A Notable Apple II / Mac donation

[Dog Cow]

A family friend donated a lot of his old Apple II and Mac equipment, software, and manuals to me earlier this week. The Apple II stuff is all from around the IIe era (1982-1983) and the Mac stuff (mostly just disks) is from 1984-1986, and most are MFS disks, with some 800k disks which were probably used in a Mac Plus. This guy was involved with an Apple dealership, so he had a bunch of pamphlets, disks, and hand-outs that Apple gave only to dealers-- the average collector doesn't have them.

Well, it was certainly exciting. I got an Apple //e, about 30-40 manuals, and a bunch of disks. The majority of the disks are still readable, and I've archived them on to my Mac mini for safe-keeping. Around 5 of the Apple manuals were still shrink-wrapped, and about 8 disks were still in shrink-wrap as well. The //e had an Extended 80-column card and a disk controller card so I hooked up the drives I was given awhile back (remembering to align the pins correctly) and discovered a problem.

While the disks, drives, and controller card are OK, (I tested in my IIgs) there is something wrong with the //e, and I think it has to do with RAM. I can't get any disk with ProDOS or DOS 3.3 to load. Weird noises, like clicking, comes from the speaker and cassette ports (I hooked a powered speaker to the cassette out) and a few random characters appear on-screen. Moving the controller card to other slots changes the behavior a bit, but still does not work. Copy-protected games such as Chop Lifter, Boulder Dash, and Skyfox will boot up to the title screen but not further. A disk for the IIgs will boot to an error "You must boot this disk on IIgs hardware." Placing the controller card in any slot other than 6 and booting the Apple Presents the IIe disk puts a message on screen "You must boot from slot 6"

Applesoft BASIC works, as I have typed and run some programs. These strange behaviors make me think there is something wrong with the RAM. I used an IC extractor and removed and then replaced all of the ICs on the motherboard. I also cleaned all the key caps and the plastic case. The W key is broken, but all others work.

 

[Green78II]

Sounds like a pretty good haul!!!! If I remember correctly, each slot is for specific things: slot 1 printer, slot 2 modem, slot 3 can't remember, slot 4 can't remember, slot 5 3.5" drive, slot 6 5.25" drive slot 7 specialty card. I'm not sure about the others, but I'm positive on the disk drive slots.

 

[Dog Cow]

Since I have an Extended 80-Column card, whenever that card is in the Aux slot, Slot 3 is disabled. I tried moving the controller card to all the different slots. The behavior changed a bit, but still it would not work.

 

[II2II]

The IIe has a built-in self test. One website suggests that you access it by pressing control, solid-apple, reset (though I thought it was solid-apple, hollow-apple, reset). I'm not sure how indepth it is, but it may help you find the problem.

Quite frankly though, the Apple gear sounds boring. (And yes, this is from an Apple II enthusiast.) The Mac gear though sounds intensely interesting since pre-System 6 and pre-Mac Plus era stuff seems to be scarce these days. What sort of stuff did you get on those MFS floppies?

 

[Dog Cow]

The IIe has a built-in self test. One website suggests that you access it by pressing control, solid-apple, reset (though I thought it was solid-apple, hollow-apple, reset). I'm not sure how indepth it is, but it may help you find the problem.

It fails. It's supposed to print something like KERNEL OK, but mine doesn't. It says

RAN:

and just stops.

Quite frankly though, the Apple gear sounds boring. (And yes, this is from an Apple II enthusiast.)

I don't know. I haven't really gone into big detail about all of what I got. I've taken photos of it all, but have not cataloged anything yet. I got a big zip bag which I think was for the //c. I can't find any photos of it on the Internet, but this guy had literally 5 or 6 of them, so he gave me one when I noted, "Looks interesting," and he just handed me one. I mostly got a big load of Apple II manuals and a few 5.25" disks when it came down to the Apple II portion. I like manuals though, sometimes even more than getting hardware or software, because there's a lot to learn from reading them. They're comprehensive and authoritative, something you can't find on the Internet. I want to learn to program something useful, and the bulk of the books are Apple programming manuals. I need another bookshelf.

The Mac gear though sounds intensely interesting since pre-System 6 and pre-Mac Plus era stuff seems to be scarce these days. What sort of stuff did you get on those MFS floppies?

A lot, and I suspect most all of it is rare and desirable, but this might make you cry: one of the disks is an original, 1984 Macintosh System Disk. I popped it into my Mac Classic to have a laugh and try to boot off it. It worked twice, and a few hours later, every utility and OS I have reports it as unreadable... even to this day. I suspect some little flakes of magnetic media came off. I'm not too worried about it, anyway, since I'm sure there are already people who have made disk images of it, so since the disk has the original label, I could just rewrite it with an image from the Internet. The majority of the disks with systems on them have 1.1g, with a few newer ones (mostly just the 800k disks) having Finder 4.x or 5.x. I've found one disk which has System 1.0, and the date says 24 Jan 84. I've also made sure to lock all the disks before putting them in the Mac Classic, and I don't ever plan on unlocking them, unless in an extreme case.

I've taken photos of all the disks (not individually, though, going to do that later) and I have archived them. I will release a full list of what I got sometime later.

 

[Dog Cow]

I suppose the carry bag for the //c is kind of rare. A Google search turns up useless crap like laptop and iPod carry bags, but this site has it: http://homepage3.nifty.com/apple2tree/appleiic/aiic6.htm

The first two photos on the left-- that's what I have.