Apple IIgs

Donor: Dan Price
Location: Williamsburg, VA

Ahh! The pinnacle of the Apple II line!  Also the end of the line for the venerable series.  Let's take a quick look at its strengths and weaknesses.

The Apple IIgs really was an Apple II on steroids.  It came with over a full meg of ram (256k on the earlier models), up to 3200 color graphics, and 32 channel sound.  It came in a sleek case that opened easily.  Typical of Woz, the inside was a testament to clean design. It supported the new 3.5" drives. Plus, it ran all your old Apple II software, so you didn't lose your prior investments.  You could easily add things like expansion RAM, fancy video boards, and, via SCSI, hard and Bernoulli drives.  And it used all those funky Mac-style mice and keyboards. Finally, the OS looked a heck of a lot like the Mac OS, all nice and graphickey.

So why wasn't it a huge success?  In a nutshell, Apple dumped it in favor of the Macintosh.  But why? I think the main reason is the same reason other new but backwards compatible machines didn't do well. You have a huge installed base of Apple II+ and IIe users. And you have a very small number of IIgs owners.  Are you going to write software that takes advantage of the IIgs's extra features?  Or are you going to keep compatibility with that huge installed base and sell many more copies? The Commodore 128 suffered from the same fate.

You also have multimedia powerhouses like the Amiga and Atari ST coming along, running shiny new software in place of old Apple II programs.

Finally, I seem to remember that the IIgs had some problems with RF interference shielding.  While it had a great sound chip, its own RF emissions would add static to its own sound.

All in all, it's a shame. The machine had some great features and wonderful expandability options. But sometimes you just need to start over. (Cue the Mac!)

Dan Price sent me the mother lode of Apple IIgs stuff.  Along with the unit itself, he included extra keyboards, memory expansion cards, SCSI cards and drives, and tons and tons of software and documentation.  I'll eventually include scans of some of the software and docs, but here's most of the hardware!

• View of the full system
• Close-up of the front of the system unit
• Extreme close-up of the Woz signature
• Sort of a side/front view
• Rear view, from left to right, the ports are:
  • headphones
  • modem
  • printer
  • joystick
  • floppy drive
  • monitor
  • composite video monitor
  • ADB port for keyboard and mouse
  • the vertical oriented port is a SCSI port via an add-on card
• Extreme close-up of the underside label
• With the case open
• Close-up of interior (Notice that the front of the box says Apple IIgs, but the motherboard says Apple //gs?)
• Funky IIgs keyboard (I really like the way it looks!)
• Your standard Mac Extended Keyboard
• Your standard floppy drive
• Front view of external hard drive, SCSI of course
• Rear view of hard drive
• Front view of external Bernoulli drive, SCSI again (Who needs ZIP drives anyway!)
• Rear view of Bernoulli drive
• Hardware accelerator card
• Hardware accelerator card, with its box
• Memory expansion cards
• Memory expansion cards, with their box

For more in-depth information, check out the Retrocomputing page on the IIgs!

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