Apple II restoration

It's hard to believe, but we're now in possession of a real Apple II! Specifically, an Apple IIe with two Disk II drives. Since it hasn't been used for at least 25 years (and has been sitting in an uninsulated garage for an unknown proportion of that time), it's in need of some minor cleaning and repair before we turn it on again. Fortunately, the PCBs all look easy enough to work on once we have sufficient practice desoldering.

The outer shell is unsurprisingly yellowed and dusty. The screws holding the shell together are missing, so be cautious when handling the machine.

The interior is likewise dusty. The base has small spots that appear to be corrosion from animal droppings. The name “Schrock” is written below the power supply in permanent ink; it's not clear whether it's from a previous owner, a service agent, or an Apple engineer.

Below the coating of dust, the main board is remarkably well-labelled and cleanly laid out. Important ICs are given not just part numbers but function labels (“video ROM”, “keyboard ROM”, “MMU”, etc.) as well. It truly is an artifact from a different time in Apple's history. The board layout alone makes it clear that users were meant to access the innards. The CPU is a CMOS 6502.

There are four expansion cards installed. The aux connector slot has an extended 80 column/64K expansion card. Slot 1 contains a Super Serial card connected to a DB-25 port on the rear panel. Slot 4 contains a revised Applied Engineering RAMFactor card¹⁾. Finally, the Disk II interface card is in slot 6. It's worth noting that while the Disk II headers are neither shrouded nor keyed, it is effectively impossible to connect the ribbon cables backwards because the headers run parallel to the board. That is fantastic attention to detail.