Constraints

Now, if you have worked on the Apple II, you have noticed the constraints of the machine.  The two big ones that come to mind are memory and disk space.  If you look at pretty much any of the software written for these older machines, they go to some great lengths to conserve both

Both of my machines have 128K.  The //c comes that way originally and the //e  is enhanced with the newer 65C02 processor, new ROMs and memory.

Now disk space is a different animal.  Back in the day, diskette drives were expensive.  You could get one and sometimes buy a second one later, like I did with my Apple //c.  You could do that with the //e, but in the case of my machine, the previous owner went with the duodisk, which had two diskette drives and had a sleeker look.  At this point, both machines had two 5 1/4″ floppy diskette drives for a total of 280K of space.  With two drives you could start up a program diskette in the first drive and put a data diskette in the second drive.  You could make fast copies from one drive to the other.

Apple offered other disk space options in the form of a 3 1/2″ diskette drive and the Apple profile hard drive.  The hard drive involved some really serious outlay of cash, in excess of $3400 for a 5MB hard drive.  Even now, a hard drive can run you several hundred dollars for the Apple II and the same again for a controller if you are not using a //c (They are also fairly rare).

My Apple //c is my primary Apple II.  Adding a  3 1/2″ drive was like adding a small hard drive to it (800K is more than 5 x 140K diskettes).  It’s really nice to put software on the bigger disk and not have to delete files to add more files.

I have to be honest, I added the second duodisk to my //e on a lark.  I saw it on eBay a a really cheap price and picked it up with the controller.  I installed it and it works, beyond that I haven’t used the second set yet.  I am also looking for a controller, Apple 3.5 Disk Drive Card (Liron), for the //e, that I can use with one of the 3 1/2″ drives from the //c.