Escher
New Member
Good day all!
I local gentleman got in contact with me in response to a craigslist ad I placed looking for info on vintage apple ii info. He pointed me here!
I was a commodore boy in my 80's youth, but always wondered about the Apple world... So I finally took the plunge! I have two little ones under 5 years old, and thought that some vintage Apple goodness would be a nice intro into computing for them in a couple of years.
So, I found 2 IIe's and a IIc+, 2 monitor 2's, a unidisk and extra IIe PSU listed on my local craigslist... I probably spent a bit too much, but it was local and I didn't have to sweat shipping!
All I had was an old beat up 5.25 dsdd and no software. I found the ADTPro site and managed a "bare-metal" bootstrap, over audio of all things! I now have a formatted Prodos/ADTPro client disk (which I quickly turned into a flippy disk... remembered that trick from my C64 days)...
My unidisk is in great shape - I took it apart and cleaned the heads last night (which were already very clean).
The IIe I'm using as my primary machine is a platinum. I had to swap in the disk controller card from the other machine since the platinum's original was fubar.. but now its running sweet. I have big plans to spend time playing with this- its so much fun!
In the interim - I have ordered some dsdd disks (just a 10 pack) from floppydisk.com, and have a second unidisk on the way from ebay. I also ordered David Finnigan's new book from Amazon yesterday.
I'll post some pics later on tonight..
My biggest issue - which I only just realized, is that the superserial cards are like gold these days.... so I guess I'm going to be doing slow audio transfers for the time being. My craigslist friend mentioned that I would probably want to pick up a IIgs since they have the SS card built in... and from what I can see, its about the same price to buy a IIgs as it is just the card!
Anyways- sorry for rambling - I'm carrying on like a 14 year old in a 1980's computer class... This is just too much fun!
I local gentleman got in contact with me in response to a craigslist ad I placed looking for info on vintage apple ii info. He pointed me here!
I was a commodore boy in my 80's youth, but always wondered about the Apple world... So I finally took the plunge! I have two little ones under 5 years old, and thought that some vintage Apple goodness would be a nice intro into computing for them in a couple of years.
So, I found 2 IIe's and a IIc+, 2 monitor 2's, a unidisk and extra IIe PSU listed on my local craigslist... I probably spent a bit too much, but it was local and I didn't have to sweat shipping!
All I had was an old beat up 5.25 dsdd and no software. I found the ADTPro site and managed a "bare-metal" bootstrap, over audio of all things! I now have a formatted Prodos/ADTPro client disk (which I quickly turned into a flippy disk... remembered that trick from my C64 days)...
My unidisk is in great shape - I took it apart and cleaned the heads last night (which were already very clean).
The IIe I'm using as my primary machine is a platinum. I had to swap in the disk controller card from the other machine since the platinum's original was fubar.. but now its running sweet. I have big plans to spend time playing with this- its so much fun!
In the interim - I have ordered some dsdd disks (just a 10 pack) from floppydisk.com, and have a second unidisk on the way from ebay. I also ordered David Finnigan's new book from Amazon yesterday.
I'll post some pics later on tonight..
My biggest issue - which I only just realized, is that the superserial cards are like gold these days.... so I guess I'm going to be doing slow audio transfers for the time being. My craigslist friend mentioned that I would probably want to pick up a IIgs since they have the SS card built in... and from what I can see, its about the same price to buy a IIgs as it is just the card!
Anyways- sorry for rambling - I'm carrying on like a 14 year old in a 1980's computer class... This is just too much fun!