Re: Some simple questions....

[spec@vax2.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

Reposting article removed by rogue canceller.

In article cm6065@wlv.ac.uk writes...
>
>A freindly sort has just donated to me an Apple II Europlus with two
>external 5 1/4" floppy drives marked 'Disk II' & a RGB monitor. I have
>never used one of these machines before & I have some questions.
> 
>What capacity are the drives?

    They are single-sided, 140K per side. You can use the other side
of the disk by cutting a notch on the opposite side and flipping it
over.

>Are PC 5 1/4" disks interchangable, for the exchange of data?

    Absolutely not. IBM formatted disks use a totally incompatible
formatting scheme (MFM) which Apple GCR drives cannot access and
visa-versa. There are rare hardware addons for both systems, requiring
at least a separate controller card which would change things though.

>As it came with no boot floppies, where can I get an operating system
>for it?

    You'll want either the older DOS 3.3 or ProDOS 8. The latter can
be found at Apple's FTP site (ftp://ftp.apple.com/dts/aii) or from
local usergroups, but requires you have at least 64K RAM.

>Is the disk drive usable from the basic?

    No, you'll need to load one of the above operating systems. You can
obviously start using Applesoft BASIC as soon as you turn on the system
and press CONTROL-RESET, but you won't be able to save or load programs
to disk. You can, however, save programs to casette-tape directly. :-)

>How much is this system worth? (Out of curiosity, as I have no desire to
>sell it, well unless it turns out to be worth $10,000 :) )

    Certainly no amount worth selling it, 8-bit Apple II's are fairly
common and the II Plus model is less valued than others due to some
of it's limitations (memory, keyboard, character display). Perhaps
$25-$40, depends on the condition and person buying.

Mitchell Spector
spec@vax2.concordia.ca