Re: Help with Original Apple II

[a_specto@alcor.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

"George Wishart" <wishart@gte.net> wrote:

>I went a yard sale last weekend and a lady had a large cardboard box with a
>sign FREE OLD COMPUTER. I took it apart and discovered a ribbin cable was
>unpluged and clean out the cobwebs. and fired it up It seem to work but
>don't know how to load basic or access the floppy drive. I don't have any
>manuals. I get text and what looks like HEX dumps. I never owned a Apple of

    If this indeed is an original Apple II (circa 1977-79) that's
never been upgraded, then that behavior would be normal.
The Integer ROMs would cold boot them machine with a
jumble of random ASCII characters or even bits of low-res 
graphics blocks sometimes.

    At this point you had to press 'Reset' alone to switch into
Monitor (which would give you a "*" prompt), and then press 
Control-B to switch into Integer BASIC (a ">" prompt). From
here you could access the cassette interface or start up the
5.25 drive (if present) by typing "PR#6".

>any kind. The ser. # is 1428. Is this worth anything?

    To collectors it definitely would be. My own vintage Apple II,
manufactured in 1978, is a revision 02 board with serial # 11985
I recall. Apart from 'F8' it has the original Integer ROMs, a 22 year
old Disk II controller with 13-sector PROMs and several late 70's
vintage slot cards (Apple ROM card, Apple Serial Interface Card, 
Apple Parallel Card, Microsoft 16K card). I picked it up free years
back (stored in its original box!) but not so likely to part with it
now. It's actually what started and provoked my collecting interest.

Here's some things to check for to see if it's an original II:

- ROM sockets F8 to E0 populated with 341-000x parts
- Lid cover says "Apple ][" with _no_ "Plus" underneath
- Keyboard has false key that sticks up for Power indicator
- Presence of socketed 4/16K DIP jumpers adjacent DRAM
- Early date code (70's) marked in upper left corner of mainboard
- No presence of any RFI shielding; prior to FCC regulations
- Motherboard revision 06(?) or lower; 820-0001-0x

    Incidentally, the earliest board, revision 0, has no part 
number printed anywhere on the motherboard. It also has 
the most differences between other Apple II (and II Plus era) 
boards--such as Hi-Res graphics only having 4 possible colors 
(black, white, green and purple). Later Apple II boards have 
the part number printed underneath the 6502 CPU; carefully 
pull the chip and look underneath.

Mitchell Spector
a_specto@alcor.concordia.ca