Apple ][ minus

Along with the "READY GO" clone I posted about previously came our original Apple ][+.

It looks pretty good. These machines generally do. They don't turn yellow like the //es and Macs do. This is, as I recently learned, because they're actually painted that color, and the paint doesn't turn yellow.

This is actually a fairly late Apple ][+, as far as I can tell. With a serial number of A2S2-542439, it's not far under the the highest serial number this poster in 2007 had ever seen (A2S2-544703).

This machine has been mostly stripped of its cards. I'm really not quite sure how this happened, I do think that there was a time that both machines (this one and the "READY GO" clone) were operational, and we had enough disk drives to go around. Maybe somewhere there's a box with another controller card and another disk drive and an Apple-Cat ][ modem and a 20MB hard drive. Maybe I gave them away to somebody at some point. If they're still in our possession, they're very well hidden. All that's left in this computer is the 16K RAM card.

The 16K card is not actually an Apple 16K card, which surprised me somewhat, since I didn't even realize we had a third-party 16K card. But, there it is. The internet doesn't seem to know much about these Ace Electronics 16K expander boards, but I assume it's completely compatible with the Apple 16K card. It is possible that this card actually came with the "READY GO" machine and I swapped them, though I'm not even sure why I would have thought that worth doing.

But, now. Take a look in the lower right corner of the overview of the inside of the computer above. There's a spot in front of the third 74LS161 from the left. It doesn't look healthy. It looks even less healthy close up.

It's possible at least that this is just... goop. That a bit of isopropyl alcohol will bring it up without incident. I'm kind of hoping so. There are a few more of these spots as well.

However possible it might be to fix those little spots up, though, I'm not at all as sure about the freakish horrorshow that lives under the keyboard.

That might be a real problem. There may well be stuff that's simply eaten away under there. Clearly it is going to take a lot of cleanup before I would risk putting power into this board. I have no idea what that is. I don't even really want to speculate. But whatever it is, it doesn't belong on the motherboard.

So, this one is going to take a fair amount of work to bring back to its feet. I'll do what I can when I get a chance and see what I can manage. But I also am not going to hold my breath. It is conceivable that what I really have here is a parts machine.