Some interesting new finds

["Ernest" <ernestls@home.com>]

Last week, a guy here in the Seattle area posted an ad for some apple II
stuff for cheap if someone would come and pick it up. So I set up a meeting
with him a couple of nights ago, and holy smoke, he had a ton of really
great stuff. I haven't even finished going through it all, and already I'm
over whelmed. I'm having sensory overload, I think.

He used to work for A.P.P.L.E back in the 80's, so over time, he acquired
several prototype boards from various companies, and heavily modified an
Apple II+.  I left his place with several boxes of stuff, including lots of
original software with manuals, tons of books and Xeroxed specs on all sorts
of things, a shoebox full of lose original software, a laser 128, with
original mouse, external floppy drive, and user manual... in other words, I
got a gold mine of vintage Apple II stuff for $50.00.

Here is the beginning of what I got.

Apple II+ (1979) This has all sorts of gadgets attached to it, including a
homemade multi-boot ROM device with a toggle switch, a KeyTran device that
does something with the keyboard layout, and a UltraTerm Display board
that's plugged into another homemade something or other stuck into an empty
chip slot near the color trim (thing?) There is an internal fan pointed at
this little daughter board.  What is this?

An SSM Serial & Parallel Apple Interface card "complete with cables and
serial firmware" in it's original box, with docs and software. This card is
unusual (for me) because it has a separate cable port for each interface,
and two attached cables. It's dated 1979, the baud rate is changed (300,
600, 1200) via a little dial pot.

A Multi-Tech Modem II Data Modem (1983) in it's original box, with user
manuals and software disks. This is a funky looking device, with a card that
goes in the apple, and a cool looking external interface unit. I've never
seen or heard of one of these either. It gives you a choice between 110 or
300 baud.

A Strawberry Board. This is a prototype for sure. He told me that it was
sent to A.P.P.L.E by a company in Japan, to try out to see if they thought
that it would be worth developing for market. It's a long red card with a
big Sanyo battery on it. The interesting part is that someone took one of
those little tiny sanding wheels, and scratched out the IDs on every single
chip. Then, they took a red grease pencil and wrote RINGO on the biggest
chip. The docs are all in Japanese, except for certain computer words, and
there is a cover letter explaining that it's a Real Time Clock, 18 Voice
Synthesizer, and 2-port parallel I/O, and that there were only 22 boards
produced (at that time.)

Needham's Electronics EPROM Programmer card, with docs and software. (1987)

A U-SCI floppy drive. It looks similar to a Disk ][ drive, except it has a
toggle switch on the front, and one red/one green light next to the switch.
It is in it's original box, with docs and software. I think that this drive
is for copying protected software.

Well, that's just the beginning of what I brought home but it was a nice
score for me. Is the source code for Applesoft released to the public? If
not, I found a copy of that too.

Ernest