Re: Apple II Fibernet Interface Card

[Sean Fahey <a2fan@hotmail.com>]

On Friday, June 10, 2011 5:23:21 PM UTC-5, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
 
> The fact that the card has a 6551 ACIA pretty much tells it all.
> 
> It was a fibre-connected serial link, likely running a proprietary
> protocol.  The fibre link may have been dictated by electrical isolation
> requirements for some environment (hospitals, high voltage interface,
> ??), not by any need for speed.

This is anecdotal information that I'm attempting to follow up on. The FiberNet card may be a.) something built but never shipped or b.) its possibly MilSpec.

The card doesn't appear to have a part number on it anywhere. Even late stage Apple proto and pre-production demos usually had a product prefix assigned. Or, another theory is that it might be part of a system that didn't officially exist in a public dealer price sheet. More on that later.

Here are the interesting bits:

The guy who sold the Fibernet card also sold the dual UniDisk drive and dual 5.25 Apple III drive (as well as other interesting gear) over the past several weeks. I wrote him to ask where he got the drives, and he replied:

"Sorry, I don't have much information on the origin of the drives but they came from Apple's Floppy Drive division when they were at the Bubb Road or the Orchard Park facility. We used to get different Floppy drives to evaluate quite often and Engineers and Techs were always trying to come up with the next hot product. Some would go through a pretty extensive development stage and then get cancelled. Sometimes when the drives were not being evaluated anymore someone would just build something neat and different to use at their desk.
Apple used to move a lot back in the day and would just toss unused stuff away or give it to employees to use at home. (Not like today when everything is accounted for). Bottom line is I am not much help in identifying them but can tell you they were made by Apple folk and they have been in boxes in storage 
for many years."

This could mean the Fibernet card is just another proto -- those crazy Apple engineers, always brainstorming on the next big thing.

The next bit of info came from a former co-worker - the guy who oriented me in my current job about 10 years ago. During the course of "getting to know each other" chit-chat, my interest in the Apple II came up and he mentioned he still had an Apple II in storage. He went on to tell me that the reason he liked the Apple II so much was that he worked on them before he retired from the Air Force. My co-worker said he traveled site to site, servicing the electronics in nuclear missle silos. He claimed that the Air Force, for a time, used the Apple II *in* the some of the silos for general administrivia and training simulations. He also said (and I kind of ignored it at the time) that some of the Apples were connected via fiber optic links back to NORAD. At the time, I assumed he was mis-remebering because I'd never seen or heard of a fiber interface for the Apple II. So when I saw the Fibernet card auction, this prior conversation hit me like a ton of bricks.

The latter scenario seems plausible to me now, because we know there are Tempest compliant Apple II cases in existence. For those who don't know what Tempest is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPEST

A fiber interface could be part of a overall Tempest-spec Apple II system.

We also know that the Air Force and Army used to buy Apple II computers and some of them were ruggedize for use in the field.