Re: APPLE IIgs

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

Joe Doucette <doucej@rpi.edu> wrote:

> Hello all..
> 
> Here's the story..
> 
> I got my IIgs when they were BRAND new...I was thinking about getting a
> IIe at the time, but figured what the heck..this thing will run IIe
> software, and it's new, so I'll spring for it.
> 
> When I purchased it, the only commercial program available for it was
> Paintworks Plus. (I didn't get it..) Basically, for the first few
> months, it was a modern looking IIe. Then gradually more software came
> out for it.
> 
> The WOZ signature ones (Mine was one of these) were on all of the IIgs
> systems shipped in the first quarter..(Or the first thousand, or
> something funky like that) The ROM in there was supposedly embarrasingly
> buggy, so Apple recalled all the "old" IIgs systems and replaced the
> ROMS. (Authorized Apple dealers switched them, I believe)

Correction: Apple never "recalled" the original IIgs ROM.  They just
made the 00->01 upgrade freely available.  (There was also a problem
with the original VGC chip, which was freely upgradable at about the
same time as ROM 01 became available.)

> "New" systems (Ones made after the updated ROM was complete) came with
> ROM 01 installed. There was never a ROM 02 upgrade as that ROM had a
> couple extra pins on it...

I don't know where you got that idea from.  The reason that there is no
"ROM 02" was to avoid yet more confusion among developers in particular.

Apple didn't have an official name for the original IIgs ROM (it doesn't
say anything on the boot screen).  There is a routine in the firmware
that returns the firmware version number, and it returns zero (hence
"ROM 0", or "ROM 00" if the convention of "ROM 01" is followed; note
however that the 1MB IIgs says "ROM 3", not "ROM 03").

When the revised ROM came out in 1987, it was officially called "ROM 01"
(as shown on the screen, and reported by the version routine).  However,
Apple referred to it as "ROM 2" in some technical documentation (it was
actually the "2nd ROM version" but this was usually just written as "ROM
2").  This caused some confusion.  They leapt straight up to a version
number of 3 for the 1 MB IIgs, thus it reports the version number of 3,
and is the 3rd version of the ROM.

A similar path was followed with the IIc ROM.  The original ROM reports
a version number of 255.  The second one reports a version number of
zero, and the third one reports a version number of three.

> So, basically, there shouldn't be ANY ROM 00 systems left around.

Hardly.  A lot of ROM 00 systems were used in schools as fancy IIes, and
were not upgraded.

> There was a free upgrade to ROM 01, which I think was needed to boot GS/OS.

GS/OS didn't come out until late 1988, at least a year after ROM 01 was
available.  Apple just didn't bother to include support for the original
ROM.  (The only technical reasons would be to avoid any nasty bugs in
the firmware, and having to put a larger patch file on the system disk
that could deal with both ROM versions.) 

If the machine was only being used as a IIe, or even for limited native
IIgs software, there was no major incentive to upgrade the ROM.


As for my early story: I bought my first IIgs in July 1987.  It was a
ROM 00 machine with a "Woz" label.  (I believe Apple Australia and/or
the NZ agent got a large stock of these machines in September 1986, and
it took them longer than expected to sell them.)  The ROM 01 upgrade
wasn't made available to us until around the middle of 1988.  I'm not
sure exactly when new ROM 01 machines became avaiable in NZ - about the
end of 1987, I think.

By the time I got the ROM 1 upgrade, I already had an OctoRAM memory
card with 2 MB installed on it (256K SIMMs).  I bought my first hard
drive (a 60 MB Rodime that cost almost as much as the computer did)
about the same time as the ROM upgrade.  Prior to this I was basically
using the machine as a fancy IIe, with some experimentation with the
IIgs-specific hardware features (I had a lot of knowledge of the innards
of the IIe from extensive use during high school).  With the hard drive
I was able to start using native software effectively, and leapt
straight into writing my own programs with APW.  It has been an upward
spiral ever since...

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz
Snail mail: P.O. Box 27-103, Wellington, New Zealand