Another member of the 1977 Trinity Joins the Collection - Apple II

One of my long term goals for collecting Retro Computers is to get the original Trinity of Home Computers from 1977, the TRS-80 Model 1, an original Apple II and a original Commodore PET.  In 2023 I got a really dirty TRS-80 Model 1 and cleaned it up.  I have a Commodore PET 4016 from 1980, but it's not the original machine.  I've also got an early Apple II Plus machine from 1979 which I've setup with the original ROMs so it would behave like an Apple II.

Earlier this year I found out about a large lot for sale locally and I jumped at the chance to buy the entire lot.  I've blogged about starting in on that lot of repairs here already.  I mentioned that I would set the Apple II aside for repairs.  It didn't sit for to many weeks before I came back too it.  Ironically, this machine was built in 1980, one year after my Apple II Plus but they have the same Revision 4 motherboards inside.  If you look on the timeline on Wikipedia it does not show any overlap between Apple II and II+ production but I think that is incorrect, Apple continued to make Apple II and II Plus at the same time and that may have continued right up till they switched to making the Apple IIe in 1983.

When I got the computer on the workbench I found that the video signal was stable but I was getting garbage characters.  Also, not all the keys on the keyboard were working.  I started by taking the entire machine apart and cleaning it throughly, it wasn't too dirty, but the seller had told me these were stored in a basement for years so the machine was just dusty.  This machine will never be a museum piece.  It came from the University of Minnesota so I've left those asset tags on the machine.  It has quite a few scratches and bumps on it but I don't mind since I intend to actually use this machine.

The Keyboard is a Datanetics type.  I sprayed Deoxit on the keys that were not working and most of them came back to function just by cycling them a few dozen times, but the S key was persistently broken.  I was able to find a couple of Datanetics key switches on Amazon so I ordered a couple.  After replacing the S key the keyboard was fully functional, except that the power light was out.  I removed the bulb and tested it, it was working, so it just needed to be reseated into the keyboard and it has been working fine since.

The garbage characters on the screen were are harder fix.  I removed every single socketed IC off the motherboard, sprayed the DIP sockets with Deoxit and replaced them, but the problem persisted.  I should have tested all the RAM chips but at the time I didn't have a tester for the 4116 RAM chips used on this machine (I have since got a working tester for these).  Eventually I was able to identify bad 4116 RAM chips and swap them out.  Since this is an original Apple II I have configured this with 48K RAM.   I will be leaving the 64K RAM card out, and I will not be adding an Autostart ROM, which makes this more authentic to the original experience.  Since the machine starts up in the ROM Monitor you have to learn at least one ROM Monitor command (Control-B) to get BASIC started every time you boot the machine.  I enjoyed learning about all the different early ROM versions of the Apple II and II+ and this is much more interesting now that I have access to the hardware.  Incidentally, the Apple I also started up in the ROM Monitor, and this was all code written by Steve Wozniak himself.

During the repairs the original power supply failed.  This was not the most common failure of RIFA filter capacitors which can be easily replaced, so I removed the circuit board and replaced it with the Reactive Micro Apple II Power Supply kit.  It still looks original because that fits in the original case, but I enjoy having the peace of mind that comes with a modern power supply.

Although I am interested in experimenting with the original hardware configuration, I'm not thrilled with the idea of loading programs from Tape, so I may go ahead and leave the Disk II controller attached even though I know it wasn't an option in 1977.  The Disk II system was and is an amazing "quality of life" upgrade for this machine.

I'm quite happy with how this machine turned out...

Do you have memories of the original Apple II?  If you have thoughts or ideas please leave a comment here, or reach out via my email shown in my profile.