EEVblog #788 - Apple IIC Teardown

hi its teardown time even better than that it's retro computer teardown time we love retro computers here on the eevblog there with online more popular tear downs today we've got the classic Apple to see from 1984 haha let's check it out and still works beauty and thank you very much to Oliver who I gave this to me at the recent Maker Faire in Sydney here's Oliver thanks mate um he actually found it on local hour curbside garbage collection so it came with the machine the original couch controller the original power supply we're going to mouse and a whole bunch of floppies as well awesome thanks Oliver so the to see came out in 1984 it was not a successor to the Apple 2e they actually sold them at the same time they see in the to see actually stands for compact and as you can see it is possibly a pretty small and compact unit considering that it has a built-in five and a quarter inch floppy drive that was one of the big selling points of this puppy back in the day and it even having a carry handle on the back carry handles actually falling off this one so you can actually carry it around I don't know if anyone really did that because you got it actually like around this huge big brick linear power supply as well this big huge transformer so yeah it wasn't really compact it wasn't really portable in that sense because I didn't have a battery external power supply and it didn't have any built-in display the most common display for this thing was the small CRT which I do not have unfortunately which went sat on a case this thing was actually tilted up like this so that you could you know it was more ergonomic to use the keyboard and then the display would come over the top and it would sit in are probably linking a photo there or there was also an optional one color I believe it was LCD screen which sort of sat on the top here and kinda made it look like a little laptop but it wasn't really no internal battery but still you know this was a reasonably popular machine back in the day and a lot of people compared it to the IBM PC junior at the time has a bit of a fire and I guess it maybe a lot of people will say that you see was a fire as well but it is a classic machine now it differed slightly from the Apple 2 in that it while used a 65 80 to process it used the 65 C over 2 which is the new CMOS version of it as such a lot slight differences in there which meant that not all software which made use of some quirks in the original 6502 they couldn't run on this to see but it was pretty much compatible basically a compatible our chip in the end and it worked at the same screaming just over one megahertz beauty it came with 128 K a ram 140 k5 and a quarter inch floppy built-in as well whereas the Apple 2 of course all that sort of stuff was separate it's got an 80 column mode as well that was all built-in so this had a lot of stuff built in serial ports as well on the back built-in mouse port this rayul optional extra on the 2e the 2 we of course had all the expansion slots in it or the original Apple to Ollie as well as the 2e all the expansion slots in that this has no expansion capability at all but it's most of the stuff you needed to have a functioning computer were built in so it was you know it was pretty decent in that respect didn't really need expansion capability in this sort of thing but I guess it wouldn't be nice but you can't fit it in a nice compact case like this and I have both RGB monitor and composite monitor outputs we use the composite output today to actually see if we can play Zork on this thing beauty and it whopping 560 by 192 graphics 15 colors it wasn't that shabby for the time I guess but yeah there were better machines out there but still it was fairly reasonable for the time the original retail price about 1300 US dollars that was from 30 years ago nineteen eighty-four dollars here whoo that was a lot of money but hey it was a fully functioning computer with like 128 K a RAM and everything and I also used the integrated was machine custom ASIC chip to actually replace the dedicated disk controller in this thing so I'll be interesting to crack this puppy open and here it is it's not in bad condition for its age yes it has that yellowed very common for the time that comes from the bromide in the plastics that they used to use are leaching out so very common you can fix it but it's yeah it's not that easy five and Quaritch floppy drive as I said there we go haha look at that 140 K per disc double-sided to beauty we've got some ventilation nut slots here in the top it looks like it's got a filter on the top of it so you can't actually see the circuitry down in there to keep all the dust and crap out and the keyboard is actually really nice I liked the style of the keys with the sort of the flat part and then they're raised up in the middle and I love and I love to always loved the feel of this sight keyboard the only time I ever used a to see actually uh I didn't know anyone who owned one the only time I ever got to play with one was at the local library this was their main computer in the local library you had to go in and give you a hand your library card over they'd give you the floppy disks and you know you could go over and use it you know you could book it for an hour or whatever and use the things I used to do that back in the day wow what was that year mid 80s geez now there was actually two models of the to see this is the original to see there's also the to see plus and it came out in 1988 when this one finished selling this so this one had a four year lifetime and major the two major changes in that are they actually replace the 80 40 column switch here switches here with a volume they actually had a volume slider here and they also change the five and a quarter inch floppy to a three and a half inch floppy and the two C plus also ran at 4 mega Hertz instead of the one megahertz that this ancient puppy did but unfortunately I think it was a bit of a flop at the time the two C plus because Apple had already released the two gs the graphics and sound model which had a really advanced graphics and sound capability for its day and they didn't include any of that in the two C plus so yeah this original to see it's even worse it's got like one bit sound and well yeah okay you can do 560 by 192 15 color graphics but yeah pretty ordinary in the side here we've got ourself headphones and a volume slider for the speaker that's tucked up under there in there's a label for those playing along at home it doesn't I don't think it has a date so I'm not sure what the barcode thing here is if that's a serial number I'm not or what's going on there I'm not entirely sure but yeah basically I'm 80 what's for the CPU whoa jeez you can fly to Alpha Centauri on 18 watts if we have a look on the back here we got ourselves a serial mouse port but got ourselves a modem coms in a face that's our RGB maunder output that's our composite monitor output which we're going to be using today another external second our floppy disk drive a serial printer and the DC power connector using old-school din connectors of course look at that you can see the connectors there a little bit crusty but yeah she still works mmm this thing's seen better days and there's the money shot for the fanboys and as I said this is where the carry handle goes and it didn't come with the carry handle but look very different type of plastic haven't hasn't yellowed it also maybe yeah it's like an entirely different type of plastic didn't have the bromide in there to actually leach out so you know fade with all that ultraviolet exposure so anyway I don't know how they got that in and out without taking the case off hmm anyway you can carry this around oh look I've got my Apple to see with my big linear transformer as well hmm and my monitor all right there's the brick power supply for it I see input connector here but yeah it's just a whopping great big transformer and that had a nominal output of 15 volts DC at one point two amps or so so yeah that wouldn't that wouldn't be regulated at all that it'd just be a bridge rectifier full wave bridge rectifier and some output caps and Bob's your uncle but it did have all the reckless at type approvals beauty and here's an original Apple Mouse as well how original well look at the serial number twenty thousand four hundred and fifty two g's that's pretty good for a stroller I xx thousandth Apple Mouse ever made it's not many at all made in the United States of America and the main unit assembled in Ireland to be sure to be sure here we go let's try and boot this puppy up I've got one of these our car rear view mirror LCD reversing camera thingamabobs arm it'll do it's got composite video input we're going to try and play Zork - fantastic I got the original tab can you remember putting the tabs on to the right protect tab side a is Zork to side B nothing so let's whack that in the drive and clunk that down yet to go clunk back in the day I'll try not to get clear on the screen and here we go is try boot it listen to the sounds of then it's reading the floppy come on you can do it hey doesn't like that and wearing like Flynn it works still reads a floppy disk after like 30 years and more than 30 years unbelievable so we can go let's play Zork pick up sward why does it have to access disk it's got access to disk you oh no it doesn't like that uh internal error Wow floppy drives a bit dodgy I'm afraid let's try that again here we go we got our Apple to see we're in and pick up sword yeah why can't it's got 128 K a ram why can't it out load why does it have to keep reading the disk geez just to do it trust me it does work hmm anyway you can see that it still works 30 years later fantastic I love it you know a thing with the Apple to see is that it's really quite annoying if you boot the thing up without a floppy disk in it then you get the Apple to see up there and then you just get what check disk drive there's nothing like it doesn't pop straight up into your basic command prompt so the way you do that which isn't completely non-obvious control reset like that and bingo we're at our prompt and we can find out what version of the ROM we had we can go peek - 108 9 that is completely obvious of course and we've got ROM version 255 and if we do call - 151 today we enter the monitor oh the power can you feel it you can also do the exact same thing using the command print peek six triple four seven which again is completely obvious and this is 255 means it's the original ROM version kill grew what what what why you don't reset it properly chuckle wobbly and it came with a whole bunch of these discs they aren't Apple original they're all like our Apple used Sydney Apple users group look at that blackjack and cards the Applefest 1992 ah fantastic double-sided I even a sticker on the bottom integer on flipside love it so there you go anyone remember the Apple or was anyone part of the Sydney Apple users group is this your machine did you dump it on the roadside ah surely not anyway yet no original discs we've got masters beginner calc lair whatever that is anyway but whole bunch of them fantastic which one do we want i'll have global thermonuclear war looks like this was like a monthly disc or something and from the users group and came with a whole bunch of different programs by the looks of it alright let's crack this puppy open and see what Cupertino has to offer now it's all going to be a through-hole dip technology of course that's pretty much what it was back in the 80s so don't expect any surface mount stuff in here at all I'm not sure we've got four bigger screws here I'm not sure what the deal is there but anyway um I not sure if the world's himself actually worked on this because he after his plane crash in the early 80s left Apple for a bit he did come back and famously um you know it worked as just an engineer and but I don't think he's ever credited with the two seas so um probably working on the two gs ah more than the to see because this is basically just an Apple 2 and then they just in them it's just packaging integration and stuff like that probably something that there was wouldn't have been that interested in I'd be guessing so these four here are actually metal threaded inserts where the other ones were just dumb self tappers into the plastic so I'm not sure if this is the correct order to take it apart I guess we all find out we're getting somewhere I can see the crusty phenolic base single sided board for the keyboard something came out here a bit of rubber sort of rubber strip that looks like it's surrounding the keyboard but it's probably clips on the back or something like that but yeah this top plate obviously obviously just comes off somehow there we go there we go ah almost tada we're in like Flynn Errol that is and as you can see there's not a huge amount doing here we've got it dominated by the big five and a quarter inch are floppy we'll take that out separately of course and that was you know 140 cage AAB and of course there was famously but with the Apple drives actually how he got the cost down was just had the mechanism itself and then developed his own interface electronics and famously did it with like five chips or something I remember the exact number and that was in the original Apple and then for the Apple starting with his to see I believe and then the two GS and other ones they put it that same circuitry into a small arm ASIC chip or peel D or whatever it was and that became the integrated was machine so as I remarked before the keyboard itself this is not high-quality fiberglass board it's what's called a phenolic base board it's very cheap very common in our consumer gear so nothing inherently wrong with it and they still use it today you open up any you know you open up your $5,000 LCD TV or something and you'll probably find that the power supply uses a phenolic card base board they can shave a few cents off there so they do so yeah we've got a ribbon up here that connects that down in there so that actually just slides into there put a little cutout in the drive there it's pretty good tada oh we're more in like Flynn look at that I actually really liked how they've added this strengthening bar across here this probably like abs plastic or something but that strengthens the keyboard so you can see that that braces in there and over in here so that alert so when you've got this in like this when you press in the middle of the keyboard it doesn't flex and feel cheap and nasty so that's a that's a really nice addition there somebody was thinking and if we take a look at the main guts down here we've got ourselves a date code the main 65 co2 made by NCR by the way there you go it was yet paid by all and sundry back in the day date code our fourth week 84 we've got first week 84 we've got 30 first week 84 but these are fairly you know they might have had you know a ton of these in stock d rams well like these were the precious thing back in data my precious and we've got a date code of first week 85th week 85 so there you go this they would have put this into production like weeks after that so very early 1985 vintage this machine and here's some attention to detail on the EMC the electromagnetic conformity for this thing this is like a steel ring here like a you know a steel wool steel mesh ring that connects the one of the ground points here and this is one of the mounting posts for the floppy drives that just electrically connects the floppy drive down to the main board they're very nice they've got two of those and there you go that's just for the 6502 faired boys and of course it wouldn't be an early 80's computer without a couple of bages on it there we go genuine mod wire there and a resistor going between the pen on this gal slash power device over to one of the vias they're nice no surprises for finding the famous integrated was machine ASIC up here there is IWM right next to the floppy port of course there's the internal floppy connector there's the external floppy connector so I haven't actually looked at the schematic and architecture of this thing yet but obviously like they're just are parallel data and then they've probably just got a different selection or some other miscellaneous control lines for the separate floppy drive you probably couldn't use both at once it's interesting to note that this is the original Apple Watusi and you can tell because or there is no memory expansion all the memory the hundred and twenty-eight K is on the board here right down here now in 1986 they did release a memory expansion version of this it's a substantially different board layout and it's got a here's a photo of it it's got a memory expansion connector down here and this allows you to expand the memory and thing not so in this original one now you can see there's a few other circuit changes as well one thing I really like about these old machines is that they put proper silkscreen labels on look they told you what all the block parts of the unit were with all the main chips look IWM integrated was machine TMG that's the main timing chip Glu that say it's well it's glue logic but it stands for a right you know general-purpose our interface logic unit we've got our character generator up here we've got video latch here and there's the ad latch for example for the ad column mode and just everything is labeled it's brilliant and the main elements down here I've already pointed out the main not CPU the MMU that's the memory management unit handles all the memory addressing and all that sort of jazz IOU that's pretty obvious that's the IR interface IO peripheral type interface and then we've got our character generator ROM here that's of what map stands for the character you know keyboard mapping unit and then Mon down here is monitor of course the old school our word for the firmware and this puppy here is the ink which is our encoder and of course that's the keyboard encoder because you need a keyboard encoder to decode all the keys of course like to do the matrix address mapping as you can see there's basically nothing for the sound here here's our volume knob over here on the side our headphone output and just like yet there's no sound chip no nothing it was just single bit sound output beep beep beep and you might actually have been wondering about this switch here that looks like a keyboard that's because it is the keyboard switch and what that one does is it switches between your standard layout like this that everything your QWERTY layout and a default school Dvorak layout so yeah for those Dvorak fans I guess you could get like a different key tops and put them on and or maybe they actually sold a Dvorak configured machine for those uh yeah Dvorak fans so anyway yeah nobody does that anymore do they does anyone out there use a Dvorak keyboard come on there must be somebody so what happens with your keyboard of course is the keyboard encoder takes the keyboard matrix and gives you a matrix location of which actual key was pressed and then the character generator map Rama here because that's effectively what it is it's just a it's just a ROM essentially a lookup table that then converts that matrix value into a particular ASCII character which then can be are displayed on the screen and everything else and these 2's six double five ones which are labeled sixty-eight five ones here on the silkscreen they're actually your to white serial chips cuz this thing had that two serial ports on it and the main clock for this thing there it is fourteen point two four nine eight two megahertz and that in combination with the timing chip here generated all the system timing including the main processor clock so the main process won't run at just over one megahertz they would have divided that puppy in here by fourteen we've got one yes triple five timer there will a dual triple five time are the five five six brilliant and the ventilation slots on the back here I don't know how they're working that well cuz there's a metal our grid on there show might be able to see that on the other side and then there's an insulating card under there of course because you can't have the bottom of these are dip packages shorting out to the metal on the back so there's like that just covering up all the all the vent holes are under the air what the that's not going to be effective at all there they are we've got a metal screen under there but yeah the board just sat flat I'm there it's yeah you and just for kicks will check the processor clock now we need the pin 37 or the 6502 which is the main eye input clock phase and the 6502 actually has a separate clock outputs as well there you go Mario right I'll scope 1.0 1 5 6 2 megahertz or there abouts you can see that it's all a little bit jittery here now I don't know if there's like a the odd missing cycle in there or not not sure what's going on so if we stop it and go in it all looks uh no looks fairly fairly normal so you might have some trigger jitter nah-ah know is that my imagination might have some trigger jitter or something in there but that looks see a little bit jittery Oh what's going on oh yeah I'm not sure that's actually trigger jitter I think it's something genuine on the clock so I'm not sure what's happening there I don't know enough about the Apple timing chip to to know what that deal is there you go there's the main processor clock and it's rock-solid it's a little bit rounded off there because I've got my bandwidth limiter turned on and not exactly our probe in this properly hence all the ringing and crap like that but yeah it's rock-solid so there's something else yeah so the timing coming out of the timing chip is probably missing a pulse here or there for some particular reason maybe some sort of you know I don't know interrupt wait stay D type thing and even Apple couldn't escape the clutches of Bill there we go copyright Microsoft 77 because there's some Microsoft basic happening in there we've really got left to look at is this brick here this nice big shield a brick TDK dead giveaway that's a DC to DC converter here's our DC input from our linear plug pack that we've got um this looks like a melted capacitor on the top but heads it's not think it's a big yeah it's just a big wrapped wire round inductor they're just a big choke and then we just got a big mains input duct filter cap Nippon chemi-con thank you very much tell you what though I do really like how they've got the card edge connector here completely separate shield and enclosure and along with those shielding EMI gaskets I told you about going up to the floppy drive Lee they took EMI recently seriously um you know it's hard when you got like a a double sided board like this and you just got traces busses big buses running everywhere but you know they're done a pretty decent job there how does that come out it's got to pull out there we go we're in like Flynn well I'll tell you what I don't mind that puppy at all that looks actually quite nice and on resistors which were lead formed end on resistors very common for the day of course and that's a very nice clean neat layout huge big gate ground plane on the top Nippon chemi-con caps fantastic no expense spared there as so you know they're they're still going no leaks in those whatsoever and that's a very nice implementation of a DC DC converter ID not sure how many out rails that's got will have five volts and minus 5 volts and 12 volts or something from a 12 to 15 like up to 15 volt input from the plug pack if I put it back together and just take the lid off you can see this bracket that they're using at an angle there to hold in and push the switching transistor across against the back in here which is using this as a heatsink that's a rather novel but yeah a little bit convoluted to try and get in though and last but certainly not least this ugly looking floppy drive here but my hats off it still worked I found some gunk in here and everything so it still worked a treat it just goes to show the robustness of these things really it's just incredible and of course there's our head right down in there and if we work out floppy in of course there you go and then the stepper motor just moves the head in and out and turns the disk not much going on there at all but I love the bottom look at this they've got an old-school timing chart on here so that you can actually get the rotational speed with your stroboscope fantastic and made in Japan hi to all my Japanese viewers arm it's an Alps drive and serial number only 60,000 that's that's pretty low this is one of the earlier units really I mean how many of these things did they make a million Apple 2 C's I'm not sure the exact number but as you can see there's not much on here at all there's just a motor control stuff pretty much because all of the digital decoding and head amplifier and stuff like that but apart from that there's you know there's bugger all on here because all of it Arcas was did his own controller famously and that saved a lot of the cost there now of course on this because it's a single sided disc this top part here isn't the head it's just like a yeah it's just like a little uh felt pad type thing there is our head right in in there there we go it's got some gunk on it that could do with some cleaning oh there it is look at that for those who remember back in the day um you used to be able to get a five and a quarter inch are cleaning discs it was like a cloth instead of having like the mylar magnetic coated disc itself that it actually had like a cloth in there like a microfiber II type cloth they didn't up microfiber back then I don't know an equivalent type thing and then you'd put your you'd put your cleaning fluid onto that you'd stick it in and then you start the drive up and clean your head I think that's what we need to do here mmm what you need is a cotton swab like this and you need some isopropyl alcohol this is the pure stuff 99.8% or you can also use one of these medical swabs as well these are only a 70% alcohol but they'll do the business so they've actually got a little cleaning cloth inside already pre moisten so you can actually use that too just to get in there and wipe the head now we just lift up this up pressure pad here because this is only a single sided Drive the double-sided ones will have our heads on both sides and they'll actually have a head on this mechanism that lists up so you'll have to do both but just repeat it and we can see our head in there very very dirty look at that so we've dipped our cotton bud in the alcohol not too much but just get in there and start scrubbing you can see it might take a bit of elbow grease this one I don't think this one's been cleaned in 30 years maybe hmm and there we go head is perfectly clean now now just make sure there's no fibers in there just get in side because you can actually get fibers that come off these if you get good micro fiber type our cotton buds they're the best now you shouldn't wipe this at all because the alcohol will just evaporate so don't worry about it just leave it a few minutes and she'll be right here we go that's one 500th shutter speed you can see the inner loop which was the fifty almost standing still almost ah pretty close and this disk drive seems to be working a treat after we cleaned it I think there's something wrong with physically wrong with the Zork disk I can see some physical damage to it so anyway load in another one checking out high-resolution demonstration or biorhythms they will all the go back in the day ah let's go for the USS Enterprise high-res picture ah got to do it okay I think what's happening here is this LCD somehow maybe not can be compatible with the graphics mode perhaps ice regardless of what program I seem to run if I try and go into graphics mode it just blank screen so oh sorry there we go you saw it we had the enterprise tries to capture that fantastic so there you go that's a probably a rather lengthy look at the Apple to see the original one not to be confused with the two C+ or that one with the upgraded memory module 1990 this was like the first early weeks 1995 so this is just over 30 years old and it still works beauty no problems with the power supply because they use top quality caps in there it's well-built and really not much I can wrong go wrong without you know 5 volt TTL stuff at all and the floppy drive amazingly still works I've cleaned that and I think I'll just go play some Zork and by the way I'll link in the full service manual for this thing it's got the schematics and it's like 560 pages and it's got the wrong dump listing and AH man everything including the kitchen sink it's fantastic they really did proper technical reference manuals service manuals back in those days that's fantastic so terrific bedtime reading so if you like that please give it a big thumbs up on YouTube because it always helps a lot and if you want to discuss it YouTube comments or eevblog comm forum or blog down below catch you next time you

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 140,543

Rating: 4.9313984 out of 5

Keywords: apple, Apple IIc (Computer), Product Teardown, teardown, pcb, retro, vintage, 1980's, circuit, schematic, boot, power on, review, comparison, applesoft basic, basic, monitor, firmware, rom

Id: JsUM-ZcBFE0

Length: 33min 51sec (2031 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 27 2015

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What was the dual 555 Timer likely to be for?