The Apple IIGS "Mark Twain" Prototype or "Super Apple II"
By Jim Pittman
Copyright (c) 1996 Apple Users' Group, Sydney
Republished from Applecations, a publication of the Apple Users' Group, Sydney, Australia.
(c) 1996 by the AppleQuerque Computer Club
Reprinted with permission from the February 1996 issue of The AppleQuerque Computer Club's publication AppleTalk.
During the last month several AppleQuerque members have been able to evaluate a prototype Apple IIGS, sometimes called the "ROM-4" or "the Super Apple II," a machine that never officially existed.
A couple of years ago I met a former Apple Computer employee at the University of New Mexico Computing Center. I was using my trusty 1981 Apple II Plus as a terminal to our UNIX system, and she remarked that she had worked with the Apple II team and was always glad to see an old Apple II still in use. As we talked about her work at Apple Computer and my fondness for my much-enhanced Apple II Plus, she mentioned that she had a prototype Apple IIGS that had been designed and developed but never manufactured.
I was not particularly interested in one-of-a-kind prototypes at the time and soon forgot about it. In November at the Apple II Library meeting, Jim Wifall and Joe Walters were discussing some news that had appeared on GEnie. Some Apple II enthusiasts, notably Joe Kohn of Shareware Solutions II fame, were tracking down prototype Apple IIGS machines that had never been announced or manufactured. They believed that somewhere, some of these prototypes still existed.
I casually remarked, "I know someone in Albuquerque who has one of those."
At this, Jim and Joe turned their astounded gaze on me and wanted to know "What? Who? Where? When? Did you see it? We want to see it!"
When I finished my rather sketchy story about meeting someone who owned a prototype, Jim and Joe were excited that such a historically significant machine might be close at hand. We all agreed that it was our moral duty to find this machine and examine it. I said I'd try to find out if my friend was still in Albuquerque and contact her to see if she would be willing to bring her computer to a Club meeting and demonstrate it to us.
I looked up her 1993 phone number at a UNM department, got her current business number and was soon talking to her on the phone. She remembered me and my Apple II Plus. Yes, she still had the computer, it was in storage and she was delighted that our Club members were interested in seeing her prototype Apple II. She didn't have a monitor for it but she would be happy to bring it to one of our meetings in January.
After the holidays I contacted her again to be sure the meeting was on. She said she wouldn't be able to attend the meeting this month but would bring the machine to the University so we could make sure it still worked, and she'd loan it to the Club for our evaluation!
On January 4th she brought the prototype to my office at UNM. It looked like an Apple IIGS with a slot in front, but on the bottom it said "Mark Twain" with a single-digit serial number! We plugged in a Mac keyboard and mouse and an old monochrome NEC monitor and turned the machine on. It beeped, announced itself as an "Apple IIGS Rom 3" and booted up to the Finder; obviously it was in fine shape after
hibernating for a couple of years. A quick trip to the clock in the control panel revealed that the machine was within a few seconds of the correct (Pacific Standard) time!
The hard disk had GS/0S System 6.0 installed, as well as HyperCard GS and a few more or less standard utilities. I had brought some 3.5" disks along to try out. We had heard that the ROM-4 prototypes were supposed to be equipped with 1.44-megabyte "super-drives" but this one only seemed to recognize 800-K disks. And, the drive would not eject disks, either by dragging the disk icon to the trash or by pushing the eject button. Fortunately, the straightened paper clip trick worked.
That evening I took the machine to Jim Wifall's to give him time to do some exploring before the Apple II Library meeting. A spare color monitor, keyboard and mouse brought the machine fully to life and it was the star attraction at the Saturday meeting of Apple II enthusiasts. Jim, Joe, Mike Westerfield and Richard Wifall discovered a number of interesting details about the machine.
The CPU was the same as in a ROM 01 or ROM 3 Apple IIGS, a 65C816 DIP running at 2.8 MHz, making it seem rather slow compared to our accelerated IIGS's. There was just over two megabytes of memory on the motherboard. The hard drive was 40 megabytes and it seemed rather slow, too. The motherboard was very neatly laid out.
Two 64-pin SIMM sockets were located where the memory card on a standard IIGS is found; we had no SIMMs of the appropriate size to try out. The slots appeared to be standard Apple II slots, but there were only five; slots 5 and 7 were missing, to allow room for the square power supply box. (Since slot 5 corresponds to the smart port on the back and slot 7 corresponds to the hard drive, the loss is minimal.) There was a game paddle socket but instead of a speaker there was a little black transducer. Several yellow wires were soldered to various places. The most notable instance was a 14 pin DIP chip that was turned upside down on the motherboard, with wires running from its pins to the motherboard holes. There was some sort of daughter board under the disk drive area and a connector next to it on the motherboard, sticking out to the right; we assumed these comprised the equivalent of a high-speed SCSI controller card.
The case was a standard IIGS case with the Apple logo but no name, and had a slot cleanly cut in the front for the 3.5" disk; the eject button was right next to the slot. The back connectors were pretty much the same as on a standard Apple IIGS, but neat holes had been provided for the relocated power cable and switch. A significant difference in the back panel was a new 1/8" jack immediately above the headphone port. Close inspection and some tests revealed that the headphone jack definitely handles two channels, not one, so we presume it is a stereo jack. We also assume the second jack is a microphone input.
We didn't try a SCSI device, but we did install a FOCUS hard card with System 6.0.1 in slot six and set the control panel to boot from that slot. The FOCUS card booted up and seemed to work just fine in the prototype machine.
We also saw the "almost" version of the cover for the 1992 Apple II Resource Guide. The version that actually came out had a book displaying the name of the author, Mark Twain, which was the code name for the prototype machine. The alternate cover, which was obviously a proof from finished artwork, actually showed the ROM 4 Apple IIGS! The cover was mounted in glass with the Tennyson quote painted on the glass,
"It is better to have loved and lost that never to have loved at all." Mike remarked that, considering the code name, he thought a bastardization of another quote would have been more appropriate: "The news of my death has [not] been greatly exaggerated."
Rumors from Kansasfest 1991 described the "Super Apple II" as a killer machine that Apple management dared not release for fear it would dampen sales of their favorite child, the Macintosh. But it appears that the Mark Twain prototype was in no way intended for such a role. Rather, it was designed to be a powerful but inexpensive consumer product, a natural successor to the Apple II, II Plus, IIe, IIc and IIGS and its target would have been PC clones and the education market.
With a hard drive containing AppleWorks GS and HyperCard GS, it could be sold as a home or school computer that was not only simple to set up -- truly plug-and-play -- but also easy to use. Yet it would provide all the power most people need in a home computer.
Despite the completely new motherboard, we feel this machine provides essentially no technical advance beyond that of a ROM 3 Apple IIGS, other than having a built-in hard drive, 3.5" drive, SCSI port and twice the memory.
Apple II enthusiasts in the AppleQuerque Club have been fortunate to get a glimpse of a bit of history in seeing this Apple IIGS that might have been. Many of us expressed our belief that if Apple Computer had built this machine we would certainly have bought it.
Reality is another matter. Despite Apple Computer's decision to drop all Apple II products, many of us now own Apple IIGS computers with added equipment that give our machines far more power than the prototype Mark Twain: larger and faster hard drives, 1.44-megabyte 3.5" disk drives, accelerators, floptical drives, Zip drives, and 8-meg memory cards. After the decisions were made not to produce the super Apple IIGS and to quit producing the ROM 3 Apple IIGS, a remarkable amount of hardware and software has become available. The Apple IIGS is enjoying a renaissance of sorts that so far shows little sign of ending.
We intend to demonstrate this remarkable prototype machine at the February AppleQuerque meeting and at the February Apple II Library meeting.
NOTES:
You may be interested to know more about my 1981 Apple II Plus. It has a 16-K Apple memory card, a no-name parallel card driving an Epson FX-85, an Apple Super Serial card attached to our network at 9600 bps, an AE TransWarp II accelerator, a Videx Videoterm 80-column card, a Videx Enhancer II keyboard enhancer, and it emulates a VT-102 by a hardware and software package, Softerm 2. The Enhancer II gives me all lowercase/uppercase ASCII characters, two repeat speeds, and the ability to effortlessly create and run macros in seconds!
This machine sits next to a 386 Zenith which is my primary terminal to our UNIX and IBM mainframes via Telnet. On the other side of the Apple II is a Macintosh II which is so slow and has such a hard-to-see screen that I seldom turn it on. Well, it IS a 1987 Mac, after all.
At home I still use my 1980 Apple II Plus which has a 2400 modem and prints to an NEC Spinwriter via a Practical Peripherals microbuffer. It has a Transwarp II, a Videx Ultraterm and a Videx Enhancer II.
I have a ROM 3 Apple IIGS with a RamFAST, a Superdrive and an Apple 3.5 card; an HP DeskJet prints via a Grappler+ card. I can print to the DJ from AppleWorks 5.1 and (using Pointless) from GraphicWriter III -- which recently got upgraded to version 2.0, a BIG improvement. I also have a ROM 01 IIGS which I bought used; it has a Quickie scanner and 7 megs on a CV-RAM card.

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