Re: ][ Board only

[Eric Smith <eric@brouhaha.com>]

Michael J. Mahon wrote:
> I've seen Apple main boards attached to a plywood base, along with a
> power supply and a keyboard--no sides or top.  It's called an "Apple
> on a stick".

That's what I was using from 1982 to 1987.  I was too cheap to buy a
normal Apple II+, so I bought a logic board as a service part (Apple
had long since stopped selling the board separately as a product).
The least expensive switching power supply I could find at the time was
made by Power General, if memory serves.  I bought the keyboard (sans
encoder) also as a service part, and used a Videx Keyboard Enhancer II.

I didn't attached the keyboard to the same base, though.  I built a
custom wedge-shaped wooden case for it.

I bought two disk drives and a controller from JDR.  They were basically
clones of the Disk II.  At the time, half-height drives were appearing,
but still cost more than full-height.  Some of the clone drives didn't
work well with all of the copy-protection schemes.  Most of them could
deal with half-tracks, but since the seek profiles were different they
had trouble with spiral-track schemes.

I didn't get my first "real" Apple II until 1994 or so.