Ultra-BIG Monster Megahaul (and estate cleanout) Apple II stuff

[S1500]

Please tell me it came with a Cinco MIDI organizer.

[Keatah]

I don't believe it did. No Cinco Midi organizer 4 U Sorry. More importantly, though, I called my buddies over to to clear out the 286-386 stuff. After disposing of 2 boxes of the royal shit, myself, I figured the other 6 or 7 cartons looked worthwhile and ought'a be put to some use. I wanted nothing to do with it, personally, myself.. So they took care of it.

 

Despite me being careful to keep the stuff separate - some of it still leaked into my Apple II haul. I was horrified! But.. Ignoring that little dust-up - this haul has turned out to be bigger and better than any collector could imagine. It seemingly has EVERYTHING! I MEAN FUCKING EVERYTHING!! This is a treasure hunt transported straight out of the 80's and into the garage. A Garage Safari!

 

This is the 3rd set of pictures. I have not gotten to the //GS'es or //c+ or II units yet. Nor the monitors or +1000 disks, there's more books (And I found a 3rd copy of the Computer Station's Programmer's Handbook to the Apple II) (YES YES YES!!)

 

Next week I can continue going through more of the stuff. But for now, enjoy this Garage Safari.

https://picasaweb.go...22/MegaHaul3Of9 -- We have:

 

a microbuffer box cover sleeve

 

Some *MORE* workstation cards. This is like a cancer, I've got 15 now, and the number keeps growing.

 

A trashed Mountain Computer Expansion Chassis s/n 900. The mainboard is loose inside. And there is a box of hardware screws and shit. I could save this as a parts doner for my other 2 working units. Or leave it as such till I have time to do a proper restore and good cleanup. I don't have the heart to throw it away. It sits there, looking at me, like a forlorn puppy. Wondering what I'm gonna do with it..

 

Appli-card with ram extender for the //

Appli-card with wordstar for the ///

 

A ramCharger (WITHOUT) a leaked battery! (YES!)

 

A NIB MIB CIB SuperDrive 3.5 controller board

 

A shitty boring Taxan RGB card

 

Some software like zaxxon and space shuttle and halley project with all dox and charts and shit.

 

A brass cube. a great weapon with the heavy sharp corners.

 

A Language card with Autostart Rom!! (and a missing 4116 ram chip) I know these are dirt cheap and common. But I like this card for some odd strange reason.

 

A Rana Elite controller

 

An Exerciser card. This comes from a service center.

 

10 boxs of 10 floppies by Verbatim

 

Some books, a silentype manual

 

ComputerEyes cards (rev B and rev F) with disks and dox and box by digital Vision inc.

 

Yech! some Pentium PRO 1MB cache CPU's with mobo and voltage regulator and heatsinks

 

AE A/D + D/A

 

Tiny pile of cables and supra 2400 modem

 

Novation CAT 300 baud acoustic coupler

 

USR 28.8 36.6 external courier modem.

 

Paddle Adapple "0"

 

Multibotics Parallel Interface

 

Another(!) Profile interface for the ///

 

2nd Sight VGA board

 

A board that just says Apple II interface (anyone know what this is?)

 

Video Overlay demo tape vhs

 

RMB230 Robotic workshop manual and interface box and disk and card

 

Some odd looking parts and chips and scsi-like terminators.

 

Crystals

 

Micromodem IIe

 

Some lowercase chips for the II+ (but sadly no Beamon Porter POWERCASE chips)

 

GS-RAM PLUS from AE

 

Zip GSX 1.02

 

Scsi card (rev-a) and (rev-c)

 

Another Grappler (this makes 5 of these)

 

Proterm 3.1 box dox disks adverts reference cards

 

A mouse interface board.

 

Apple /// Universal Parallel Interface

 

Blazing Paddles Illustrator (I learned to draw with this! And my copy was pirated. And NOW I own it for real! Look!)

 

An un-usable and non working Koala Pad (I could melt it and see what it smells like, or simply blow it up!)

 

Complete set "apple" magazine - complete!

 

Another Corvus interface (these are competing with the network cards now, another cancer)

 

A complete Apple Cat II outfit - 212, 202, expansion, touch-tone decoder, Firmware, bag of cables and box of manuals, Bsr controller and set.

 

The obligatory videx 80-col cards

 

Some more Novation Com-Ware disks

 

Complete Corvus hard drive docs with disks and binder book

 

A new function strip from videx. absolutely perfect shape (box is a bit ratty though)

 

Grappler box

 

Internal MicroBuffer

 

A telephone

 

Video Overlay Card Development Kit.

 

Koala Pad NIB CIB MIB

 

A Sup 'R' Mod II modulator

 

Applied Technology Laboratories Copy Master II

 

Fingerprint with fingerprint-pad-button

 

Now my seventh Super Serial II card (say that really fast)

 

Another 100 meters of phone wiring (not shown)

 

Another 3.5 drive interface

 

Ex-pander

 

Lan Tech inc network card.

 

Microsoft Softcard - Z80

 

Ramworks II partially populated

 

Transwarp GS and daughter card

 

RGB AE RGBOPT

 

A *Broken* video overlay card (this has physically busted hybrid inductor parts and is ready for the heap..)

 

Data Sentry battery

 

No-slot clock

 

8087-2 co-processor

 

Vulcan IDE drive interface from Applied Engineering

 

Minimally populated RamWorks III

 

Echo +, box dox disks speaker

 

Microsoft Softcard CIB Jewel Case packaging. Almost like new. With Osborne CP/M User Guide.

 

AE PC Transporter //e installation kit dox

 

AE PC Transporter Users Manual v1.31 and aepc system 2.0 addendum, notes and manuals and tech tips.

 

PC Transporter disks.

 

Small selection of cables for PC Transporter

 

AE PC Transporter boxes

 

3 PC Transporters (all different revisions)

 

Smartcom II and Smartcom I from Hayes

 

Echo IIb with speaker disk dox box and papers

 

A Transwarp board with manual

 

subLogic press and scientific visualisation PR package with complimentary copies of A2-3D/A and other things.

 

Some original Apple-branded 1978 Diskware blank disks and DISK ][ floppy diskette envelopes

 

An extremely important looking and probably rarer-than-rare MPC Peripherals Corporation Apple II Parallel Printer Card - Ap80 Rev.B to top it off. I know I could get 499.95 on epay for this!! Wanna buy it?

 

Older ProTERM manual or something

 

Epson MX Printer manual with Graftrax III+

 

90 pounds of books (not pictured here, they are common and in pdf on the web.)

 

Sams ComputerFacts for the Epson MX-80 F/T w/Graftrax III+ (these are totally kick-ass service guides!)

 

CIB almost MIB Apple II Video Overlay Card with dox box bags disks cables hardware warranty and development kit.

 

Are we done yet?? No! There's more to come, it will be a week or so before we can go through it. Expect at least 300 - 400 more pics. Folks, it's that much!

Edited December 31, 2011 by Keatah

[Keatah]

While integrating some of this shit into my collection I stumbled upon MY Mountain Hardware Music System and its monster-sized manual. I forgot how big the fucker was. And my board has a light-pen attached to it. The one in the haul didn't. I also located (and re-packaged) my Alpha Syntauri sound sheet demo record - More envelopes and a little extra supporting material to keep it flat.

 

This particular MMS board is special sentimental value because I programmed it to make this humongous BBRRAAAAAPPPPPMMMMPPPFFFFFFF noise on this array of valve amplifiers. Basically this was like 10,000 watts going into 40 something odd speakers or something with the intent to simulate the rumbling of a rocket liftoff. It sounded more like farting and blowing chunks than the intended rumble. Eventually we did get a Boston-like turbo sound. But by then I lost interest in science experiments. I still clearly recall getting called to the principal's office to go home quickly because I had left something on all day and it was smouldering. It was the transformers powering the homebuilt amps. To get this amount of power going we took extension cords from the next-door neighbors and their neighbors as well. We ran it all into this heisted distro box from some construction site. While today its pretty lame stuff, but to gradeschoolers this was exciting and heady stuff. This was before Back to the future, the first one, the one with that huge 20 ft. speaker. So imagine our surprise when we saw that show for the first time!

 

Folks this is what it's all about. Having fun and learning new shit. Man..

 

Well, the MMS, in addition to this graphics tablet are my most favorite bits of Apple hardware. I just re-packaged my graphics tablet for long-term storage while I was at it.. Any ideas of how much one of these is worth today. I have no intention of dumping it, just curious.

https://picasaweb.go.../MyStuff34Of247

Edited December 31, 2011 by Keatah

[madmax2069]

wow, just wow. Congrats of a epic megahaul. its killing me in not being able to buy anything as of right now. i am eyeballing the TranswarpGS or ZipGSX. I only hope when i do get paid that you will still have something.

[Blackbag]

I'm looking forward to the sale list, but I can understand it may take a while, and you're probably going to hold onto the insanely great stuff (don't blame you one bit).

This is a once in a lifetime collection you picked up, for sure!

[potatohead]

Can you scan that blank prototyping card?

 

I'm interested in potentially building some of those. Wondering what the design looks like.

[nathanallan]

What a frekkin haul! Nice! If those network cards need a home, I will be looking for two of them pretty soon; just got a performa 400 and 630cd. They need upgrading. So does the ][e I got, but still researching what I can get for it.

[Keatah]

Somebody actually wants to "buy" a network card?. 10 years ago I couldn't move any for $10.00 + postage each!

A lot of folks have asked what I'm going to be doing with individual components and boards and things.. And frankly I am not sure. I have some of this stuff already. I want to add significantly to my collection too. Ideally it would be nice to make all the designs and material available so that kits may be made. But that would never happen. There is no real market for this sort of thing.

 

Though remember that a lot of vintage electronics used generic logic. And the custom chips weren't that complex when they were used. Certainly a lot can be stuffed into fpga and arm chips - as evidenced by Carte Blanche and Harmony cart. This includes analog processing - like for the Mountain Music System and ComputerEyes digitizer.

 

I'm just glad to have saved a lot of this stuff from getting dumped. Because that's what would have happened. The pieces I'm trashing myself are just that trash, like the cracked and busted IIgs housings. I retrieved all the odds and ends and boards. The Apple 2 series is near and dear to me.

 

To the everyday person, none of this means anything. None of this hardware can do facebook or amazon. So it's pretty much useless. If this was sitting in a box at the Best Buy entrance I can promise you that folks would walk right by it. And I bet they'd throw their snot-filled tissues. The blind people, with their guide dogs.. Their dogs would piss all over it. An engineer might have a passing curiosity about it all and selectively go through it. And a retrogamer would prolly do something similar. Though I'm sure any 2 series enthusiast would back up the truck as I did.

 

All this stuff is only worth something to the Apple folks. And then its gonna be the older folks(probably), and THEN it will need to be people that are into the 2 series. So it's a pretty vertical "market".. Shit, man, I wouldn't even call it a market at all.

[Keatah]

@potatohead. During my next garage safari I'll unpack the proto card and see what we can do.

 

@nathanallan. You want to put those in a performa 400 and 630? I'm not familiar with the performa series, but I can't imagine it having slots for Apple II 8-bit cards?? Or does it somehow?? All the hardware shown here in this thread is all about 2 series stuff, aside from the oddball PC component or two that oozed into the haul. And the network cards are for the 2 series.

Edited December 31, 2011 by Keatah

[potatohead]

Good grief Keatah! I just got done gawking at your photos!

 

Awesome! That is what I love about Apple ][. So many hardware things produced.

 

Thanks, BTW. No hurry.

[Keatah]

For me, it was the versatility and ability to customize stuff. There was (and still is) a special mystique about the whole console. I didn't necessarily "worship" the company - I was too young to understand it. But I was not to young to recognize the magic in the circuitry. Not that there was much circuitry to begin with. There was no graphics card or sound card. It was all done by flipping registers and scanning memory.

 

To a 10-year old getting into BBS'ing and [{(WarEz)}] the Apple II was just complex enough to hold interest, and yet it was possible for one man to know everything about every aspect of the machine. I had written my finest stuff when it came to BBS mods.

 

And just now, I wrote an Applesoft BASIC program that writes a custom batch file that controls several programs on my windows XP system, making it easier to pilfer stuff (like classic game pictures) from the internet. I remembered all the string operations and file i/o commands - whilst referring to the Beagle Bros. Applesoft chart once in a while.

 

I even built a computer controlled radio system to listen in on the Voyager spacecraft. Or at least I was damned sure I did. It was fun playing make-believe too!

Edited December 31, 2011 by Keatah

[Keatah]

Now that I have decided to keep (and am permitted to do so) all this stuff. What's the best place to post scans of documentation? There's quite a bit of interesting stuff in here that should be shared around and preserved.

 

I was thinking of asimov, but it's such a big place and a lot of it will undoutedly fall through the cracks or get lost in the mire.

[potatohead]

I would ping the guys at A2 Central, and Apple Scans.

 

Any chance at photos of the front and back and or docs of the proto board?? I've been working on my own Apple proto board, modeled after some I saw online. Can't wait to stuff hardware in there. (check another box on the "wanted to do as a kid" list!)

[Keatah]

I don't recall ever having documentation with this. Though it could be buried in my pile of shit someplace.

I got the card sitting here next to my scanner. Any special way or mode you want me to scan this in with? B/W? Color? A certain size or DPI?

 

The only thing on this particular card is that there is a cut trace. It's not a big deal, its visible, and it doesn't effect the electrical characteristics, seemingly.

[potatohead]

Color please. I suppose 600 DPI, maybe 300. Just wanting to see the traces and components. I'm sure the size is the size, once we've picked a DPI.

 

I've got a nice chunk of a layout in Eagle now. (bitch that one is to learn, and I'm sure I've got mistakes to be sorted yet) Would be good to see how they did it.

[Keatah]

I did the scans. At 600 DPI I ended up with 2 14meg files, 1 for each side. And that's a zipped BMP. Can't post them here. What is your suggestion?

[potatohead]

Crap. Well, when I get to my other machine, I'll PM you a Drop box tomorrow. Thanks for that. Appreciated.