Re: Yay! Finally got myself a IIgs!

[John <jlogo10@yahoo.com.au>]

On 29 Jun 2006 02:40:26 -0700, "skylarking" <petsoundsnz@gmail.com>
wrote:

>
>N.N. Thayer wrote:
>> > So anyone else got any Apple II bargains recently?
>>
>> Free from my brother-in-law:
>>
>> Apple ///
>> ProFile 10 MB
>> Monitor ///
>>
>> Free from my dad:
>>
>> Apple ][ (Rev 1)
>> Apple ][+
>> 2 Disk ][ drives
>> Apple //e
>> DuoDIsk
>> Monitor //e
>>
>> And everything works.  :)
>Even the Apple /// works ok? I thought that they were notoriously
>unreliable, and that was one of the reasons they flopped.

The first release of the Apple /// had a near 100% failure rate due to
system overheating.  The revised model (Dec '81) was better and is
probably the most common model found.  The Apple /// Plus released in
Dec '83 was the most reliable revision of all but it was too little to
late and was dumped early in 1984.

The Apple /// flopped for a number of reasons.  It was rushed on to
the marketplace and had some serious quality control problems when
released.  The high initial cost of the system coupled with the
release of the IBM PC in 1981 also worked against the /// in the
business marketplace.  The poor compatibility with existing Apple //
software was also a major drawback with the /// as it was designed to
be a completely separate machine from the Apple // line.

I have a 1982 release Apple /// with 256KB standard and a 10MB ProFILE
hard drive. It's quite a nice machine to use and featured many
advanced hardware improvements which became commonplace in the Apple
//e and later machines (80 column display, bank-switched memory,
upper/lower case support, video interlacing, inbuilt RGB, serial &
disk drive ports).