Introduction (Cont’d)
Contents
The Apple III used a mechanical keyboard that was visibly different from the one used on the Apple II and Apple II Plus. It had a numerical keypad, allowed the use of both upper case and lower case letters, thus the presence of the “Alpha Lock” (“caps lock”) key (the Apple II and Apple II Plus by default only allowed upper case letters), the presence of the new Open Apple and Solid Apple keys, and the reset key was now hidden behind the keyboard.
Figure 3: The keyboard
On its rear side, the Apple III had a connector for an external floppy disk drive, two I/O ports (mainly targeted to joysticks), an RGB video output, a composite video output, an audio output (for connecting to external speakers; the computer had an internal speaker as well), a serial port, a receptacle for the power cord, and the on/off switch. The first I/O port supported the direct installation of an Apple Silentype printer, which was a thermal printer. As you can see, the Apple III had four expansion slots. In Figure 4, you will notice that we had an expansion card installed; this was the Profile interface card for the Profile external hard drive.
Figure 4: The rear panel
In order to remove the Apple III’s top lid to have access to its interior (for installing expansion cards, for example), you needed to remove two screws located at the bottom of the computer. In Figure 5 you can see the Apple III with its top lid removed.
Figure 5: Inside the Apple III
As mentioned, there were four expansion slots, and our Apple III had a Profile interface card installed, which must have been installed in slot four. Other expansion cards available at the time included a CP/M card (which had a Z80 microprocessor that allowed the Apple III to run the CP/M operating system and programs written for this OS), memory expansion, and an Apple IIe emulator. But the truth is, few hardware manufacturers got interested in developing peripherals for the Apple III.
Let’s now take an in-depth trip inside the Apple III.
