The IIGS: Apple or Macintosh?

[@JustChiminin]

There's a whole modern cottage industry out there to upgrade these machines to their fullest potential. Hard drive options utilizing SD cards or USB thumb drives. Processor upgrades like the AppleSqueezer to kick the speed up to 14Mhz which also add 13MB of RAM. Entire software libraries on 32MB disk images, the ProDoss limit, available for download online. The Floppy EMU is helpful for this. Stereo output cards, and video output options to utilize HDMI and VGA monitors. Believe it or not, this is the best of times for the old GS!

[@shawn_bullock]

I got started on the IIc back in '87. I remember one day Zork crashed and I saw the assembly pnuemonics. I did eventually figure out how to poke around, then found the mini assembler and taught myself 65c02 assembly from just that exploration. It would be years before I saw a book on 6502 assembly or knew what an assembler was. When I finally got my hands on a book I had correctly taught myself 6502 except a few misunderstandings I had to correct. To this day I can work miracles with 6502/65816 assembly but I can't remember something from Javascript I learned 5 days ago. But then I met a friend who had a IIgs. OMG, heaven on Earth. I never really had any access to any language that could use the toolbox, or any books on the subject. I didn't until about a decade later in early 2000's but by then my professional career on Windows/Intel had already begun. One day I might make a IIgs program but hasn't happened yet.

[@Ariannus]

Apple offered the IIgs as an upgrade kit for the older Apple 2 models, where an Apple reseller would swap the motherboard in your II/II+/IIe case. That is why it has the keyboard connectors and the ram card has the angled corner to fit under the slanted keyboard of the older case.

[@Zagroseckt]

Yep. my first encounter with a ii/gs was a conversion.

[@LajitasRain]

From Wikipedia: "The 2.8 MHz clock was a deliberate decision to limit the IIGS's performance to less than that of the Macintosh. This decision had a critical effect on the IIGS's success; the original 65C816 processor used in the IIGS was certified to run at up to 4 MHz. Faster versions of the 65C816 processor were readily available, with speeds of between 5 and 14 MHz, but Apple kept the machine at 2.8 MHz throughout its production run." The Apple RGB monitor was far superior to the Apple composite. None of that color fringing. And of course it fit with aesthetic of the IIGS much better.

[@jsrodman]

It was a bad decision in hindsight for a company that was desperately trying to find a path forward. They knew the Apple II line wasn't long term viable and they'd already failed to build new lines with things like the Apple III and Lisa. Being a bit paranoid about trying to get the Mac going makes some sense, but with hindsight we can see that these products were never really going to conflict. The Mac's early successes were tied very directly to its higher resolution that the IIgs would never have. And GS OS, while cool, was never going to have the memory tightness that allowed the Mac to run its complex operations, and similarly lacked the sophistication of the toolbox. A 4mhz IIgs would have just potentially given them two successful products.

[@grtitann7425]

That decision came from Jobs, to screw The Woz ...again.

[@Great-Documentaries]

Quoting Wikipedia like it is a citable source of credibly information is hilarious. It had ZERO effect. ZERO. No one was dumb enough to buy these except school districts. It wouldn't have made ANY difference since this POS ran no existing 16-bit software (read as: Mac software like PageMaker, Excel and Word), and was vastly outperformed by the true multitasking Amiga and the lower-priced Atari ST. No one considering a Mac and the software that ran on Macs was going to buy this POS. And obviously no non-Apple fan was going to choose this instead of a PC, Amiga, Mac or Atari ST. It was one of the dumbest ideas Apple ever had. Almost as bad as Commodore releasing the Plus 4 when they already had the Commodore 64.

[@jonc4403]

@@Great-Documentaries No one? The Woz IIgs in my office would beg to differ. It was an amazingly good computer, better than any contemporary Mac. I used it as my primary computer for high school and half of college, and it was better for games than any Mac for nearly a decade. Apple would have been better off dead-ending the Mac and using the IIgs as the start of their product line going forward, maintaining backward compatibility throughout their product line. We'd never have seen Apple "decline" in the '90s, and never have had to see that idiot Steve Jobs come back and ruin the company a second time. We'd never have seen stupidity like iPhones that didn't support normal software installation, laptops that were too thin to include removable batteries, and non-replaceable RAM and storage. Sure, it wasn't incredibly fast at release, but with an accelerator card it would easily outrun a Mac II. I'd love to see a modern computer based on the IIgs heritage instead of the curse of Jobs.

[@john_ace]

Originally only up to 10MHz certified 65C816 were available a bit later than the release of the IIgs. These early 65c816 versions had bugs that would be more prominent at higher frequencies. There was a reason that the Transwarp GS and ZIPChip GSX were only sold in 7 to 9MHz versions. Aftermarket mods could push the cards to around 12MHz. The later 16 or even 18MHz speeds were archived with the redesigned 14MHz version of the W65c816 that can be pushed to incredible 20MHz with very fine tuned timings like in the C64 SuperCPU (1997).

[@michaelstoliker971]

The Apple IIGS came in two options. The board could be installed into a standard Apple II to stealth upgrade a II to a II GS which is why a keyboard connector was needed. The speed was hobbled by Steve Jobs so it wouldn't outsell his Macintosh. It was a better computer than the existing Macintosh so Jobs had to make sure it stayed outclassed until he was ready to release more powerful Macs. A faster IIGS would have forced him to bring out upgrade Macs before he was ready. WOZ really was the smarter Steve.

[@baroncalamityplus]

Thats the story I read as well. However, Jobs left Apple in the fall 1985 and the IIGS launched a year later. Even if Jobs made the decision, Apple management could have changed that decision before the launch of the Apple IIGS.

[@claudiadarling9441]

@@baroncalamityplus It may have been to far along into production to change it. By that time Apple was already bureaucratic and bloated.

[@comedicsketches]

No, dev of this thing hadn't even left the concept phase when Jobs was sent elsewhere. Engineering and certainly production weren't even started.

[@michaelstoliker971]

@@comedicsketches Steve Jobs left in 1985 and the IIGS was released in 1986 so development was well under way in 1985. Woz was known to have made a statement about an 8Mhz CPU in 1985. Whether it was Jobs who was directly responsible for hobbling the IIGS or not, it is true that Apple did hobble it so as not to compete directly with MAC, and it was known that Jobs did not like the IIGS.

[@comedicsketches]

@@michaelstoliker971 He was sent out at the very beginning of the year when dev was STILL IN CONCEPT STAGE. Further, limiting the speed was probably a good idea for the specific reason of price targeting and product differentiation and Jobs was not the only one at the company who understood basic business.

[@tropicalretro]

6:16 That would be the Stealth GS. You could upgrade your //e by replacing the board, hence the connector.

[@GeorgeRTurner]

Such fond memories for me. Nice to see the IIgs running. I was a member of the IIgs software team (code name Gumby Software, and that was our GS :-) ) The startup progress bar was a weekend project I did, and I would save off the actual boot time so the next time you booted the system, the time it took to complete the progress bar would be reasonably accurate. This was helpful when you booted from a RAM disk or hard drive. Even back in the day booting from a Ram disk was a treat. :-) Thank you for the video and the trip down memory lane. BTW, a friend/co-worker did the ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) implementation and when the system/ADB reset, it reset to his birthday! ;-)

[@techsaverscomputerrepairca2127]

GS/OS was actually pretty incredible for it's time. Because of third party utilities, my GS could read and write MS-DOS disks and Mac disks (FAT, NTFS and HFS) plus I also had TrueType font capability. Had it hooked up to my HP Deskjet so had great looking documents. I also had a Z80 card for CP/M compatibility, and a video overlay card for some video work upgraded to 4Mb memory and a 20Mb internal hard drive. 2 x 5.25" drives,, a 800Mb 3.5" drive plus a 1.6Gb 3.5" Superdrive. Great computer!

[@Great-Documentaries]

TrueType came later. In fact much of the stuff you mention came much later. And it would have cost a fortunate if it had existed in 1986. The GS/OS was behind the times for its time. The Amiga had a multitasking Unix-like OS that was light years ahead of anything Apple had (in fact Apple never made a mutitasking OS during the 1980s as MultiFinder suspended apps and could NOT leave them running -- Amiga was multitasking in 1985). Also, who cared about Z80 compatibility in 1986? No one was still running that ancient OS and its software. The Commodore 128 had a Z80 built in, by the way.

[@techsaverscomputerrepairca2127]

@@Great-Documentaries Well thank you for setting us all straight in your negative comments left for me and others. Feel better yet? Didn't say anything about all my add-ons being available in 1986. Didn't care abou how you felt about CP/M, either. I had an Amiga too but I could recognize the good work that ALL programmers and engineers were putting in to EVERY platform. Being such a sneering a-hole towards other retro computer users kind of flies in the face of what this KZbin channel is all about. Get lost or grow up.

[@whophd]

@@Great-Documentaries I really don't think the GS's feature set in 1986 is as relevant as the feature set in the period 1989-1992. We do the same with every other platform, and think about what MS-DOS could do in v5.0 and v6.0, and we talk about what the 386 and 486 PC did with Windows and dial-up internet, even if it came with MS-DOS. This is why Macintoshes of the late 1980s are usually still running MacOS 6.x and 7.5.5 versions, typically the latest compatible or the one before it. Let's also be honest about who buys which computers - not everyone can afford the latest. So to save money, people (like me) bought the GS when it was 3 years old, and had a ton of features it didn't have when new. What a deal! Until I had a full-time job in the IT industry, my "daily driver" or main computer at home was never the latest model CPU, and even now when I look at 2000-2020, it was 50% of the time that I went for the "best" model in the year I was buying it.

[@RideManDave]

ADB: The Apple IIgs was the first machine to use ADB. ADB migrated to the Macintosh after the IIgs was released. Keyboard connector: As others have said, that board was designed so it could be mounted in a //e case. Memory: It’s the other way around. 256k on the board, 1MB on the expansion card. Mine has a 3rd party memory board with 4MB which the Apple memory card can plug into, giving me 5.25MB. Video: The IIgs RGB display is crystal clear with no color fringing. About the only way to make it look even better is to use a Video Overlay Card. Control panel: You can boot the machine with any DOS 3.3 or ProDOS bootable disk; in fact GS/OS is essentially an overlay on ProDOS. Anyway, Apple-Option-Esc will bring up the system control panel with a few more options than the one in that version of GS/OS.

[@tschak909]

The ADB was designed concurrently for this system, and was adopted for thE Macintosh.

[@cathrynm]

I got a GBS-C from Aliexpress and an 2GS to SCART cable from Ebay. Now, the video looks way way way better. It took a little tweaking to optimize, but I"m pretty satified with it now.

[@BilisNegra]

Although mentioned in relation to other things, the IIGS hasn't had that much coverage in the form of YT videos exclusively devoted to them for an Apple product (contrary to regular Apple II's or compact Macs). It's a really refreshing topic and I thank you for this.

[@Ehurst01]

My elementary school opened my 1st grade year. Our computer lab and every classroom had one of these. I remember playing the MECC classics like Oregon Trail, Word Munchers and Number Munchers. It would be great to see some edutainment software in am upcoming video!

[@johnathanstevens8436]

The drawing routines and a few others were in ROM to speed things up. The ensoniq sound chip really was pretty awesome. Most likely would have been at least a 3.5" disk for GS/OS since it's larger than just ProDOS.

[@levimaaia]

Great video. The IIgs was my first computer.

[@LegoTux]

That boot disk is very bare bones. To get the full experience do a full GSOS install on the Emu as a HDD. The keyboard connector was for the IIe to IIgs upgrade where the base plate/back panel of the IIe was replaced to accomdate a IIgs motherboard.

[@HistoryMovieCritic]

This was my all-time favorite computer. I used it for many years into the Mac era. I can answer most of your questions about using it.

[@john_ace]

I once talked to a ROM dev for the IIgs who said that he had a 7 MHz late prototype that was very stable and going faster was technically limited by memory speed, not the CPU. But the faster chips were very hard to come by and 3-4 MHz was the bulk. There was little trust in WDC by Apple to be able to have a steady supply of chips faster than 4 MHz. They did not want to risk anything and went with the _very_ safe 3 MHz boundary partly because of limited CPU supplies and partly because of potential conflicts with the Mac line.

[@BilisNegra]

8:31 No greyscale for Macs of that era! It was 1-bit B&W with textures/patterns to make something closer to gray than bare black OR white. Well, you know that, but I wanted to point it out for viewers not in the know. That makes the color GUI in the IIGS all the more notable.

[@Great-Documentaries]

Not even close to being notable given that Windows was already in color and the multitasking (something MacOS wouldn't have until the mid-90s) Amiga's GUI was in color from the very beginning. Even the lowly Atari ST came in color models. It was only crappy Apple Macs that came in black and white.

[@whophd]

​@@Great-Documentaries Hmmm I lived through the pointy end of this comparison - EVERYTHING was black-and-white in the PC world, and Windows 3.0 was the first Windows version most geeks encountered. First and foremost, "nobody" used Windows instead of MS-DOS until Windows 3.1, roughly 1992. Windows 3.0 was 1990. But if you had Windows in the 1980s … while Windows 2.xx was capable of colour, the UI was predominantly black-and-white, and you could spend an entire session seeing nothing but that. This all comes down to most users having CGA or EGA and colour monitors being rare until the 1990s. So the GS had this golden moment where it might have shined - the late 1980s had very little colour from Macintosh or PC. The Macintosh II and IIx, then IIcx and IIci and IIfx, were the only options before 1990, and all of them cost a bomb and would never been seen in person by most geeks let alone others. Now that being said, the very early years of the GS are quirky because its operating system began life as ProDOS 16, and in the early days of ProDOS 16, it was using a black-and-white display mode from the Apple IIe. Very bizarre, very second-rate, and very temporary. But by 1988 the full colour desktop had appeared, and with only 640x200 pixels, it proudly represented the vision of colour desktop graphics from one team at Apple. There was way more colour going on in the Apple IIGS Finder than you'd find for years on Macintosh and Windows - partly thanks to the fact that every GS user had a colour display.

[@BestSpatula]

My elementary school in the early to mid 90s had a lab full of these. One remarkable feature of this system is that it supports localtalk networking. Apple sold a mac-based File and Print server and it was possible to boot the IIGS off a localtalk network and run Apple II software without any floppies. Users could print to a print queue. All handled by the onboard workstation card. Our lab also had IIe computers with the workstation card that worked exactly the same way. But the IIGS had it onboard.

[@ZiggyTheHamster]

Mine too. It would boot off of a Mac file server, and then let you pick from a catalog of disk images. Obviously, we had basically everything MECC ever produced.

[@BestSpatula]

@@ZiggyTheHamster absolutely. We also had magic slate which let us send emails to our teachers. The whole thing was ahead of its time.

[@mercster]

It's funny, when I was an Amiga kid, I always noticed two other systems whose graphics looked comparable on the back of game boxes: Apple IIgs and Atari ST. I never had any personal experience with these platforms, but I learned much later that while the Atari ST line was surely comparable to Amiga in performance, the Apple IIgs was... not so much. I think it had the same animation/sprite problems that the old Apple had (I did have a Laser 128 from Sears, which ran Apple II software...) I'm in Knoxville and would love to get to your museum one day... I'm disabled and on fixed income, as well as poor health... we'll see. 👍 Thanks for the video.

[@jsrodman]

The IIgs definitely could update the screen faster than a IIe or similar, but definitely no sprites, no copper, no blitter, and an underpowered cpu. Sylpheed on an un-accelerated IIgs is.. Impressively sluggish, for example.

[@mercster]

@@jsrodman Yeah that's kinda how I remembered the discussions around it... screenshots looked great, but get things moving, not so much.

[@jsrodman]

@@mercster It also didn't help it to compete that the IIgs was priced around the Amiga 1000 levels with 256kb of ram when the 1000 had 512kb pretty standard. And had come town to around 1600$ at the time the amiga 500 had hit around 1000$. "Expensive, but slow" isn't really a great sales pitch.

[@mercster]

@@jsrodman Heh, yeah... by the time my parents got me the Amiga 500 with 1M RAM expansion gaming bundle at Electronics Boutique (best Christmas ever), I think it was $600-$700.

[@mercster]

@@jsrodman I guess even then, people paid the "Apple tax." 😏

[@barkeaterden]

Thanks for the reminder! I have a thrift-store GS (and C) that replaced the Woz edition I bought in '88 that I'd like to get running (and upgraded). I have the same monitor on my workbench and I use it regularly.

[@barkeaterden]

IIRC...the chip was only good for 1 channel and there was a way to add another Ensoniq chip to get stereo.

[@scottgfx]

One thing I read about the ][GS back in the day; Its code name inside Apple was "Amiga Killer".

[@tetsujin_144]

Now that is comedy! OK to be fair the IIgs had better sound hardware. I think both machines suffered from a limited amount of sample RAM (with a sound system that only plays samples) but IIgs had more voices. But graphics? IIgs just couldn't keep up with its 1MHz bottleneck and virtually no hardware support for anything (can't even page-flip) At best IIgs has the advantage of a flat memory map for its graphics (no bitplanes) and that's advantageous especially for high end cpu-driven games (on an accelerator of course, 7MHz Amiga wasn't exactly a CPU beast either) like Wolf 3D. But for 2D games, moving sprites and backgrounds around, Amiga has hardware for that while IIgs is limited by its CPU and 1MHz video RAM. On paper the IIgs was comparable to an Amiga (well except the CPU wouldn't compare favorably on paper but the 65816 had better cycle-per-instruction performance so it's at least in the same ballpark) - but when you actually see Amiga games on a IIgs, it's pretty sad.

[@JohnAranita]

My 1st computer was the Apple IIGS. Dad bought it for me from a ComputerLand.

Had Apple not deliberately limited it's speed, the IIgs would have rocked! Still have the one I grew up with... totally love it still! =)

[@kascnef]

Had one but donated it to a school

[@redwingblackbird8306]

We had these in a computer lab, when I was in Junior High.

[@VIC-20]

The GS sound chip was designed by the same team as the Commodore 64 SID chip, if you missed the comment in the video.

[@PJ-sv4iw]

My parents had the IIGSS growing up, so I have fond memories of messing around with it and playing a few games. I still have it to this day, removed the clock battery, and upgraded the ram to 4MB (overkill), but beyond that, it doesn't get used anymore.

[@rager1969]

Daylight Savings was extended in the early 2000s, so it wouldn't choose the correct day to change.

[@ken1w]

I used one much longer than my more recent computers. At the time, “Internet” was mostly text-based and there were the popular “dial-up” services (AOL, GEnie, etc.), so an Apple IIgs was very usable and fun compared to Mac and PC contemporaries. Fun games. I didn’t use any older Apple II model previously, so I ran it primarily in the GS/OS (Mac-like) GUI. Mine was upgraded in almost every possible way, from more RAM, accelerator, beefier power supply, and sound card, to hard drives (internal and external). To get the GS experience, you must (at least) find a working RGB display. Note: Apple’s RGB display and slim ADB keyboard that came with GS are designed to “fit” the case. The part that sticks out aligns with keyboard shape and display sit on top to look like extension of case.

[@The_Temple]

Some of the design reflects Wozniak vs Jobs …. and Apple didn’t want the GS to take away from Macintosh sales

[@slaapliedje]

The Woz vs Jobs design was basically the philosophy of "open and hackable" vs "toaster oven with no serviceable parts." Imagine if Woz had continued designing computers... we probably would have ended up with an awesome Linux-like platform that was fully open and with proper 'ownership' (let's be honest, if you run macOS or Windows, you don't really own your computer / software.)

[@The_Temple]

@@slaapliedje right, Woz was all about open architecture that could be user customized - Jobs wanted something that would be locked down, quite the opposite point-of-view who knows what might have happened if Wozniak ultimately had his way - but certainly different for Apple

[@transitengineer]

Thank you, for highlighting the Apple IIGS computer system. If, I knew about these back when, they were being sold as new systems, they would have made an excellent upgrade from my Atari 800 home computer (smile...smile).

[@borf42]

We had a couple of these in my middle school. While I liked my C64 better, we had a lot of fun on them with Animation Studio as well as a music making program.

[@pjsampras7072]

My guess is the internal keyboard plug is probably used when the board is sold as an upgrade kit for Apple IIs with built-in keyboards into their cases.

[@mailboy1979]

The "keyboard" and "keypad" ports were for the //e upgrade kits. These components were connected inside the system via a ribbon cable. The "RAM card" you have pictured is the Apple Memory Expansion Card that could hold up to 1 MB in RAM modules. 256kb was onboard. It is a pity that you don't have the stock keyboard that came with these units as it is the smallest keyboard ever shipped with an Apple desktop computer. The //gs wasn't really meant to be run with a composite monitor. That's why the color graphics look muddy. The //gs was always demonstrated with a large BOSE speaker when at the dealership. They really wanted to promote the sound output.

[@VK2FVAX]

I hope you use the system more. I really enjoy watching you potter cluelessly around a system. It's seriously a compliment. Enjoying the learning journey. It'll be good to see more on the system with some other software and scene demos that loads off disk.

[@robertthurman9866]

I started with an Apple 2+ 64K. I loved the GS and still have it with the monitor,3.5 and floppy drive and scsi 30 meg HD in storage. It was originally going to have the sound card as an option. However the software companies refused to program for the card unless it was made as a standard feature. So it is really a 2e with a sound card and a video card and a faster CPU. The only real advantage was a larger capacity memory card system that used bank switching to emulate being able to access more memory. For big spreadsheets that helped. I used to be a member of The Original Apple Corp. The first Apple user group.

[@gklinger]

The original Apple IIgs had 256K of RAM and 128K of ROM and later models had 1MB of RAM and 256K of ROM.

[@DrakeSteele]

You really need an RGB screen for that - the color resolution was enough higher than the //e that trying to use composite just... kills the aesthetics of the OS, unfortunately.

[@darktetsuya]

I do remember seeing this in grade school, probably took a year or two but man I was blown away at what an upgrade it was compared to the standard II/IIe/IIc/etc. line! I don't remember using the GUI interface that much, though I do remember some 'how to use the IIGS' program that showed you how to use the mouse and some of the other new features of the upgrade. looking forward to the followup looking at the games and stuff!

[@trentonhuggins465]

Our computer lab in school was 95% regular Apple 2's with a couple of these scattered in. The one I was assigned luckily was the IIgs.

[@jessihawkins9116]

why do you count yourself lucky? it’s not like you owned it, it belonged to the school. 🤨

[@shmehfleh3115]

There's a color killer button on that Apple monitor that sharpens things up considerably, at the expense of displaying color. The Applecolor RGB monitor is of course the way to go with the IIGS. But any old RGB monitor or scan converter that can sync down to 15 kHz will work with it.The difference between them and crappy old composite is stunning.

[@marizuokereke7347]

I vaguely remember doing a project on the IIGS. I'd been working on Macintosh in C and 68000 asm. Work gave me the IIGS project because i was also familiar with 6502 assembler.

[@lars1588]

I'm here from the Ensoniq community. It's neat that it uses the Q-Chip also found in the Ensoniq Mirage and ESQ synthesizers. They can actually do a whole lot for something of their age.

[@junker15]

Your IIgs mainboard probably began life in a IIe pan that was intended to upgrade a IIe to a IIgs. (That upgrade kit was this mainboard, a replacement pan that had the IIgs mainboard port space available on it, and a replacement badge for the lid.) I've never seen any IIgs mainboards of the ROM01 variety that had the IIe connectors populated. (Yours probably has the IIe power supply connector also populated. It's a ROM00 upgraded to ROM01 or a ROM01, with 256k on-board.) That memory expansion shipped with later ROM01s (with only the 256k soldered in) so they'd have at least 512kB for GS/OS 4 (What became GS/OS had color as early as 1988). Your expansion board has all 4 256kB banks, so that's 1MB expansion. ROM03s had 1MB fast RAM on-board plus the usual 128k standard RAM. The Tools in GS/OS floppy augment the tools in ROM. If you have a ROM01 and the tool your application wanted isn't in ROM, it's loaded off the system disk. ROM03 integrated more of the most-used tools into ROM so it didn't need to load them. You're definitely going to want to have your Floppy Emu boot a GS/OS 6.0.1 hard drive image to get the full GS/OS experience. The floppy you booted has a minimum install.

[@impossiblescissors]

The closest the Apple II family (prior to GS) got to an elegant GUI was GEOS

[@Great-Documentaries]

Which was a port of the Commodore 64 version, where it was developed.

[@john_ace]

The Apple IIgs was the first Apple computer to use ADB. The Ensoniq can generate 32 simple voices or 16 'complex' voices. The complex voice is a combination of two voices where one voice is used as envelope. In GS OS only 15 voices are usable because one voice is reserved for the OS. If the Ensoniq DOC is directly programmed, all 16/32 voices can be used. The DOC can actually output 16 separate channels via 4 control lines of which apple made 3 available on an expansion connector. The IIgs is often called a 16 bit system. That is not really correct since apart from some CPU-functions, all other hardware components are 8 bit and even directly Apple II compatible. The IIgs is basically a IIe with an integrated accelerator, fast-Ram, an additional graphics mode and a new sound-system. The graphics, sound and ADB are part of the IIe 'subsystem' and run at 1 MHz. They could have been made as an add-on-card like the "Video Overlay Card" that uses an Apple IIgs graphics chip and is compatible with the IIe.

[@JeffTiberend]

I had read that the clock speed was limited because the Mega II couldn’t work properly at the higher clock speeds.

[@idahofur]

I have been doing computers since mid 91. Well I had a short break. The sad part is I didn't realize how close the IIgs was to Apple II. So I passed them up at thrift stores years ago. Including the nice crt monitors. Before thrift stores started not accepting picture tube monitors. I did know they worked with a adb keyboard / mouse. But, hey i got one now and I can tell you what. I used a Apple Color Composite Monitor IIe and it sucked. I was so happy to find a IIGS RGB monitor. Difference of night and day. On a side note. Since I never worked on Any apple products and really any Macintosh computers. I didn't realize you could just plug most apple ii cards in the system and such. Strange thing is I did know about an Apple III+ along with Apple LIsa / Mac XL. Part of the reason the place I worked at got Sun Remarketing magazines from the place in Utah

[@Bakensobek]

I had one of these. My very first computer, and I loved it. Always did, and it was hard when it was becoming clear that there was no future for it. Apple hobbled it so it would not compete with the Macintosh, and when it was clear that it would be discontinued, Apple wanted us to get a Macintosh LC as itsreplacement. That's when I decided I would never again buy any Apple computer (nor phone or tablet years down the road), and went with a PC with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 for my next computer. And I have been a Windows user ever since.

[@SenileOtaku]

Back when I was first shopping for a home computer, I had been debating between the Apple IIe/c systems and the Macintosh. Then when the IIgs came out I knew that was the one to get, as it covered BOTH sides. But I didn't get approved for Apple financing, snd bought a used Tandy 1000 instead. Never picked up any Apple systems until 32 years later when I bought an old MacBook Pro at a flea market.

[@micheldonais7476]

My cousin had that stealth Apple IIgs into an Apple II box, with embedded keyboard. Also, the IIgs "System" existed on my Apple IIc with 128k, but in monochrome, of course.

[@SlideRSB]

The Apple Desktop Bus made its debut on the IIGS before being incorporated into the Macintosh. Prior to the ADB, the original Mac used an RG45 connector for the keyboard.

[@Retrocomputernerd]

With the keyboard connector you pointed out on the logic board you can indeed use an Apple iie keyboard as others have mentioned. This also means that you have a relatively early ROM 1 system I believe. The ROM 3 did not have the keyboard connector and later ROM 1 had the solder pads but the connector wasn’t actually populated.

[@cooperschwartz318]

The ROM 00 and 01 models came with 256k of fast RAM on the board, and the ROM 03 models came with 1MB on the board, a fully populated Apple IIGS Memory Expansion card adds 1MB

[@georgesenda1952]

Hard drives for the GS were incredibly expensive at the time. IF you get a set of RGB cables which are easy to get you can connect the GS to a modern tv. MY ][GS is connected to my 2014 Sony Bravia and looks good and some people have modded old Apple ][ monitors to put LCDs in them so you can get the displays of today on Macs and the GS. There are archives out there where you can download just about every game ever made for the ][E & the ][GS and I still have about 50 disks for it. My girlfriends housekeeper threw out my collection of 10,000+ Apple ][ disks many of them original games which are worth a fortune today. I was out doing something and never did get an explanation as to why she went into the closet where they were all neatly stored in disc containers and threw them into a dumpster and to replace them today would cost me thousands of dollars. I was on the Apple developers list at the time and knew executives at Broderbund, SSI and elsewhere and was given a lot of free game software and at the time I had every program Apple had ever put out for ALL of the Apple ][s and a lot of manuals, peripherals, printers etc.

[@onigvd77]

Would really like to have one of these to use now, I don’t think we had that exact model at school but if we did it was just one, most of the others in the lab were IIe and Macintosh Classics to start with, there was a big upgrade in computer labs later and all the IIe and similar machines were replaced. You mentioned the first Macs being B&W yes that’s correct, but not grayscale, grayscale is having multiple shades of gray. SEs can be upgraded to grayscale as the MacOS of the time supported color despite what the screen could output.

[@choppergirl]

Played a lot of Hellcats over the Pacific on this thing in a Software Etc.... and some color Tetris... which is what it excelled at. Wouldn't have traded my Mac SE for it for all the money in the world, but it was wild to sit down at a computer suddenly enter a world of rich color and sound. It was no IIci though, but had it's niche as an Amiga kind of computer. Hardware ahead of it's time but you knew both were on a dead end branch of the desktop computer evolution tree.

[@bryndal36]

The reason for the keyboard ports on the motherboard is so that you can switch out the Apple // motherboard out of it's case and fit the //gs motherboard in there. Apple actually offered this as an upgrade for people who wanted to keep their original Apple // case. Apple also sold a version of the Apple //e called the Platinum which had the //gs motherboard in it.

[@vintagegeek]

Did all the Apple II Platinum systems have the IIGS motherboard or was it an extra cost upgrade?

[@bryndal36]

@@vintagegeek I think it was just an extra cost upgrade.

[@adrianrobey7716]

If only Steve hadn’t been so myopic and hurled the r&d into the IIGS. I would have loved to see the results.

[@shawn_bullock]

About that keyboard slot on the motherboard, IIRC correctly and the details are hazy but I once saw a IIgs in a IIe style case. There was an official IIe to IIgs upgrade kit. It might have been used for that.

[@Nickean-ox6ls]

7:53 When you smack your Macintosh’s tosh

[@georgesenda1952]

The ][ GS was not a Mac & a lawsuit by Apple Music ( the Beatles company ) forced Apple to discontinue the computer and playing games and hearing music at the time was an incredible experience at the time. I have a ][ GS, ][E, Enhanced ][E. ][+, ][C. Integer Based Apple & lots of games and manuals. APPLE ][ FOREVER.

[@whophd]

Nah this is a list of things that happened but they aren't related.

[@davidew98]

the board was also sold as an upgrade to the IIe

[@samshort365]

I have only used the Apple II GS via KEGS emulation, but it would have been a beast in its day and formidable had its specs been used to the fullest. On the other hand, the original Mac, which I first saw in 1984, appears like a glorified shoe box in comparison. My first thought when I booted that emulator was: "Why was this computer not a thing?" Now I know, Jobs!

[@trudnai]

Cool thing is that you could run all the Apple II programs and games on it using command line. The Macintosh cannot run them. And it has tons of devices onboard that you would normally need to insert as a card to the Apple II. In fact you need to configure these out if you want to insert a traditional card. Oh and btw that Apple IIe Platinum you showed on the picture has 128k and everything to be able to run Mouse Desktop, a GUI very similar to the GS/OS or the MacOS. You should be able to use the Macintosh keyboard the original one - the M0100, the Macintosh SE use Adb mouse, with the db9 connector.

[@EnronnSierra]

I never really understood Apple II GS and GS/OS line. Seems like it was basically the poor people Mac OS back then. A lot of IT text books, you often see it where mostly kids in class rooms are using it.

[@a62dave]

That OS reminds me so much of GEOS.

[@zaxchannel2834]

Stuff was nerfed because Jobs hated the GS and was upset it was better than his baby, or so I've heard

[@TonyP9279]

I'm guessing the "Auto Daylight Setting" is programmed for the pre- 2007 schedule change. I wonder if there is an update for that.

[@musclesmouse]

I have 4 IIgs, but no monitor. I guess I could use a composite like you did to get them working. I need to find my Gauntlet game I bought back in the 80s. Should still work.

[@horusfalcon]

Man... that UI is a technicolor yawn! I thought I was trippin' for a minute, then I remembered: NTSC = Never Twice Same Color.

[@mhenrique4860]

Why you show the crt when it is off but doesnt show it when it is on ?

[@joenichols590]

the IIe was my first computer ever i learned how to program basic on it

[@michaelhill6453]

I'm guessing the colours look much better in real life. Almost illegible otherwise.

[@kirishima638]

When Apple developed the Mac, with its 400kb floppy drive, they did not envision the need for a hierarchical file system, something Apple ProDOS already had. With the introduction of 800kb floppies and hard drives for the Mac, Apple back ported the hierarchical file system from the Apple II, which they called HFS. Similarly, the ADB and the ‘snow white’ design language originated with the IIGS, which came to the Mac with the Mac II. So the Apple II was a better system in many ways.

[@whophd]

100%. It had so much potential, and that is why I get very defensive about it haha.

[@summerlaverdure]

that was a lot of messing around with the menus in the system :( hopefully youll make another video where you run other software

[@BryonLape]

There were several limiting engineering decisions that make little sense if the "they crippled it to not compete with the Mac" idea is really myth.

[@WorldOfRock4U]

I'm watching this video on a macbook air 2 ghz w/ 250 giga bytes. i5 I started w a c64 then added geos then moved to a 5300 cs powerbook.

[@rhuwyn]

The story that it was Apple simply limited the clock speed for no other reason then to not compete with the Macintosh is mostly myth, that's often repeated so much that so many believe it to be ubiquitously true. Someone very recently did a very well done retrospective on it. The issue was a combination of companies contracted by Apple being unable to produce CPUs at the yields needed to supply higher clock speeds, and a combination of factors including Apple wanting to actually deliver a product which was already way behind schedule, as well as some design complications. Don't think it's simple enough to blame any one party, but ultimately from what I saw the decision was made so that Apple could deliver a consistent product at scale.

[@stpworld]

You can run apple IIGS OS on 90s power macs I have it installed on a few have not figured out how to make disks run yet.

[@negativezerocool2518]

I'm pretty sure it was limited so that way it was backward compatible. I know for a fact if you speed up the processor there's a lot of games and software that doesn't work right.

[@PeterRichardsandYoureNot]

I find that fact about limiting clock speed to 2.8mh to be a crock of bull. When this machine came out, it was a band air between the ,ac and the Apple ][ systems. Immediately two companies came out with over clock cards to help the thing run at 6 mhz or 8mhz depending on the card you got. I had heard one was being developed for 12 mhz bunt that would have been nuts. Considering Apple was overly protective of their hardware, I have a very very hard time believing they would leave over clocking up to thrird parties like the transwarpgs card to speed up the system. Why would they neuter their own system only to open a window for third parties to make money on something they could easily have opened up from lunch and therefor insuring their position in the color home computer space with speed, great graphics and amazing 16 bit sound with ensomiq sound chip.

[@whophd]

The speed issue didn't matter to me (as a very heavy user 1989-1992) as much as disk compatibility, display resolution and Macintosh app compatibility. While HD floppies and SCSI hard disks were quite nicely solved (even if you needed to go third-party for the floppy hardware), I dearly wished upgrades were available for those second two shortcomings - these don't get as much discussion. They were related problems, in fact; and when the PC Transporter upgrade put an x86 card inside it, they had to fully take over the display just to show a simple CGA. An upgrade path into Macintosh software - just the minimum Mac 128k or 512k level of compatibility - would have been the kindest way to take the sting out of this. There was no way to migrate from the IIGS to any Macintosh, with the small exception of taking certain documents from AppleWorks GS to ClarisWorks (and then onwards to iWork in the PowerPC era, Intel and iCloud on iOS). Hypercard and Hypercard GS were very close to being a unified product across two platforms, and might have been the only example of a document format actually being binary-identical.

[@choppergirlfpv]

It's an Apple II. It was no Macintosh. It was more like Apple's version of the Commodore 128. Hellcats over the Pacific and Tetris was pretty epic on it though. It smoked my Macintosh SE in those two regards, but nothing else.

[@whophd]

Uh oh, at 0:01 I see a composite monitor with what is essentially an RGB device - this computer is dear to me, so "how dare you" haha. The system was NEVER designed to be used with composite video, and no contemporary user EVER used it with composite. Just to prove it, the quality of the composite output is actually worse than what the Apple IIe does for the SAME MODES. Anyone who talks about Steve Wozniak's graphics design will mention how he directly manipulated the NTSC video signals to create colours … and this persisted with improvements in the Apple IIe and Apple IIc. But in the IIGS this entire mechanism was ripped out and replaced - so if you use the legacy graphics modes, it will be an emulated + imperfect version, then mapped onto the RGB buffer. This was designed to be viewed over RGB (and works well in digital, converted up to VGA, DVI, HDMI, etc). The composite output, on the other hand, was just reading off the RGB buffer and then creating a composite signal … a quite poor one, too. A much better result would happen if you converted RGB to composite manually. Full points for using the "wrong" keyboard though - this is entirely period-valid, and plenty of users did this, grabbing a Macintosh keyboard - or would have if they could. I don't think you had a good system disk with just 2 Control Panels. I've never seen that before. Even booting off a floppy had 6 or 12 control panels. Take a look at the "classic" text modes using Ctrl-Cmd-Escape. It's an entire text-mode control panel in there. You actually DID eject the disk by dragging it to the Trash. 13:55 ... that icon shows it is mounted but ejected. If it was a real floppy, you'd reinsert it now, but in between you could insert a different floppy, and use this ability to copy a file between 2 floppies. You're right that none of this was available on the other Apple II line, because they were all 8-bit. This platform was a fairly substantial 16-bit desktop and operating system, and the title of your video is a VERY good question. From the 8-bit Apple II perspective, it was absolutely close to a Macintosh, with the scale and ambition and sheer amount of infrastructure you would only see on a hard-disk-based operating system you associate with the 1990s not 1980s. And yet … from the 32-bit Macintosh perspective, it was absolutely close to the Apple II instead! Any Macintosh user of that era would equally find it had little in common, because the application compatibility was never there, the disk compatibility was nearly but not quite there (it took effort and buying extra hardware), and importantly the display compatibility could not be achieved. You did have document compatibility - certain applications on each platform could share documents because they were built to work together, and luckily Apple supplied the same fonts, so at a pinch you could compose on a GS and take it to a Mac for printing - however, the displays were so different that you had to stretch everything vertically 200% while using the GS, just remarkably ridiculous … in return for which, the GS had 4,096 colours at a quarter of the price of a colour Macintosh, plus tons more games. But a "Macintosh" it never was - the Mac never had a 16-bit machine, and the GS would never be 32-bit. The final chapter was the Macintosh LC with Apple II card, which simply pretended the GS never existed. It was an Apple IIe card, so from its announcement it was an insult to GS users. The story of the Apple II closed with not the GS being discontinued, but the Apple IIe in fact - the older design outlasted the GS by 2 whole years.

[@johngault2462]

The chips were not capable of being mass produced with the quality to support the speeds Apple was trying to target.

[@7alken]

it was time when I dreamed about this because of ensonig mirage sound; but it was before juice turned into religion ))

[@ViegasSilva]

hey man, you're covering the vents with that monitor on top!

[@jsrodman]

The case was designed to expect a monitor on top. Its not that big a deal. Computers back then didn't generate that much heat.

[@whophd]

Yep the fan on this model was VERY optional and I think I must've been the only person to buy it.

[@andrewdunbar828]

video or content? hybrid video content!

[@mariuszszarek1992]

Nope, there wasn't enough faster version of cpu available in big quantity. GTE, the producent have had technological problems.

[@rubbersoul420]

nice

[@rootbeer666]

Composite is just sad with the resolution of the gs.

[@jessihawkins9116]

nice presentation you didn’t even run any software on it 😒

[@Great-Documentaries]

The Apple II Gee Whiz (that is what we all called it) was such a joke! Very underpowered versus an Amiga, able to run ancient and absolutely obsolete 8-bit Apple software, and absolutely incompatible with the Mac. I was around when it was released, and laughed like everyone else did. Apple NEVER should have wasted time making this garbage. No one with a brain was going to buy this instead of a Mac, and Amiga or even an Atari ST. It was for fools who refused to abandon 8 bit Apple, even though Apple lost that race to the Commodore 64. The IIGS never had a chance because it was a sucky, overpriced POS that was stuck in no-man's land between the 8-bit world of the past and the current 16-bit world that was about to become a 32-bit world with the introduction of the 68030 Macs and 80386 PCs. Apple could have shoved a 15 MHz version of the processor in it and it wouldn't have made any difference.

[@BrayAndre-g1s]

Anderson Kimberly Thompson Lisa Garcia Melissa

[@richardbuck1750]

I love your videos but the background music makes it so hard to enjoy this one! Would you consider uploading it without the background music? Thanks!

[@stefanegger]

KZbinrs, the beggars of the 21st century.

[@MarquisDeSang]

PC are the only computers tha DO NOT have a SOUL.

[@ericwazhung]

sad... what about those lovingly-assembled by all the Dr. Frankensteins out there?