BYTE, Jan 1985, pp. 167-168.
<2> Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, "Fire In The Valley, Part Two
(Book Excerpt)", A+ MAGAZINE, Jan 1985, p. 45.
<3> Williams and Moore, "Part II", p. 168.
<4> Freiberger and Swaine, (Part Two), p. 45.
<5> Freiberger and Swaine, (Part Two), p. 46.
<6> -----, "A.P.P.L.E. Co-op Celebrates A Decade of Service",
CALL-A.P.P.L.E., Feb 1988, pp. 12-27.
<7> -----, "Apple and Apple II History", THE APPLE II GUIDE, Fall
1990, pp. 9-16.
<8> Frank Rose, WEST OF EDEN: THE END OF INNOCENCE AT APPLE COMPUTER,
1989, pp. 62.
APPLE II HISTORY
===== == =======
Compiled and written by Steven Weyhrich
(C) Copyright 1991, Zonker Software
(PART 6 -- THE APPLE II PLUS)
[v1.1 :: 12 Dec 91]
THE APPLE II PLUS: HARDWARE
We now go cruising ahead in time about one year, to June of 1979.
Applesoft BASIC had been in heavy demand since the introduction in late
1978 of an improved version. It was needed by those wanting to write and
use applications that needed the capability of floating-point math.
Because of this, Apple engineers had begun working in 1978 on the Apple II
Plus, a modest enhancement to the Apple II. The main attraction of this
newer Apple would be Applesoft in ROM, available immediately without having
to load it from cassette or disk. Also, having it in ROM would move it out
of the part of memory where RAM Applesoft conflicted with hi-res graphics
(after all, Applesoft had commands specifically written into it for
manipulating those graphics, something that Integer BASIC could only do via
special CALLs to the routines in the Programmer's Aid #1 chip).
With the decision made to upgrade the Apple II, other changes were
made to make it more attractive to new computer buyers. The cost of RAM
chips had dropped considerably, so most new II Plus systems came standard
with a full 48K of RAM. Since the disk operating system consumed about 10K
of memory, having the full complement of available RAM made it easier to
use the Disk II with either version of BASIC. Since users would not need
to add the smaller 4K memory chips, the strapping blocks that had made it
possible to use either 4K or 16K RAM chips on the original Apple II were
removed.
Small changes had already been made to the product since it first
began distribution. Most of these changes were made primarily to simplify
it and decrease costs of manufacturing. First of all, the original
Apple II motherboard, designated as "Revision 0", was changed to make it
possible to display two more colors in hi-res graphics. The Revision 0
board had only four colors (green, violet, black, white), but Wozniak had
learned that by making a simple alteration he could get two more colors
(blue and orange) and two more varieties of black and white. The
Revision 1 and later boards were capable of displaying all eight colors.
The means of making this modification to Revision 0 Apples was described by
Wozniak in his reply to an article by Allen Watson III about hi-res
graphics (in the June 1979 issue of Byte magazine). With that change,
people who were not afraid of doing a little electrical work on their
computers had some of the benefits of an updated Apple II.
Hardware bugs that Apple engineers fixed included one that caused
text characters to be displayed with green and violet fringing, whether in
graphics mode or text mode. The "color killer" circuit they added fixed
things so that non-graphics text would display in black and white only.
Another problem involved RAM configurations of either 20K or 24K (a 16K RAM
chip plus one or two 4K RAM chips). In those systems a hardware bug caused
the 8K of memory from $4000 to $5FFF to be duplicated in the next 8K of
memory, from $6000 to $7FFF, whether there was RAM present at those
locations or not. This made a 20K Apple appear to have 24K, and a 24K
Apple appear to have 36K. The Revision 1 motherboard fixed this problem as
well.<1>
Revision 1 boards also modified the cassette input circuit to respond
with more accuracy to a weak input signal, making it easier to load data
and programs from cassette. Also, one "feature" of the original Apple II
was that any sound generated by the internal speaker also appeared as a
signal on the cassette output connector; this was fixed in the new
motherboards. Lastly, the RESET cycle was made part of the power-up
circuitry, eliminating the requirement that the RESET key be pressed after
turning on the computer.<2>,<3>
THE APPLE II PLUS: FIRMWARE
More important than the minor hardware changes, however, were the
changes in the ROM code. The new ROM replaced the original Monitor with
one that, among other things, better supported the new Disk II drive.
Since RESET was now automatically activated when the power was turned on,
the new ROM code had the computer automatically do a few things. It
cleared the screen (displaying "APPLE ][" at the top), and began a scan
down the slots, starting at slot 7 down to slot 1. It examined the first
few bytes of code in each card's ROM for a specific sequence that
identified it as a Disk II controller card. If one was found, control was
passed to that card, causing the disk drive to startup and begin loading
the disk operating system into memory. If no disk controller was found,
the ROM code jumped instead to the start of BASIC (instead of leaving the
user in the Monitor, as in the old ROM). This "Autostart ROM", as it was
called, made it possible to have a system that started up a program on the
disk with little action needed by the user.
The RESET code was more intelligent in the Autostart ROM than in the
Old Monitor ROM. There was now a "Cold Start" RESET (which functioned as
described above), and a "Warm Start" RESET. A Warm Start RESET could occur
without re-booting the Disk II (if it was present); in fact, it ensured
that the disk operating system remained "connected" after RESET was
pressed. This feature was implemented by setting three bytes at the end of
page $03 in memory. Two of the bytes were the address of the place in
memory to which the Apple should jump if RESET was pressed. The third byte
was a specially coded byte created from half of the address byte. When
RESET was pressed, this special "power-up" byte was checked with the
address byte. If they didn't properly match, the Monitor assumed that the
power had just been turned on, and it executed a Cold Start RESET. This
feature was extensively used by writers of copy protected software, so
users could not modify or copy the code in memory simply by pressing the
RESET key.
The other major change, mentioned earlier, was the BASIC that was
supplied in ROM. Gone was Steve Wozniak's hand-assembled Integer BASIC, in
favor of the newer Applesoft. Since these ROM versions of BASIC used the
same memory locations, they could not be used simultaneously. With the
introduction of the II Plus, Apple also released the Applesoft Firmware
card. This card, which plugged into slot 0, made it possible for previous
Apple II owners to have some of the benefits of the II Plus without having
to buy an entirely new computer. Even with that card, however, you could
not use features of one BASIC while the other was active, and switching
from one BASIC to the other erased any program that was being used at the
time. The two BASICs could be told apart by the prompt they used; Integer
BASIC used the ">" character, but Applesoft used the "]" character.
Another change made to the Monitor ROM made screen editing easier.
The original Apple II's procedure for editing a line typed in BASIC or in
the Monitor was tedious at best. To change a line of text in BASIC, you
had to list the line, move the cursor up to the start of the line, and then
use the right-arrow key to "copy" text from the screen into the input
buffer. If you wanted to skip part of the line, you had to move the cursor
past the text that you wanted to eliminate WITHOUT using the arrow keys.
If you wanted to INSERT something into the line, you had to move the cursor
off the line (above it or below it), type the additional text, and then
move the cursor back into the line to finish copying the original part of
the line.
For example, suppose you had typed this line in Applesoft and
displayed it on the 40-column screen:
]LIST 100
100 FOR I = 1 TO 100: PRINT "I
LIKE MY APPLE": NEXT : END
To change that line so the PRINT statement read "I REALLY LIKE MY
APPLE" meant either retyping the entire line, or using the edit feature.
(If the line was particularly long, it was preferable to edit rather than
retype the entire line). To edit this line, you would have to move the
cursor up to the "1" of "100" and begin pressing the right arrow key. When
you got to the "L" of "LIKE" you would have to move the cursor above or
below the line, type the word "REALLY" followed by a space, then move the
cursor back to the "L" of "LIKE", and continue copying with the right arrow
key. After editing a line, the screen might look like this:
100 FOR I = 1 TO 100: PRINT "I
LIKE MY APPLE": NEXT : END
REALLY
(In this example, I moved the cursor down one line, typed "REALLY",
and then moved it back to the start of the word "LIKE"). If you didn't
make any mistakes it would read like this:
]LIST 100
100 FOR I = 1 TO 100: PRINT "I
REALLY LIKE MY APPLE" : NEXT
: END
However, if you didn't take care to skip over the extra spaces
inserted in front of the word "LIKE" by the Applesoft LIST command, it
could appear this way:
100 FOR I = 1 TO 100: PRINT "I
REALLY LIKE MY APPLE"
: NEXT : END
The big problem with these cursor moves for editing under the Old
Monitor was that each move required two keypresses. To move the cursor up,
you had to press "ESC" and then "D" EACH TIME you wanted to move the cursor
up. "ESC A" moved right, "ESC B" moved left, and "ESC C" moved the cursor
down. With a long line that needed much editing, this would get old real
fast. Not only was it cumbersome, but the layout of the keyboard made it
difficult to remember the correct letters used for cursor movement;
although "D" (up) was above "C" (down), it seemed that "D" should stand for
"Down". Also confusing was that "A" was to the left of "B", but their
functions were the opposite of their position!
The new Autostart ROM improved this screen editing process just a
bit. Now, pressing "ESC" turned on a special editing mode. Repeated
presses of "I" (up), "J" (left), "K" (right), and "M" (down) continued to
move the cursor until a key other than ESC was pressed. On the keyboard
these letters were arranged in a sort of "directional keypad" or diamond,
which made remembering the moves a little easier. The previous ESC editing
codes were still supported, but still with their previous limitations.
Unfortunately, however, you still couldn't tell whether you were in the
regular text entry mode or in the ESC editing mode, and often attempts at
changing a line took several tries to get it right.<4>,<5>
Other features added in the new Autostart ROM included the ability to
pause a listing by pressing Ctrl-S (VERY helpful when trying to scan
through a long program!) As mentioned above, pressing RESET would return
control through the soft-entry vectors on memory page $03. This would
allow a user to exit from a runaway BASIC program by pressing RESET, and
still keep program and variables intact in memory (which could not be
guaranteed with the old Monitor ROM).<5>
John Arkley at Apple wrote the changes to the original Monitor ROM
and created the Autostart ROM in November 1978 (he's the "John A" mentioned
in the source code listing found in the 1981 edition of the APPLE II
REFERENCE MANUAL). After he had done the work and the ROMs had been
created, Apple wanted to publish a new version of the Reference Manual to
cover the Apple II Plus. The older Reference Manual (affectionately known
as the "Red Book") had included an assembly language source code listing of
the Monitor ROM. They wanted to include the source for BOTH versions of
the Monitor, but a problem came up. While developing the Monitor, Apple
had used a local mainframe computer dial-up service known as "Call
Computer." They used a cross-assembler on that computer, assembled the
code, and then used the resulting object code to create the ROM. (A
cross-assembler is an assembler that creates object code for a processor
other than the one the cross-assembler runs on. For example, if you can
write 8080 machine code with an assembler running on a 6502-based computer,
you are using a cross-assembler). Unfortunately, Call Computer had
accidentally done a system backup with the source and destination disks
reversed, erasing all the files containing the source code for the Apple II
Monitors. There were no disk or cassette copies of the source code for the
Autostart ROM back at Apple. Working from the source listing in the Red
Book, John recreated the source file for the original Monitor, and then
disassembled his own modifications for the II Plus and re-created his
Autostart ROM source file. Those reconstructed listings are what appeared
in the 1981 edition of the Apple II Reference Manual.<6>
Not everyone was pleased with the modifications made in the Autostart
ROMs, however. Some of the authors of the magazine CALL-A.P.P.L.E. liked
to refer to the new computer as the "Apple II Minus", since Arkley had to
remove some of their beloved routines from the ROMs to make room for the
new features. Missing from the Apple II Plus ROMs were Integer BASIC, the
miniassembler, and Woz's SWEET 16 interpreter (that entire space now being
used by Applesoft). Missing from the Monitor were the assembly language
STEP and TRACE features, and a set of sixteen-bit multiply and divide
routines.<5>
THE APPLE II PLUS: COST
The new Apple II Plus, at $1,195, sold for over $100 less than the
original Apple II, although it came with more memory and had Applesoft
(previously an added expense item) in ROM.
THE APPLE II PLUS: BELL & HOWELL
Apple made a deal early on with Bell & Howell to let them sell the
Apple II Plus with a Bell & Howell name plate on it for use in schools.
These Apples were black colored (instead of the standard beige), and had
screws on the back to keep the lids on (apparently to keep students' hands
out). These Apples (sometimes called "Darth Vader" Apples) also had the
"shift-key mod" (see below) applied. Since Bell & Howell was a major
supplier of school equipment, this was a means for Apple to get a foothold
in the school environment.<7>,<8>
Bell & Howell also had electronics correspondence courses, and used
the black Apple II Plus for one of their courses. They offered a one year
warranty, instead of the ninety-day warranty offered by Apple.<9>,<10>,<11>
THE APPLE II PLUS: EARLY USER EXPERIENCES
An Apple II veteran on GEnie, Dennis Ulm, kindly provided me with the
following reproduction of his ORIGINAL Apple II Plus packing list. It
gives a little picture of what early non-disk users had to work with:
APPLE II PLUS
PACKING LIST
This package should contain the following items:
item no. part number description
---- --- ----------- -----------
1 1 600-2023 cassette tape: LITTLE BRICKOUT, COLOR DEMOSOFT
2 1 600-2024 cassette tape: RENUMBER/APPEND, ALIGNMENT TEST TONE
3 1 600-2025 cassette tape: FINANCE I, PENNY ARCADE
4 1 600-2026 cassette tape: LEMONADE, HOPALONG CASSIDY
5 1 600-2027 cassette tape: BRIAN'S THEME, PHONE LIST
6 1 030-2057 manual: Introductory Programs for the Apple II Plus
7 1 030-0044 manual: The Applesoft Tutorial
8 1 030-0013 manual: Applesoft II BASIC Programming Reference
Manual
9 1 030-0004 manual: Apple II Reference Manual
10 1 030-0035 publication: Apple Magazine
11 1 600-0033 1 pair of game controls
12 1 590-0002 cable: to hook up a cassette recorder
13 1 590-0003 cable: power cord for the Apple II Plus
14 1 030-0001 Apple Warranty Card
15 1 600-0816 Apple II Plus System 16K
or
600-0832 Apple II Plus System 32K
or
600-0848 Apple II Plus System 48K
(LITTLE BRICKOUT was an abbreviated Applesoft version of Woz's
Integer BASIC Breakout game (the reason he designed the Apple II in the
first place). BRIAN'S THEME was a hi-res graphics program that drew lines
on the screen in various patterns. HOPALONG CASSIDY was a "guess who"
program that also used the hi-res screen).<12>,<13>
Also included in Dennis' II Plus box was this photocopied instruction
sheet:
TAPE LOADING INSTRUCTIONS
If problems are encountered in LOADing tape programs, it
may be necessary to "queue" (sic) the tape before LOADing. To
queue a tape, use the following procedure:
1. Rewind the tape.
2. Disconnect the cable from the tape recorder (so you can
hear what's on the tape).
3. Start the tape recorder in PLAY mode.
4. When a steady tone is heard, STOP the tape recorder.
5. Connect the cable to the tape recorder and adjust the
volume and tone controls on the tape recorder to the
recommended levels.
6. Make sure your computer is in BASIC.
7. Type LOAD.
8. START the tape playing.
9. Press RETURN.
The program should LOAD properly. If an error message occurs,
repeat the procedure, but try readjusting the tone and volume
controls on the tape recorder.
Dennis says that in his experience it took at least five to ten tries
to get anything to load properly from tape!
THE APPLE II PLUS: MORE HARDWARE ADD-ONS
Lower-case was still not supported on the new Apple II Plus, though
it was a popular user-modification. The thriving industry for Apple II
peripherals made up for this shortcoming, with various vendors supplying
small plug-in circuit boards that fit under the keyboard, allowing display
of lower-case on the screen (and sometimes direct entry of lower-case from
the keyboard). By 1981, when the Revision 7 motherboard was released for
the Apple II Plus, a different method of character generation was used,
which reduced radio-frequency interference that was generated. For
Revision 7 boards, lower-case characters could be displayed with the
addition of only a single chip. However, unless a user changed the
keyboard encoder with a third-party product, only upper-case characters
could be typed.<14>
The keyboard itself underwent some changes, both by users and by
Apple. The original RESET key was in the upper right-hand corner of the
keyboard. The problem with that key was that it had the same feel as the
keys around it, making it possible to accidentally hit RESET and lose the
entire program that was being so carefully entered. One user modification
was to pop off the RESET keycap and put a rubber washer under it, making it
necessary to apply more pressure than usual to do a RESET. Apple fixed
this twice, once by replacing the spring under the keycap with a stiffer
one, and finally by making it necessary to press the CTRL key and the RESET
together to make a RESET cycle happen. The keyboards that had the
CTRL-RESET feature made it user selectable via a small slide switch just
inside the case (some people didn't want to have to press the CTRL key to
do a RESET).
Another keyboard limitation was addressed through a modification that
became known as the "shift-key mod". This was such a widely used trick
that Apple ended up supporting it in hardware when they designed the
Apple IIe. Since the II and II Plus keyboards could not directly generate
lower-case characters, early word processing programs had to find some way
to make up for that deficiency. Apple's own Apple Writer program used the
ESC key as a shift and shift-lock key, displaying upper-case characters in
inverse video and lower-case in regular video. Other programs suggested
installing the shift-key mod to allow more natural entry of upper-case,
using the SHIFT key already present on the keyboard. The user had to
attach a wire to the contact under the SHIFT key, and run it to the game
port where the input for push-button 2 was found. (This push-button PB2,
$C063 in memory, was for one of an optional second pair of game paddles
that third-party hardware companies supplied for the Apple II). The
program would assume that all letters being typed were in lower-case,
unless the SHIFT key (attached now to paddle button PB2) was also being
pressed; in that case the letter would be entered as upper-case. Since the
PB2 button was not often used for a second pair of game paddles, it was
unlikely that this modification would be accidentally triggered by pressing
one of the game paddle buttons. This modification did NOT use buttons PB0
or PB1, which were on the first pair of game paddles. (PB0 and PB1 now
correspond to the Open-Apple and Solid-Apple/Option keys on modern Apple II
computers).
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NEXT INSTALLMENT: The Apple IIe
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NOTES
<1> -----, "Memory Organization", APPLE II REFERENCE MANUAL, 1979,
1981, pp. 70-73.
<2> -----, APPLE II REFERENCE MANUAL, 1979,1981, pp. 25-27, 34-36.
<3> Bruce Field, "A.P.P.L.E. Doctor", CALL-A.P.P.L.E., Jan 1984, pp.
74-75.
<4> -----, "Apple and Apple II History", THE APPLE II GUIDE, Fall
1990, pp. 9-16.
<5> -----, APPLE II REFERENCE MANUAL, 1979,1981, pp. 25-27, 34-36.
<6> John Arkley, (personal telephone call), Sep 9, 1991.
<7> Joe Regan, GEnie A2 ROUNDTABLE, Category 2, Topic 16, Apr 1991.
<8> Dan Paymar, "Curing A Shiftless Apple", CALL-A.P.P.L.E., May
1982, pp. 63-64.
<9> Tom Vanderpool, GEnie A2 ROUNDTABLE, Category 2, Topic 16, Mar &
Aug 1991.
<10> Tom Zuchowski, GEnie A2 ROUNDTABLE, Category 2, Topic 16, Mar
1991.
<11> Steve Hirsch, GEnie A2 ROUNDTABLE, Category 2, Topic 16, Mar
1991.
<12> Dennis Ulm, GEnie A2 ROUNDTABLE, Category 2, Topic 16, Apr 1991.
<13> Wes Felty, GEnie. A2 ROUNDTABLE, Category 2, Topic 16, Apr 1991.
<14> Bruce Field, "A.P.P.L.E. Doctor", CALL-A.P.P.L.E., Jan 1984, pp.
74-75.
APPLE II HISTORY
===== == =======
Compiled and written by Steven Weyhrich
(C) Copyright 1992, Zonker Software
(PART 7 -- THE APPLE IIE)
[v1.1 :: 26 Jan 92]
PRELUDE: THE APPLE III PROJECT
As we continue our travels examining the history of the Apple II,
let's fine tune the time-machine card on our souped-up Apple II 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
Apple II 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 Apple II 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 Apple II was finding a place in
the home, the classroom, and the office.
At Apple Computer, Inc., however, the Apple II was not viewed with
the same degree of loyalty. By September 1979 the Apple II 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
Apple II computer, they began to enlarge the engineering department to
begin designing new products.<1> These new design efforts had begun as far
back as late 1978. Their first effort was an enhanced Apple II 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.<2>,<14>
Because they knew that the Lisa project would take a long time to
complete, and because the Apple II was perceived to have only a short
remaining useful life as a product, they began a new computer project
called the Apple III. Instead of building upon the Apple II 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 Apple III should have. They decided that the
Apple III 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 Apple II 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
Apple II.<3>
Apple executives also decided that with the introduction of the
Apple III they wanted a clear separation between it and the Apple II 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 Apple II 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 Apple III, the
Apple II would quickly lose its appeal.<4>
Because of their desire for a strong and distinct product separation,
the Apple II emulation mode designed into the Apple III was very limited.
The engineers actually ADDED hardware chips that prevented access to the
III's more advanced features from Apple II emulation mode. Apple II
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 Apple II business software, during a time when there wasn't much
NEW business software for the Apple III.
The Apple III 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 Apple II had
been designed and built by Wozniak when he WAS the engineering department).
The first Apple III 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.<3>
Although all of the bugs and limitations of the Apple III 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 Apple III, the engineering staff
cancelled every Apple II engineering program that was ongoing, in
expectation of the Apple III's success. Every single one was
cancelled. We really perceived that the Apple II would not last
six months. So the company was almost all Apple III people, and
we worked for years after that to try and tell the world how good
the Apple III 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 Apple II 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 Apple IIe,
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."<4>
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 Apple II, and
was criticized by the Apple III 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
Apple III project, while suspending all further development on the
Apple II. They pegged their chances for the business market in 1980 on the
Apple III. 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."<3> 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 Apple II 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 Apple II 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 Apple II in THEIR ingenuity at finding new uses for the II, that its
value increased and stimulated yet more new sales. The Apple II "beat" the
odds of survival that historically were against it.
THE APPLE IIE: BEGINNINGS
When Apple saw that the sales on the Apple II 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 Apple II 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 Apple II. Because of that
misconception, the final code name for the updated Apple II was "Super II",
and lasted until its release.<5>
THE APPLE IIE: HARDWARE
Part of the IIe project grew out of the earlier work on custom
integrated circuits for the Apple II. When they finally decided to go
ahead and improve the design by adding new features, one of the original
plans was to give the Apple II 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 Apple II'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 Apple III,
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 Apple IIe.<6>
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 Apple II 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.<6>,<7>
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 Apple II 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 Apple II 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.<5>
THE APPLE IIE: SUCCESS
The new Apple IIe 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 Apple IIe 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 Apple IIc was released in
1984, IIe sales continued beyond those of the IIc, despite the IIc's
built-in features.<8>
THE APPLE IIE: MODIFICATIONS
Early Apple IIe 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 Apple II 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.<9>
THE APPLE IIE: THE ENHANCED IIE
This version of the Apple IIe was introduced in March of 1985. It
involved changes to make the IIe more closely compatible with the Apple IIc
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.<10>,<11>
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.<12>
THE APPLE IIE: EMULATION CARD ON MACINTOSH LC
In early 1991, Apple introduced a new version of the Apple IIe. 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 Apple IIe
cost only $199, but the required Macintosh peripheral went for about
$2,495, which makes the combination the most expensive Apple II 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
Apple II interface software, more of the memory allocated to the Macintosh
could be used by the IIe (strange way of designing an Apple II!). 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 Apple IIe card).
To use 5.25 disks with this Apple IIe, 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.<13> It had limitations, however. For a 1991
Apple II, 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 Apple II 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 Apple II and a Mac in one machine was important, this was
the best way to do it.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NEXT INSTALLMENT: The Apple IIc
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
NOTES
<1> Freiberger, Paul, and Swaine, Michael. "Fire In The Valley, Part
I (Book Excerpt)", A+ Magazine, Jan 1985, p. 45-48.
<2> Freiberger, Paul, and Swaine, Michael. "Fire In The Valley, Part
II (Book Excerpt)", A+ Magazine, Jan 1985, p. 46,51.
<3> Rubin, Charles. "The Life & Death & Life Of The Apple II",
Personal Computing, Feb 1985, p. 72.
<4> Williams, Gregg, and Moore, Rob. "The Apple Story, Part 2: More
History And The Apple III", Byte, Jan 1985, pp. 177-178.
<5> Tommervik, Al. "Apple IIe: The Difference", Softalk, Feb 1983,
pp. 118-127, 142.
<6> Williams, Gregg. "'C' Is For Crunch", Byte, Dec 1984, pp.
A75-A78, A121.
<7> Little, Gary. Inside The Apple //c, 1985, pp. 1-7.
<8> Rose, Frank. West Of Eden: The End Of Innocence At Apple
Computer, 1989, pp. 98-99.
<9> Weishaar, Tom. "Ask Uncle DOS", Open-Apple, Dec 1986, p. 2.86.
<10> Weishaar, Tom. "A Song Continued", Open-Apple, Mar 1985, pp.
1.20-1.21.
<11> Weishaar, Tom. "Demoralized Apple II Division Announces
Enhanced IIe...", Open-Apple, Apr 1985, pp. 1.25-1.27.
<12> Weishaar, Tom. "Apple Introduces An Updated IIe", Open-Apple,
Jan 1987, p. 3.1.
<13> Doms, Dennis. "The Apple II as Mac peripheral", Open-Apple,
Jul 1991, pp. 7.43-7.44.
<14> This was an early version of the Lisa project. When the 68000
microprocessor became available from Motorola, it was decided to
use that as a single processor for the Lisa. Also, after Steve
Jobs paid a visit to the Xerox lab and saw the Xerox Star
computer with its icon interface and mouse pointing device, he
pushed strongly for the Lisa to work in that way.
APPLE II HISTORY
===== == =======
Compiled and written by Steven Weyhrich
(C) Copyright 1992, Zonker Software
(PART 8 -- THE APPLE IIC)
[v1.1 :: 12 May 92]
PRELUDE: STEVE JOBS AND MACINTOSH
Rewind back to 1982, before the Apple IIe was introduced, and adjust
the tuning on our Flux Capacitor-enhanced peripheral card. Before dealing
specifically with the smallest Apple II, 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 [Apple III 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."<1> 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
Apple III 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
Apple III, a reorganization in 1980 moved the Apple II 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 Apple II 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 Apple II during this time? The efforts to
make it less expensive to build were progressing, and the Apple IIe was in
the formative stages. In the summer of 1981 someone proposed a portable
Apple II, 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
Apple II 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."<2>
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.<3>
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 Apple II as a product
"focused" to a specific group of customers, primarily new users. Originally
he had planned a closed Apple II 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 Apple IIe 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.<4>
Although he was told it was not be possible, Jobs strongly pushed for
the mouse in this closed Apple II to be compatible with the Macintosh
mouse--and they managed to make it work.<2> 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.<4>
They began work on the Apple IIc in earnest right after the IIe was
finished. Because they were trying to squeeze an Apple IIe 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.<4>
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).<4>
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.<4>
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.<4>,<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.<4>,<6> 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.<4>
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
"Apple II 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 int