Re: Your first A2.

["Roger Johnstone" <rojaws@mac.com>]

In article <3b4750aa.5457783@newsflash.concordia.ca>, 
a_specto@alcor.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector) wrote:

>     Wasn't one of the "features" of the Apple II Plus that it shipped
> with 48K RAM standard out of the box?
>
>     Unless you meant to say you had an original Apple II, although
> those were sold prior to 1980. I started out my Apple II days with
> a full 64K RAM, though by that time the (then) only 2 month old
> Apple IIc came with 128K. That seemed enormous back then!
> Of course when I picked up a color monitor (not TV!) shortly
> afterwards, it was more exciting than any amount of RAM. :)
>
> Mitchell Spector
> a_specto@alcor.concordia.ca

I used to think that too, but the Apple II+ could come with 16, 32 or 48KB.
I presume as memory prices fell they stopped selling the 16 and 32KB models.

My first Apple II was a clone. A Dick Smith Cat, which was a rebadged Laser
3000 sold by Dick Smith Electronics in New Zealand and Australia. I bought
it second hand about 1986 (technically my mother bought it, I was still in
high school) with a matching floppy drive and a Mitsubishi green monitor.

The Cat/Laser 3000 was made around 1984. It was only really compatible with
the II+ not the IIe, but many of its features were better than the IIe. It
had 64KB of RAM, but the top 16KB was addressed differently from Apple's
language card, although you could get a 16KB RAM cartridge that emulated a
language card (please don't ask me how many banks of RAM and ROM this would
give you in the top 16KB!). It had 80-column text and double-hires graphics,
but they weren't interleaved as on the IIe, instead they ran the processor
at 2MHz when in a double mode. Now why didn't Apple think of that? Or is
that how the Apple III did it? It didn't have lores graphics (no real loss),
but it did have a bit-image mode which had a resolution of 280 by 192 with 8
colours, and no colour limitations.

It also had a sound chip and support in BASIC for sound and all the extra
graphics modes. It had a memory management system that allowed it to be
expanded to 256KB and map any four 16KB blocks into the 64KB memory space.
The biggest problem was that there was almost no software that supported any
of these extra features (I didn't even get the demo software that come with
it, on a tape!) and that it wasn't IIe compatible.

Interestingly, its successor the Laser 128 dropped many of these extra
features, but had the advantage that it was much more compatible.

I still have my Cat, but the internal switching supply died about 1990. I
rigged up a temporary supply but it still wouldn't run (I just got the
familiar text-screen-filled-with-a-patern). So it's been sitting in bits in
its box ever since. One day I'll have a look at it, fortunately I've still
got the Technical Reference Manual.

--
Roger Johnstone, Invercargill, New Zealand

Apple II - Future Cop:LAPD - Warcraft II
http://homepage.mac.com/rojaws
______________________________________________________________________

The three most dangerous things are a programmer with a soldering iron, a
manager who codes, and a user who gets ideas.