A lot of people are confusing the IIc with the IIc+. The former was a fairly early/popular "portable" apple II. It was superseded by the IIGS, a 16-bit machine that competed favorably (with respect to graphics/sound/etc) with the mac.
The later IIc+ was mostly a cynical ploy by apple to drum up some cash while assuring that the Apple II line didn't compete with the mac. In most ways it was a downgrade from the earlier IIGS. Its only real advantage was a slightly higher clock rate, which could be solved on the IIGS with an accelerator like the transwarpGS. Further, not only was it an 8-bit only machine, its major upgrade was the replacement of the 5.25" floppy with the 3.5". Which meant it didn't run most 8-bit apple ][ software which was overwhelmingly on 5.25" floppies. A number of applications were Prodos based and could be simply copied to 3.5" floppies, but most games were DOS 3.3/etc and effectively bound to the 5.25 format. By the time the //c+ was released, the much less expensive Laser 128 (a clone) was filling the "portable" niche in a much better way. Particularly the 128EX, which was clocked nearly as high but significantly less expensive.
So, more expensive than a laser 128EX, worse software compatibility due to being 8-bit with a 3.5" floppy drive, and less capable in all regards than an upgraded IIGS. The latter were frequently in use into the late 1980's early 1990's with hard drives, cpu accelerators, multiple megs of ram, math coprocessors, x86 emulators, etc.
Which explains why its considered to be a fairly rare apple II.
I never used a //c+, but on the IIgs I remember the 3.5” floppy drive being a huge advantage. The 3.5” was faster and had much more capacity that the 5.25”, so the first thing you’d do on a IIgs was copy everything over to 3.5” floppies.
My memory could be faulty, but I also don’t recall having compatibility issues between DOS and ProDOS.
The big issue was 5.25” games, which would pull all sorts of low-level hardware-dependent copy protection tricks. Those couldn’t be copied without special hacks.
Which is fine, because like most IIGS owners, you had both drives. The //c was the compact integrated apple II. It is all you needed. You could just buy a IIc, take it home plug it into your TV and there was a large software library. You never needed to buy another piece of hardware. The IIe/IIGS were expandable, you bought the machine, which by itself didn't do anything, then you bought a pile of peripherals.
The //c+ broke all that, you bought it, took it home, and discovered that literally nothing worked. All the software being sold on 3.5" was for the IIGS, and didn't work in your machine, and all the software for the IIe/c/+ came on 5.25".
So, your nice compact standalone machine, suddenly requires you to drive back to the computer store and buy a 5.25" floppy drive. A piece of hardware that was a good 1/3 or so the total size of the machine. No longer was it a "compact" standalone setup.
The few times I actually saw //c+'s in the wild, they were lonely useless machines because the owner never purchased the 5.25" drive. Leaving them with a machine which booted prodos, and maybe appleworks.
A compact IIGS in that form factor clocked at 4Mhz with the 3.5" drive would have been a great product. Heck it would have made more sense to have put a hard drive in it instead of the 3.5". Apple did neither, because they just wanted to milk the II market a bit more so they could release the next mac.
I forgot about the IIGS. I remember walking through a mall and in the front of one of those boutique computer stores back then was a IIGS hooked up to a piano keyboard via MIDI and playing some amazing classical piece while it showed the notes on the screen in full color. It was amazing.
I remember creating a math library in Apple BASIC, and a stamps collector application for my father, with its own database system way before I learned what a database was. Learned Pascal, and tried learning assembly but that was too advanced for me. I was in highschool, so many memories in the Apple //c!
Some more interesting things that I remember:
The packaging of the computer smell to apples and lasted many years.
Lots of experimentation with graphics and colors (with a green monochrome monitor), sound, poke/peek, disk and file formats, etc.
Trying to create a 3D vector game about a robot exploring a haunted house, got to complete a stairway climbing scene.
I had this exact model growing up, it was the computer that I first experienced programming on. My dad tossed it while I was away at college, I'm still unhappy about that.
Wow, that was my first computer I had in our house growing up and used it to write a lot of 8th grade history papers using PFS Write, playing Lode Runner, printing stuff in Printshop. Oh, and I remember programming basic on it, where you'd even write the line numbers on each line of code.... I believe I made some version of an Dungeons & Dragons character generator. Don't forget about the sound that the Dot-matrix printers made then. Gave me my first taste of growing up to work with computers all the time....
I saw Apple II, however I also don't understand from the article, what's the author work with? No even brief project description, no code, no usage context... Maybe the article is just a beginning of some bigger story. Everything is too unclear.
Would be nice to hear comments from the author.
No doubt. I just meant it as yet-another mildly entertaining way to think about exponential growth. Apple put this turd out about a decade after their first computer. It's, at best, about four times faster than the original.
30 years after it was discontinued, you need a computer many thousands of times more powerful to connect the //c+ to a network. That computer costs $9.
I have a DEC 440 and a HP 700/96 terminal and I love and use both. I can do almost anything using them (I still can read most of the web using one of the several text-based web browsers as well), but the main problem for me is using multi-byte encodings, mainly UTF-8.
I though about writing a terminal application that would stand between the physical terminal and /dev/tty* to translate a UTF-8 multi-byte character to a predefined ASCII character. It would be confusing, but still less confusing than the mess I get today when I try to see information code d in UTF-8.
iconv is not a good choice because, AFAIK, there are hundreds of code points impossible to be translate to character sets that have 256 possible values.
Damn this is a hoot! Love that people are keeping these machines alive. I had a Mac LC with the Apple IIe card in college. After college I tried to keep it alive as long as possible. I connected a 56k modem to it to connect to the internet by PPP. I saw the modem lights flash on and get faster and faster, and then stop and come back on dribbling in slowly only to speed up and then stop again, over and over. I then learned that the LC didn’t have hardware flow control. I then admitted to myself I had to let go of the LC. :(
While retro-brighting does make it look nice, it can make the plastic brittle. Also on some old computers (Atari STs) you can damage the look permanently if you use even slightly the wrong solution (many people use the Hydrogen Peroxide from ladies hair bleaching producs and it not advisable on some models). It also takes a fair bit of effort and if you aren't in sunny climate the process can be very slow.
I remember salivating over the IIc ads in magazines at the time, also around the time I saw War Games. Don’t think I ever touched one though. And shortly after the Mac came out and a few years the Amiga so its days were numbered.
The Amiga line has the same 68K processors as the Apple Mac line. Just for 1/3rd the cost. For the price of a Mac 128 I bought an Amiga 1000 with 512K of RAM, 5.25" IBM compatible drive and Transformer PC EMulation software. The Mac had Mac Charlie to run PC software but it was too expensive and not as compatible as Transformer. I also got a 1200 Baud modem this was in 1986, the Amiga came out in 1985 based on Tripos and the Atari Lorrine project which dates back to 1980 and they didn't have the money to finish it. Workbench did trume preemptive multitasking and MacOS at the time did not it did task switching like MS-DOS.
Explorers was actually using a IIc, not a IIc+! The main difference is that the "plus" is much faster (4 mhz, I think?) and has a 3.5" floppy. I had a IIc growing up... only 1 mhz, 5.25" floppy.
This is one of the rarer specific Apple II models (happens to also be the fastest and the last released). They’re maybe $300+ or so in good shape. The more common Apple IIe goes for significantly less. I bought one for $50 4 or 5 years ago.
Weird to hear it described as "rare" because it was the only Apple that I had as a kid, but there were a _lot_ of Apple IIe/II+ around at the time. (I remember that we had a 300 baud modem, actual Bell equipment, hooked up to it.)
Still the IIgs might be more rare? I seem to recall the world had moved on by the time that came out.
Are you sure you had a IIc+ and not just a regular IIc? The easiest difference to notice is that the IIc+ has a 3.5" floppy drive, while the IIc has a 5.25" drive. The IIc+ came out in 1988, as opposed to 1984 for the IIc.
I don't have hard data of course, but I've been an avid Apple II and Mac hobbyist for a while, and own every model of Apple II. I think the only Apple II model that's rarer than the IIc+ is the original II, and that might not even be true. (The original II is _definitely_ more expensive, but I assume demand is also much higher.)
The IIgs is pretty easy to come by. It came out two years before the IIc+ and was also on sale for a lot longer than the IIc+. The IIe is definitely the most common. It was in production and on sale for 11 years, and schools bought tons of them.
There were a lot of IIGS's, schools purchased them in bulk. Plus, they were the machine to upgrade to, so a lot of die hard apple ][ users ended up on the GS.
The IIc+ is actually the last apple II created and wasn't particularly popular because it "split" the market by being a 8 bit computer which couldn't run the newer IIGS's/16-bit software. OTOH, it was clocked faster than the IIGS. In a way it was just apple's response to the laser 128+, which was a much better IIc. The cynical take was that apple didn't want to create another product that would eat into its mac sales like a 32-bit apple II, or much faster IIGS would have done. So they backed the feature set down.
The IIGS continued on as the choice apple product long after the IIc+ came out because people were just buying transwarps/etc, hard drives, etc to create a more advanced IIGS.
Commodore's response to the IIGS was to make the Commodore 65 an upgraded Commodore 64 with Amiga style graphics and sound. It never came out. There is a clone at http://mega65.org/ that tries to complete the Commodore 65 with a 50Mhz CPU. Something about the 6502 not being able to be clocked more than 25Mhz prevented it so they made the 4502 that can go up to 50Mhz.
I grew up on the IIgs at school. I can only imagine that there were millions of them. They were certainly outdated at the time; I think I had a Performa 6112CD (PPC 601) at home during the era those were in my school.
(I might be mixing up the eras a little. I most remember the Performa but that was the next computer after my 386, to which we upgraded from a Tandy 1000. I still remember writing my first program on the Tandy.)
The later IIc+ was mostly a cynical ploy by apple to drum up some cash while assuring that the Apple II line didn't compete with the mac. In most ways it was a downgrade from the earlier IIGS. Its only real advantage was a slightly higher clock rate, which could be solved on the IIGS with an accelerator like the transwarpGS. Further, not only was it an 8-bit only machine, its major upgrade was the replacement of the 5.25" floppy with the 3.5". Which meant it didn't run most 8-bit apple ][ software which was overwhelmingly on 5.25" floppies. A number of applications were Prodos based and could be simply copied to 3.5" floppies, but most games were DOS 3.3/etc and effectively bound to the 5.25 format. By the time the //c+ was released, the much less expensive Laser 128 (a clone) was filling the "portable" niche in a much better way. Particularly the 128EX, which was clocked nearly as high but significantly less expensive.
Basically it was a fiasco of a product.
Apple ][ timeline from wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Apple_II_famil...
So, more expensive than a laser 128EX, worse software compatibility due to being 8-bit with a 3.5" floppy drive, and less capable in all regards than an upgraded IIGS. The latter were frequently in use into the late 1980's early 1990's with hard drives, cpu accelerators, multiple megs of ram, math coprocessors, x86 emulators, etc.
Which explains why its considered to be a fairly rare apple II.