If you really want to get into early Apple hardware, then the ][+ and //e are the ways to go. Platinum //e and IIgs if you want to experience the declining years of Apple 2 series..
The 2series was awesome, and it's hastened demise ended the era of a time when ONE programmer could know everything there is to know about a computer system. She could know sound, graphics, dos, input/output controllers, and all the necessary details of the hardware. It was a one man show back then. Just like the Atari 2600 (and other 8-bit consoles). Remember seeing the title pages for software back then? It was one programmer only. Sometimes two. Today, it is a team of hundreds if not thousands! Don't give me that shit that one guy wrote Office 2010. I argued and argued that same point for many a minute with somebody recently. And as a side note, a lot of people think Bill Gates is like the best programmer in the world since he writes Office and Windows and invented the internet. I digress.
I experienced that directly - I found that I could understand the 2series inside and out. When the Mac came out, I didn't understand any of it. And was supremely puzzled by the lack of expansion slots. Perhaps I am biased toward the 2series to begin with. But. I remember getting the Apple ][+ home and I got a cassette player going, and a game or two, and an RF modulator. I'll always fondly remember that the Sup'R'Mod was the first bit of expansion kit I did to my ][+. And it snowballed from there. Next came a Disk ][, and interface card. Then a 16k card. Imagine to my dismay I had to load DOS into low memory and suck up 10k of ram in the process. Then imagine my elation I could load it into HI-MEM (the 16k card). Then imagine my dismay again, when I had to give up the INT FP functionality if I did DOS in HI-MEM. No more Integer Basic speed demon.. Then imagine my elation I could compile shit with The Einstein Compiler. Now my most inefficient programs blasted by with Machine Language speed. I was happy again
I learned all sorts of compromises and how to work around them! And it was fun! Then I got a printer Epson MX-80 F/T with Graftrax III in rom and a Grappler+ interface *AND* an external micro-buffer, then a 14 inch Trinitron TV to act as my own monitor.
Next up was some stuff from Mountain Hardware, like the Music System, and a RomPlus, and a multi-function board. I got a Z-80 CPU card too. I liked the printer setup a whole-lot, but I was quite annoyed I couldn't submit my homework because it was shit dot-matrix. Then I discovered how to advance the paper by 1/216th of an inch - or one pulse of the paper advance stepper motor. That, with doublestrike I could get near daisy-wheel printout quality. I was rolling! But then they quickly complained everything was in upper case. I got a Beamon Porter POWERCASE rom to get me lowercase. I was rocking! Somewhere in there I discovered pirating software and warez. I immediately got a 2nd Disk ][ drive. And you can guess, BBS'ing and modems weren't far behind. I was hot shit with a Hayes MicroModem II, the one with the little black box called a MicroCoupler. Frustrated with me tying up the phone lines for 3 hours at a crack, I leveraged and blackmailed my parents into getting me an Apple Cat II modem.
But going to back to the Micro-Buffer from Practical Peripherals.. It was da'bomb! I could do marathon printing sessions, dumping 30K and bigger AppleSoft listings in a few seconds and while it was printing I could then get to work on modifying a line or two, then dump it again! And again. I'd go through cartons and cartons of fanfold paper in a week! We once had a special recycling truck come by to take what must have been 60 or more bags of printouts. Programming was intensive. And we did it all!
Along the way I opened up my BBS and it ran for several years. In order to stay "elite" I got a 212 card with all the trimmings, and a firmware chip and touch-tone decoder, expansion module, external handset, BSR X-10 stuff. To help with programming all this shit, I got a Videx Enhancer and Function Strip. My BBS grew by leaps and bounds. I got TimeMaster II H.O. clock card, a Mocking Board, and a SIDER 10megger. Somewhere along the way I acquired a prototype card and built an extra 3 slots. But that wasn't enough. I eventually got 2 Mountain Hardware Expansion Chassis, but only used one of them. Somewhere else in there was a 3.6MHz accelerator card, Transwarp. And of course, all sorts of cables and a Kensington System Saver, and 4 or 5 sets of paddles and joysticks were acquired along the way. A ZipChip and RocketChip are among other bits of hardware I "evaluated" on a permanent basis. And of course the obligatory serial and parallel interface cards, the first early ones. And later a SuperSerial board.
Not only was I accumulating mass amounts of hardware and software I also racked up a $1000+ phone bill which my parents and the court agreed to let much of it slide. Determined to still connect cross-country, I learned boxing and phreaking. Wargames dialing was in there too.
I briefly farted around with the Gibson Lightpen System. But I never took an interest in it beyond the novelty. I was more interested in speech synthesis and recognition. Like with the Votrax Type-N-Talk. And soon I was taken by the wind with a KoalaPad. It almost threatened to derail my BBS; I used it so much. I built up a nice lovely collection of "hi-res" pictures, the popular ones of the time, and of course my own. I got a real Apple Co. Graphics Tablet, but it sat in the corner, un-used. I was more interested in RF communications and Radar Dishes and big-ass antennas at that moment.
My main problem, still, was memory expansion. The //e was announced and I had to have it! I hated giving up the type-ahead buffer in the Enhancer. But, like I learned from day one, compromises and exchanges were part of the early computing experience. Most of my hardware transferred over, except for the 16K card (the first Microsoft consumer product!) This was one of the first with an S/N of about 400 - 450 or so. With the //e we put dos way up high in AUX-MEM, or rather, on a different page and banked it in and out when we needed disk access. This allowed me to have like a 93K-byte
MONDO-SIZED BBS program going. It just grew and grew! We even got around to doing Hi-Res graphics on-line, but it was rudimentary and more or less a see-if-we-can-do-it sort of thing.
There were other bits of hardware and I didn't even mention my software adventures or Voyager-2 odyssey in this post. But suffice it to more than say - the Apple II was the best for playing with expansion boards and building your own "Add-ons". It was just so cool.
And then that asshole jobs came by and killed off the 2series. I never could understand how an Apple computer could not have expansion slots. It seemed bastardized and raped. But for the likes of the C64 and 400/800 and Trash-80's, slots or no slots, it didn't make or break the deal. I was alright with them just as they were. But to rape the 2series of the slots, that was bad. I have a //c and //c+, but I hated them at the time. And that Mac thing, yech.. I suppose I didn't like giving up my big monitor and color graphics at the time.
I never did the Mac thing, not even till today. I neither like nor dislike Apple products today. I use iTunes for my digital music needs. It's cool and it works.
As far as expansion slots in machines today, I prefer systems with as much integrated on the mainboard as possible. Things just seem to work better and there's less hassle. I suppose I am biased again from the days of the 80486 - Pentium II. I hated adding hardware because there was always conflict to solve either in Autoexec.Bat or Config.Sys or the Bios or even Win95 itself. In many ways it was easier to set up 2series hardware than it was PC-386-486 hardware.
Today, I think USB rocks and is one of the key technologies that took computers from being technically complex to simple. USB obfuscated all that interrupt and com-port shit and DMA. One should think of USB as a modern-day expansion slot. And you can get an expansion chassis for $7.99 if you need more slots.
And there you have it, a tiny glimpse into the variety of 2series early expansion options.
Edited by Keatah, Sat Dec 3, 2011 11:18 PM.