Re: Woz Limited Edition

[dempson@actrix.gen.nz (David Empson)]

Bill Robbins <mfumu@alphalink.com.au> wrote:

> In article <9hccqp017dv@enews2.newsguy.com>,
>  "Douglas E. Morris" <dmorris@doors.dnsalias.com> wrote:
> 
> >Ok, in all the GSs I got I also have one that is a 'Woz Limited Edition'
> >system.  Is there anything special about this computer?  I also noticed some
> >of these GSs are Rom 1 and some are Rom 3, is Rom 3 better?  The Woz is Rom
> >1.
> 
> The "Woz Limited Edition" were the first IIgs's to be produced.  There
> were supposed to be no more than about 20,000 of them made, but given
> that I purchased mine in Japan in 1987 (a year after release), I suspect
> there were many more released world wide.

Not necessarily.  I bought mine in New Zealand around June 1987, but I
think the only reason it was still available is that the Apple
distributor had a large shipment of them when the machine was released
(September 1986) and hadn't sold all of them yet.

I thought the rumoured number was 50,000, but I don't recall whether
I've ever seen anything official on the matter.

> However many memory boards could be maxed out at eight meg, the max the
> IIgs can access.  Therefore if you put an eight meg board in a Rom 3, it
> couldn't use the extra meg anyway.  (There may have been certain special
> applications that allowed use of the extra meg for special purposes, I'm
> not sure.)

Nope.  The motherboard can only address 8 MB of "fast" memory.  Anything
beyond bank $7F doesn't enable the memory expansion slot (except for the
ROM disk area starting in bank $F0, which has a different interface and
doesn't provide dynamic RAM refresh).

> The only advantage to me for my uses is that using AppleTalk required the
> tying up of TWO  slots/ports on the Rom 1, but only one on the Rom 3.

Not true.  Both ROM revisions tie up one slot for AppleTalk: slot 7 on a
ROM 1, slot 1 or 2 on a ROM 3.

On a ROM 1, you must set either slot 1 or 2 to "Your Card" in order to
use AppleTalk, and slot 7 must be set to "AppleTalk".  (The loss of the
built-in function of slot 1 or 2 is a moot point, since one of the
serial ports has to be allocated to AppleTalk, so its normal firmware is
useless.)

On a ROM 3, you must set either slot 1 or 2 to "AppleTalk".  You have
the option of also setting slot 7 to "AppleTalk", which is only required
for some brain-dead software which has hard coded assumptions about
AppleTalk being in slot 7 for the IIgs.  This would mean tying up two
slots.

It may be quite useful that a different slot is tied up: on a ROM 3, you
can enable AppleTalk and have a disk controller card of some kind (such
as a SCSI card) in slot 7, which means it will be first in the boot
order for "Scan", with higher priority than a 5.25" drive.

You can't do this on a ROM 1 if you want to use AppleTalk.  At best, you
have to set the startup slot below 6 if you want to bypass booting from
a 5.25" drive under normal circumstances, or set slot 6 to "Your Card"
except when you need to use the 5.25" drive.

> As you can see, the upgrade to Rom 3 was a close call for the benefit
> received vs the cost.

Apple never offered an "upgrade" to ROM 3.  It was sold as a new
machine, and the only way to get the motherboard was to buy the whole
computer.

Third parties (notably Alltech) offered an "upgrade" by swapping the
motherboard.