12:35 " CHECK DICK " apple knows whats up

So, I was getting ready for My sons nap time, he is 2, I clicked on this video accidentally without my headset on Dave said "It's teardown time!" My son Og replied "No, its not teardown time... its NAP time!" Adorable to the nth degree, thought I would share.

These old and still good caps are the reason why I only use these high quality caps today. Awesome teardown

Dave, the apparent CPU jitter is not due to the 14 divider, it's that there's a long cycle every 65th cycle (it's 2 14MHz pulses long). This was done to keep the colorburst signal in sync.

Who's General Failure, and why is he reading my disk?

I loved my Apple IIc . I still have it up in the attic. I ran a BBS from 86-89 on one and it ran 24/7 and never caused any problems. I upgraded the CPU and memory to 4Mhz via a daughter card. I recall having an issue with something during that updgrade and thanks to an apple contact I knew spent about 40 minutes with the designer of the motherboard getting it resolved! Can you image calling apple today asking to speak to an "engineer".. great little machine.

The "grinding sound" is the disk drive alignment procedure, which consists of winding the read-write head out to one end, and banging it against the stop. This was done when difficulty was encountered in reading a disk. I am not sure if this was implemented by the disk controller or in software but I suspect software, given Wozniak's design philosophy (why build hardware when you can implement something in software?). The dreadful audio output is a testament to that. When an address between $C030 and $C03F appeared on the address bus, a single click was emitted from the speaker. A suitable timing loop would be crafted in machine code to create a tone (the Applesoft BASIC interpreter was too slow). Until the appearance of the IIGS that was the total of the Apple's audio capabilities. Trouble with the floppies is not unexpected. Feeling a case of the nostalgia recently, I loaded up a pile of my old Apple disks. About 80% of them produced I/O errors. I was surprised that any of them were readable decades after being written. Don't be concerned that none of the disks had Apple logos. Back in the day, it was customary to just copy a friend's disks, which were themselves copies. Copy protection? No problem. Use a copying program to defeat it. Don't have a copying program? Obviously the solution was to copy your friend's copying program. Don't have any friends? Join the local users group. Ah, the good olde days.

Imagine saying that thirty years ago: "You can also hook it up to one of those Car Rearview Mirror LCD Reversing camera displays"

A IIc tossed in the dumpster. Breaks my heart.

I knew about Steve Wozniak's plane crash but never thought to look into it. It appears he was flying a Beechcraft Bonanza, which if I recall correctly is often called the "doctor killer" due to inexperienced pilots not being familiar with the V-tail design (ie. doctors, with high levels of skill outside flying and can afford it, crashing).

He was lucky to come across that.

Love the teardown Dave, brings back a lot of memories. I purchased a brand new Apple II+ back in the day for a staggering $2k!!!. That would be both my first and last ever Apple product I buy. Not that there was anything wrong with the product at that time considering how primitive it was but it was a hard lesson about Apple's marketing wank back then. Then, just yesterday I spotted that recognizable case shape in a pile of discarded PCs destined for the recyclers. I pulled it out and it was a IIe in pristine condition!

In that era I was using a TRS-80 Model III. "We" looked down on the hobbyist Apple market... Still, completely typical system for the day, and the pioneers of what we take for granted today. Great teardown

Excellent video. I love your retro tear downs.

Now those are bloody good capacitors :-D

i love how in depth you go into.... EVERYTHING! love it... honestly have no background at all in, software, or hardware im more mechanical (cars, engines...) but this channel is epic. I watch you ramble on at least 20 hrs a week, keeep up the good work

I always learn so much from these teardowns! Thanks Dave!

who would throw that away? That's a collector's item right there too me. :D

Awesome tear down. Thanks for posting!

£7700 for an internal error? They were a ripoff even back in the 80s... :P

I remember tearing down my IIc when I was 9, much to the dismay of my parents who then proceeded to do a tear down of my pants and give me a belting...

This video is absolutely great. Thanks for all details.

Great teardown. Thanks Dave :)

That is some Steve Irwin level of Aussie happiness.

Fun trip down memory lane - especially the tour of the main board with all the TTL, etc. I realized I still remember a bunch of the 74 series by number. First extensive experience with them was a TV Typewriter, followed by a MITS Altair 680b 6800 I built (rocketing 1MHz clock) that I still have!. Thanks for the vid!

I love those retro teardowns!

Welcome in the under 301+ Club! Champagne for all

Dave is such a great guy… consistent fantastic videos!

Correction: the 15-pin video output is not RGB. It is a proprietary "video expansion port" for use with either an RF modulator or with the optional monochrome LCD monitor.

What a great watch, cheers dave.

When I worked in an electronics service and repair workshop, the technicians and engineers used a small off-cut of soft chamois leather (with isopropyl alcohol) for cleaning tape and floppy disk heads. They don't drop lint and detritus, and allow you to get better even pressure across the area to be cleaned.

The PC JR was fun but. I remember my mates dad bought him one and it had a joystick port and a cartridge port for games and programs. I remember his dad would go overseas and bring him home a whole pile of games on cartridge and we'd stay up all night playing them in CGA 4 colour brilliance

I think the internet archive would love to have those floppies.

Dvorak codekeyboard user here :) Got it for very cheap from the office hipster loon who ordered it ironically, and before rekeying and reflashing to QWERTY it gave it a try and it stuck, it's also the best way to prevent people shoulder surfing your passwords or stealing your keyboards. P.S. Damn that PSU looks like it was made yesterday not a spec of dust, discoloration or any other wear and tear on it...

great teardown thanks

Assembled in Ireland! Woohoo! :D That's why it still works!

Thank you for the trip down memory lane..Apple II, Trash 80, Commodore Pet, and the PDP8. Good days mate. This gal thanks you very much. - Annie

Dave, thanks as always for giving time to vintage computers. For any 80's text adventurer who hasn't seen it yet, check out Jason Scott's text adventure documentary 'Get Lamp'... it'll bring back some good memories. Also look up nerdcore rapper Mc Frontalot's video 'It is Pitch Dark' on KZfaq... a brilliantly clever homage to Zork, Infocom, Colossal Cave, and vintage computers... search for "MC Frontalot - It Is Pitch Dark 720p HD"

Dave is such great guy !

i cant wait 30yrs from now seeing you teardown laptops smartphones from today!

Loved my IIC growing up. I used to code BASIC after getting home from Elementary School. We had an Image Writer II, and the color monitor! While it wasn't the first computer I learned to program, It was the one I used every day in my youth, and really got into coding with. I was hand-writing code in school when I should have been doing other things ;) It's the reason I'm a computer programmer today!

Thanks for this, brings back many memories of days gone past I had moded a Tandy model4, 128k ram and 4 360k 5 1/4 floppy drives, it ran a 2 phone line BBS, (the internet before the internet) and that is how I met my wife. Boy those were the days.

omg did you actually just reference War Games? thank you so much. youve just made my day. im so glad someone else remembers that beautiful movie. i am though glad no one remembers the remake.

I remember that computer.

Ahh, that 19-pin D-SUB Floppy connector reminds me of the 23-pin D-SUB RGB-connector on the old Amiga's!

That brings back some memories! Still got my //e and my mate had a //c. I'm surprised it still starts up and surprised how good those 30 year old caps look. Awesome.

The Apple IIc and the Laser 128 series were nice for college - lugging it from dorm room to home when you had to leave. I had the Apple IIgs and //e (with 576KB - Applied Engineering 80-column card - up to 1MB), but I was a hardware nut so I still wanted a Laser even though I had no need for one. The Laser had one expansion card slot - exposed on the side, and they offered a box with two slots inside. It essentially looked like a large IIc. Later, Laser made PC clones and I think the first few looked like the Laser 128 having that portable look to it. No battery, but these computers were easy to transport from place to place. Like with college, you could use it at work and then take it home if needed. ...although I think too many modern jobs rob us of some needed work/life balance. You could use both internal and external floppies at the same time. Since you couldn't disconnect the internal drive without voiding the warranty, the external port would be useless to the average consumer if that was true. FYI - With that 80-column card in my Apple //e, I kept overloading the factory power supply. Computer would randomly reset itself. I had to upgrade the power supply - same company - Applied Engineering. They were a local company for me. I had to place an order through my cousin who owned a computer store in Oklahoma, and then I could drive by to pick up the part from their offices in Texas. They even made an internal hard drive. I think it was for the IIgs, and it essentially replaced the power supply. AE definitely had Star Trek fans among its employees. Sound card was called Phaser (12 channel if I remember correctly). That hard drive was call Vulcan. There was a IIgs accelerator card called the Transwarp GS. A PC emulation card was the Transporter.

Umm, Dave, do you have any idea where the guy found this? I could swear this is my cousin's old machine, they gave it away to a family friend of theirs (the people that acquired it lived in Minchinbury NSW), anyway, if it was from there I just think it would be hilarious... So many memories of playing on that thing, our family had a IIe back in the day - still have it stored safely, I'd love to test it soon.

Hi Dave !It is always exciting,when you Launch a new Video I like your teardowns,not shure exactly why...i think it is your entertaining way to do it,i work with all the electronic stuff about for 40 years,and i did thousands of teardownsin my life.I think you find exactly the right words for everything ....BTW i am from AUSTRIA //not AUSTRALIA //.......Keep on going teardowns.......and tutorials......good Job..best regards from AUSTRIA

Thanks for the Apple lesson. In my area, there were the big 3: Commodore, IBM (clones), and Apple. I didn't know any Apple people growing up, still don't for that matter. Apple was prevalent in our schools, but not so much out in the wild. Probably because schools didn't have to pay the Apple tax. Very few people I knew had IBM compatibles. My friends were all Commodore people, with me being the last holdout giving up the 128 and Amiga for an IBM in 96.

Wow, how INCREDIBLY far we have come in only 30 years.

Regarding the later IIc's that had the memory expansion slot on them, they did have 128k built into the motherboard, but with 4 4x64kbit chips instead of 16 1x64kbit chips. These chips were also used on the official expansion board, 8 of them soldered on with sockets for up to 24 more, resulting in a maximum total memory of 1152k.

Seems to be a fault with the video, for some reason the bit with it being turned it on, appears before the bit where you tear it apart. Surely it couldn't have happened in that order?

Think you were doing this teardown literally on the exact same day I was cleaning out a Laser 128! The IIC was better made BY FAR.

Alps made drives for both Commodore and Apple products. This particular unit has belt (!) driven heads, which makes it easy for them to get blown out of alignment soo easy. Same deal with the VIC-1541 drives.

My first job in education was technology director of a school, in 1992. They had several IICs, and IIEs in our middle school. Bad memories - ha ha - keeping old technology and newer Mac stuff maintained at the same time. Reliable though...

I had one of those. Mine was equiped with an Applied Engineering 1MB!!!! RAM memory addon. That was awesome back in those days - nobody I ever met had that addon in Germany. I traded it for a Mac later.

Whooooooa!! You CAN,T play any Zork game with the lights on! Love these vids. Thanks for sharing. Subscribed!

I wish I still had my Apple IIc... both of them. I still have the keyboard though, and it's the later revision with the Alps Amber mechanical keys... Those things are WONDERFUL. Not like the garbage hairspring switches not he early revisions. You said you loved the keyboard... Well, you have the cheap one there! Imagine that keyboard with something quite similar to Cherry Blues... The Alps Amber is like a slightly heavier press Cherry Blue. I love the clicky-clicky sound and feel of good mechanical switches! :D

31:23 Yeah, big thumbs up Dave! Awesome.

I love that boot sound

I am old enough to remember seeing these things in action. I was pretty envious of those who had one but I could not afford one.

There was an LCD display for the Apple //c. There were also 3rd party carry cases with battery. It was the original notebook. That is until Toshiba came out with theirs's, which was an all inclusive unit with plasma display.

nice! always wanted to see inside one of these

Nice walk down memory lane Dave... Speaking of, do you remember the memory shortage in the mid '80s? A 1 bit 64k chip was going for $15 USD that's if you could get them. Then the hard drive shortage... Companies here in the U.S. were filing bankruptcy just to get purchase priority on the available units.

Funny how you mentioned the vents. I knew a few people that had them who would have issues on hot summer days.

Right in front of the power supply is the date code - 8517 - 17th week, 1985. Using the date code on the memory chips was a good guess at the vintage!

The lowercase typing was making me grit my teeth. ;) Back then we didn't assume we even HAD lowercase (of course the 2C always did).

Dave's so right, the DRAM was the gold in a computer back then. The most significantly expensive component. From my experience this didn't change until the mid to late 90's when memory manufacturing boomed driving the cost of memory down. Today the CPU and GPU's are the most expensive components and of the two I was argue that GPU's are cost king today. Anyone agree/disagree? Come live in this world of nostalgia. :) I miss my IIe.

Just an FYI- in the movie 2010 The Year We Make Contact, you can see Dr. Heywood Floyd using an Apple //c on the beach...complete with the LCD screen. Also in the same shot, a mock-up Omni Magazine with the Monolith on the cover. Ahh, the 80s.

I was the UK product marketing manager for the //c. Responsible for launching it to 650 dealers at numerous venues across the country. My own copy is at the computing museum at Bletchley Park.

It's awesome seeing stuff like this. While they were trying to shave money where they could, there is still a lot of thought going into the design, still a decent amount of quality and longevity, it's such a shame to see what Apple have become now compared to the early days

"USS Enterprise - A Hi-Res Picture" oh wow, that's definitely something alright lol. Nerds from the 80's were definitely the best nerds.

thumbs up to oliver for finding fully working mac with all the stuff. :3

The IIc did not have Dvorak outside the US. In Australia (and the UK) the keyboard button just did $ vs UK pound. You can that it is UK at 10:40 when it say INTERNAL ERROR $7700. Just release the button...

That was fun, we used the IIe a lot in school and that was in 1994 lol we used to type our current events on them and print it out

Holy cow, Dave. You still remember the machine language stuff. (peek,poke,call)

Excellent video, looks like I'll be taking apart my Apple IIC to clean the head on my floppy. I was hoping you would point out the Microsoft label.

The IIc+ also had the powersupply in the system itself instead of that huge brick. It didn't do well mostly because of the change in the market at its time of release. The IIgs came out in 1986 but computing advancements were already starting to pick up speed and the WDC 6500 series was falling behind. The 3.5" on a 8-bit Apple II didn't help it much, either.

Good job. Liked the video z.

I still have my family's first computer; a Laser 128! Looked very similar to the Apple //c with carry handle and internal floppy, but the keyboard is larger and has a numpad. Mostly used it with AppleWorks applications on ye olde green monochrome CRT. Good times.

Woz shaved a few more cents off the cost of his floppy drive system by omitting the track 0 sensor, hence the characteristic bzzzt-rattle sound at startup, the first job for the IWM is to seek backwards 35 times. On the Shugart floppy interface (found in PCs since 1981), there was a microswitch or optical sensor so the controller could stop seeking on reaching track 0.

That CPU clock jitter has probably something to do with the fact that oscillator frequency has to be divided by 14 and not by 16.

Had a IIe way back when, those were the bad old days.

I used the IIc into the early 90s!!!!! For doing school papers and as a terminal to the mainframes. It sure beats having to walk to the commons in the winter to use the Macs, which sucked anyway due to how slow the GUI was.

The handle was not just here to carry the //c around, but also to heighten it nicely under the monitor stand, thus preventing it from heating as well…

Would be surprised if Zork II didn't run on 128k, it ran perfectly well on Commodore 64. *And* had actual capitalisation as I recall. =) The reason why it's reading everything from disk is that almost everything in Z-Code games were stored on the disk in small chunks and were loaded when needed - the game is only keeping extremely relevant data in memory. Too bad I don't know much more about the Z-Code stuff and really nothing else about Apple interpreter in particular, this is the first time I've seen it in action =)

I wonder what the unpopulated LM311 and 555 timer were for. There was something called "FLASH" on the schematic, that seemed to be these.

Oh That was my very first computer, I still have mine, an i still use it (for printing labels) Love that machine

We used to use a hole punch tool to chomp a hole in the top right corner, that allowed you to access the flip side of the floppy. Arrr, those were the days.

10:58 - "It's got 128K of RAM, why does it have to keep reading the disk?" It's an older Infocom game, it was probably written to run on the Apple II+ with 48K of RAM or less. Later Infocom games will (among other things) detect whether the system can run in 80 columns and prompt you whether you want to use it or not (most software didn't do anything with the 80/40 switch) - if they're running in 80 column mode they'll also use both upper and lowercase letters (which earlier, 40-column-only Apple II models couldn't do)

Zork accessed the floppy drive for two reasons. 1. Copy protection, which is why you encountered those errors.. 2. It didn't have to require much memory from the computer.

For the Dvorak keyboard, i worked with a guy that used the layout but with qwerty keyboards. Mostly to not get punked if he left his machine unlocked.

I use Dvorak in my Lab. When I had more time and I did more programming I used it as a main layout. But I kind of stopped using it because I do not really use a computer for anything apart from looking up mathematics lately, so yeah.

You see a lot of 74xx series chips throughout the video scattered around. The nostalgia...

I don't recall Apple ever shipping a unit with a DVORAK layout. I think you were expected (if you cared enough to bother) to pry up the keycaps and re-attach them in those positions. Also worth noting that the joystick/mouse port is NOT serial. There are two analog inputs (X/Y joystick axes), two digital inputs (joystick buttons, which are actually wired to the open-apple/close-apple keyboard keys) and a few pins for mouse functionality (mimicking the pins used by the original Mac's pre-ADB mouse port.)

My First, and only school Apple machine, I used back then. 1986 Class did the turtle drawer program...

About the floppies. The double sided ones were somewhat pricey for us cheap skates. So we would buy cheaper single sided floppies which was basically (we hoped) a double sided disk inside a jacket which only had one write protect notch. So we would cut a second write protect notch either by hand or they sold a notch cutter just for this task. That made them "double sided". In like Flynn. There were some people that said you would screw up the data running one side backwards but I never had an issue.

I really like the EMI part of it all, especially for the whopping 1MHz clock speed

The IIgs is what I had growing up. It was neat. Then we got the Performa 550. It was okay I guess. Then the iMac 333mhz blue one. A week later they released the vastly improved 400mhz versions. It was kinda sad. Haven't bought a new Apple sense. Good memories