Cool, that was an unexpected surprise! I'm the author of that nearly 25 year old "mailing-list e-mail" at 18:20 (actually a Usenet Newsgroup posting) where I documented the ROM 3 differences! It's Mitchell though, not Michael. ;) I still use my Apple IIGS, and it's remained on my desk for nearly 35 years now, as my all time favorite piece of tech! Really enjoyed watching your video, here's some more tidbits of information: The IIGS actually shipped with only 256K RAM for its first 1.5 years (it only came with 512K by March 1988). The ROM 3 board you have is a developers unit, the regular production run did NOT have a 32-pin machine socket or EPROM, just a dual set of 28-pin sockets with masked ROMs. If you look at the part number, it's a beta revision of the 'ROM 3' firmware. Functionally it works the same, it shouldn't affect compatibility or cause issues (I can describe the differences if you're interested). Removing the upper lid's metal shielding, or powersupply that is touches, may introduce audio/video noise which may explain the noise you're picking up. Normally the ROM 3 board has very clean audio. Yes, the official name is indeed "The Apple IIGS with 1 Megabyte of RAM", the name "ROM 3" is just a common nickname. The ROM 3 came with a "Reference manual", whereas the original ROM 00/01 came with a colorful "Owner's Guide" which was more fluff than useful information, but it didn't have those hilarious photographs (hah thanks for the good riff on them, I thought they were a good laugh even back in the day!). The DMA SCSI board (Apple II High-Speed SCSI Card) is far more preferable over the original non-DMA board you have (Rev C SCSI card), and not just for speed, but getting along with removable media among other things. The "MB0" was a typo, I meant M2BO which is short for "Mega II Bank Zero", which was a required signal for certain I/O boards. You could install both the genlock card and other video boards at the SAME time with the ROM 3; speaking of which, the "Second Sight" was a VGA-output board released for the IIe and IIGS in the mid-90's. It had the capacity for better graphics, and a handful of SS-native programs were written that took advantage of it, but it was generally just used as glorified Apple II-to-VGA monitor interface. I actually helped influence its design, convincing the developer to use a better RAMDAC (bt478 vs bt481) to increase its color depth--little good it did in retrospect. The "Zip GS" I mention was a CPU accelerator board, the competitor to the TransWarp GS. Those can be finicky with stability when pushed to higher speeds, and the ROM 3 board's cleaner design often helped (those of us wanting to try for 15 or 16 MHz!). It wasn't a compatibility issue per say, just bettered your chances. The speed improvement is not only boot time, but also a slight (but noticeable!) boost when scrolling through windows, screen redraws, etc because of the toolsets being in firmware. Not just for better optimized tools, which they were, but they were being fetched from ROM (@ 2.8 MHz) rather than RAM (@ 2.5 to 2.6 MHz). Feel free to ask if you have any specific IIGS questions, whether about the ROM 3 or Apple IIGS in general! Lucky you got a nice working condition AppleColor RGB, both mine seem to be failing, and I think I need to recap both (worsening issue with brightness and focus after it's been powered on several minutes). Wouldn't mind knowing what caps to get, based on what you have in those bags! Thanks again for the enjoyable video and crediting my post and my detailed tech spec list below it!
I'd love to see more info on the Video Overlay Card for these. In the late 80s or early 90s I attended a program at a local science-focused school which had a lot of apple gear, andI remember using one of those. One thing I never completely understood was that when connected to their 80s-ish analog video switchers and recorders, the colors came out shifted from what was shown on the IIgs's monitor. We had to alter the palette to make them show as we expected on the video output. Also, I remember one of the instructors showing me an apple prototype of that card which they had been sent before the real one came out.. It was a huge card, incapable of being fit into the actual IIgs case- it had to be run with the top off, I want to say it was nearly a foot tall, but that might be my ancient memories playing tricks on me. I imagine those are pretty rare these days!
Heh, sorry about the slip up on your name Mitchell. :-) Very cool you stumbled across this video with me going over your old post. I have a feeling the audio noise we heard was a ground loop issue as my USB ADC isn't a fancy one and likely connects ground to USB via my desktop PC. Knowing Apple, they likely used a split ground plane on the IIgs which helps with RFI but can cause annoying ground loop issues when hooked up to grounded audio devices. Unlikely to be noticed with most amplified speakers, etc. The Color Classic was one such device where it used the shielding itself to bridge the split ground planes on the audio section and since I had to remove the shielding on that since an exploding battery had destroyed it, it led me down wrong paths until I figured out the silly split ground. The ][+ RFI machine also suffers from excessive jail bars due to a split ground plane --- I never made a video about it, but I bridged the split ground planes and it completely fixed up the ugly jailbars the later II+ machine I have.
"I already have a IIgs but I don't have a IIgs with a revision 3 ROM" is going to be something I remember for next time I need to explain to my wife why I need another retro computer
HAHA, normally I would just upgrade the ROM but in the case of the IIgs ROM 03, the newer ROM won't work on the older motherboard due to all the changes.
Oh, those picture narrations were incredible! That one on the camp was so hilarious I broke into tears. Also, glad the IIGS worked perfectly, it is a pretty nice machine.
I remember the clothing, much better quality than today's. Anything Tech wise back then, was presented as "look, we're zooming ahead", & "doing anything" on a computer put you at the head of the pack. I don't remember ppl necessarily 'comparing' what model you had, like is so default today, exceptions were those who were using Commodore, as behind the 8 ball. You owned any brand of separate computer, you were in the race. I couldn't afford anything then, but had school friends who did. They would trade Floppies back and forth, and run by Modem Connection over Bell Canada lines.
This picture backstories are just glorious. I'm just imagining what you could do with a Radio Shack catalog from the late 80s. (Also, please do a Radio Shack catalog from the late 80s.)
Adrian, been following you for a while and love your channels. Like everything about them. But this one just kicked everything up several notches. I'll never get enough of you interpreting those marketing photos. Holy crap that was awesome! Thank you for making my day!
Adrian is the last guy I will hang out in any apocalypse. He is so calm and likeable guy. He may not know everything but he tries and his voice is very adrimable. Love from Mumbai
A co-worker friend of mine got his IIgs signed by Steve Wozniak himself when he gave a colloquium talk at our work (about 15-ish years ago). I was very envious. Wozniak is easily one of the best and most inspiring speakers we've ever had at our workplace.
Hillarious picture captions! I was that kid in the school lab back in the 80's. No computer at home, but a room full of various apples and a stack of floppies at school. Apple Panic, Snakebyte and Robot Odyssey for hours ...
C'mon look how he's holding those eggs, and just dropping random peppers on top of the monitor. And are those bananas hovering in mid aid? I need some wine too now
The pictures story-time was awesome! The day camp story with the whole drama of the kids was hilarious had me in tears. Adrian needs to be the next narrator for Thomas the Tank Engine. Love the channel and the content, cheers!!
You're right about the startup sound.. That beep reminds me of a sound effect for when you drop something, or select a menu item that's not available in a retro game.
Gotta admit, as nostaligic as I am about the IIGS system bell (that weird "kronk!") , it isn't the most pleasant sound. Interesting thing is it's NOT produced by the Ensoniq chip, but it's also NOT a standard Apple II sound produced by 1-bit speaker toggling. I've actually challenged a programmer to reproduce it on an Apple II Plus or IIe, which was very close, but wasn't a success. I'm still perplexed all these years later HOW that unique system beep is produced on the GS! I think it may be 1-bit speaker toggling only reshaped or modified in some form using the GS's sound supporting hardware?
Adrian, the worst thing about that Mountain view at 33 minutes is the Horizon!! If that backdrop was real, then the house they are in must have been like 20° on the piss!! Great video as always, thank you!
Re: Shipping Monitors. Way back in the late 1980's, I was a service tech at Computerland. (remember them?). One day, about the time UPS normally shows up, I heard our inventory manager laughing loudly from the back room. We had been expecting a very large CRT monitor from Radius to arrive. UPS had just dropped off the box and it had a large hole punched inward on one side, and on the opposite side was a large hole punched outward. Someone had driven a forklift fork right through. It had gone dead through the middle of the CRT and out the back case of the monitor. I couldn't believe UPS had bothered to complete the delivery, but found out it was policy. It was on us to file a claim.
That reminds me of when my work was the service company for one large OEM, and after we’d refurbished an unit for one customer, it comes back, and we could only facepalm at the condition of the box… it apparently fell off a pallet and promptly got run over by a forklift. The delivery company ended up having to pay for a brand new unit sent overnight to the customer.
@@adriansdigitalbasement Oh, they noticed. As I mentioned at the end there, they had a policy to complete the delivery and have us file a claim. Within UPS, I'm sure it was one of those 'not my department' deals.
I sent a refurbished Engine Control Unit with DHL (worth about $800). Next day we received an email from DHL with a picture of the package that had clearly been ran over by a forklift. "Please let us know which account number to send the $3 compensation to".
I love these historical Apple marketing shots. One of my favourite later ones is from the packaging of the original bondi blue iMac, showing someone carrying the machine one-handed by the carrying handle, as if to demonstrate how easy and light it was to move from room to room, which it definitely wasn't.
Hey Adrian, love your photo descriptions. You should go through some vintage magazines and decipher some advertisement photos! The ROM 3 also had a fun little Easter egg. When you get the 'Check Startup Device' screen, press Control-Option-Apple-N it will play an audio clip from the development team. The SecondSight was a VGA board for the IIGS The PSU on the ROM 3's had the brushed aluminum case. While the label did read 70W, that's the input power, not the output. Your monitor seems to be missing that bar that can be used to pitch the monitor up about an inch or so. I'm surprised you didn't make any mention of the copyright date in the GS/OS about screen. 6.0.2 was released back in 2015 by some people who got a hold of the original source code and made some modifications to fix some bugs and update the Daylight Savings Time. The latest version was 6.0.4. Not sure if there will be any more coming from them though.
That //GS keyboard was my favorite; so much so that - when I got my first Mac (a Performa 475) - I used the //GS keyboard instead of the one that came with it. I was sad when Apple discontinued the ADB-type connector, as I couldn’t use my favorite keyboard anymore. 🥺
There's a modern adapter called the "USB Wombat" that lets you either use a USB keyboard/mouse on an ADB machine or use an ADB keyboard/mouse on a USB machine. So you can use the IIgs keyboard (or the big Apple Extended II ADB keyboard) with a modern PC or Mac (or a RasPi or whatever).
I bought a used IIGS for my classroom years ago, and I loved it! It was sort of a bridge between the Apple II world and the Macs, and I could swap text files between the two machines.
My elementary school was built in the mid 1970's and had deep, plush (not shag) carpet in the School Library, with flowed nicely into a multi-tier conversation pit (mid-1970's, remember?). It also had house-style moldings at the top of the walls. Also, our Apple IIe lab consisted of about thirty IIe's that netbooted from a central server of some kind rather than using local storage (floppy or hard disk) and had two shared Imagewriter II's (IIRC) on a table at one end of the room. The server had a massive library of educational software on it, which was pretty amazing to a kid in the 80's. (You could also press ESCAPE to boot from a floppy, if desired. A friend of mine and I got permission to program in the lab during recess, so we naturally brought our own floppy disks.) I last used a IIgs in high school around 1999 to operate sensors (light gates, etc.) in our physics lab. BTW, that's some deep lore you invented for the stock-photo characters, LOL. :-) Why commercial photographers didn't believe in depicting cords on computers, I'll never know.
The manual was fascinating! Would be cool to see more of these if they are as entertaining 😆😎 Your backstories for the people in the photos were hilarious!
If Steve Jobs were at apple when that manual came out, all those pictures would show the winners using Mac's and the loser kids using GS'. With the implied message, if you'd just spent a few thousand more, you'd be more cool in our eyes.
The best part of this is de-constructing the manual's photos. I think every manual from that era had an obligatory CAD-type professional doing something technical with his woefully under-powered computer. Hilarious.
Adrian's Digital Basement: Loved your comments on the pictures of the manual! In my opinion you should do this more often. The piano teacher sure had a mullet! Cannot get more 80s like that. 😀 May be not only comment on pictures like in this video, but sketches and other drawing of other 70s and 80s computer manuals people today facepalm and say "What were they thinking?!". Luckily that cannot be done for manuals of the 90s and after, because there existed no manuals anymore.
lol, I love the social commentary on the reference manual. I've binge watched tons of your videos now and I feel stupid for making a comment on a video early on in my marathon suggesting something obvious. Cheers-
The Apple IIgs gives me fond memories. When I was in elementary school the computer lab was full of these. I didn't see a PC in school until I got to high school.
From the initial angle, it looked like the cards in that computer were bent pretty bad. I didn't realize they were just cut that way by design as I could see in another angle later.
@23:17 - I like how the Apple just 'magically' works, sitting on a desk in the middle of the floor with no power cables or anything else visible in the picture... *magic!* ;)
Interesting commentary on those photos, I don't know how relevant that is, but whatever. I have fond memories of using Apple IIGS computers between 1990 and 1996 when I was in primary school.
Or specifically, VGA frequency monitors (~30 KHz) so back in the day we could connect our IIGS's to larger 14, 15, 17 or even 21" SVGA monitor that were so common place on Windows PC's and Mac's. It also allowed for higher resolutions and more colors per screen, but few, if any, programs took advantage of that feature. The card was generally a flop, not only in sales numbers (it came out in late 1995!) but in design. The firmware was never really completed, leaving the card glitchy and unstable.
this is one of the first computers i started out with in elementary school for the school district. it didnt run gs os but yet a very special school district text menu based os with a mainframe computer for the networking of all the computers in the computer lab. oh sure there were disk drives but we didnt have any software for any machine other then what was on the network or whatever it was called for the os. the machines always booted up to a blue screen with white text saying mukilteo school district no 6 on it and then certain menus u could choose the type of software you wanted to run. oh and there were 2 computers that had printers but no one was allowed to use them unless given special permission to do so otherwise you would get in big trouble and whatever printed was confiscated and thrown out and all computer privileges for the day or how ever long were taken away. i would love to find one sometime if i ever could. big childhood memories with this machine
I really was waiting for you to run a copy of "Oregon Trail" on this thing. For some reason, that's the game I saw most often on pictures of these things.
"MB0" is "Mega II Bank 0". It allows cards which snoop the bus to show video (like the modern VidHD HDMI card) to determine where in the 128K of slow RAM accesses were to.
Still have my IIGS ROM 01 with monitor, 3.5" drives, Toolbox Reference, Hardware Reference, and Technical Reference manuals since '86. Good to see 4MB and 8MB memory cards available. Had its power supply and ][ Plus power supply re-capped in '20. Reactive Micro's TransWarp clone might be in its future. 😁
Exactly what I was thinking, especially some smaller municipal libraries. I know of one just west of me that looked like that well into the mid 90s. We helped convert their card catalog to electronic format.
Yes, I remember our Carnegie library had the picture moldings and at some point in the 70s they covered the worn but still beautiful marble floors with ugly brown carpeting.
The DOC chip in the IIGs is very capable. It's used in Ensoniq Mirage, ESQ-1, SQ-80 and other professional synths from the 1980s. Of course, when used in those synths they were coupled with high quality analogue VCAs for envelopes and CEM filter chips.
The GS has a special place in my heart. It was just an Apple II, but it had better graphics and sound than almost everything else out there at the time. (At least anything that was cheap enough for me to put my hands on).
1) Photoshop 1.0 was a great friend (and ran well on a Mac Iicx/x with the 24bit color card though it was eh on the 8bit card...) 2) Speaking as a retired teacher, school libraries were usually a double or triple sized class room. So that library pictured in the video would be a school library and not a full building community library.
Heh -- yeah in most cases, it's a non issue since I would just upgrade the ROM -- but in this case the motherboard is actually different and you can't run ROM 03 on the older machines.
Regarding the PSU fan, you'll find the exact same situation with the Commodore 128D(CR). It was going to have a fan, and some very early production models reportedly actually have one installed (and certainly the 'plastic' 128D came with one, but this machine is extremely rare outside Europe). Most of them however did not come with a fan installed, but still have the provisions for mounting and powering a fan. By 1989 (very late production models) those provisions are gone, and you actually have to modify the PSU if you want to install a fan. According to Commodore engineers, it was originally planned to have a fan, but Commodore found they could get away with not installing it, and decided to save a little money. One has to realize that even when installing that fan costs a mere 50 cents per machine, you are still looking at over $1500000 on savings by not installing it (in case of the 128DCR, based on sales estimates). Removing the mounting position and power connection was only done when Commodore redesigned the power supply for other cost reduction considerations. As none of those machines were made to last decades, and (quoting Bil Herd) have no right to still be working... not installing the fan made sense at the time. Still, I'd certainly install one myself, as keeping the inside of the machine at around room temperature, and providing airflow to voltage regulators and capacitors in the PSU is a really good idea.
My elementary school had a computer lab of IiGS and IIe computers and Imagewriter II printers networked together using localtalk phonenet adapters. All of the Apple II computers booted off a Mac SE/30 and ran all of the MECC and other software from the network. Each student had a user account, logged in and saved their work on the server. The lab was effectively diskless. If you are serious about making the localtalk work on your IIGS, it'd make my day to see a video of that in action.
Yes, back in the 80s I had both a Mac IIci and IIGS, and I did do a network boot on the IIgs. It was so long ago I can't remember the details of the setup. Might have needed to use the pre-boot control panel (BIOS) to set it up to boot from network. It was designed for schools so that all systems in a computer lab would boot to the exact same config. Networking in those days was so damn cool and was years ahead of the PC because networking was builtin both the Mac and Apple IIgs. All you need was some cheap AppleTalk cabling.
I have netboot set up on my Apple IIgs with AppleTalk. I'm using a Mac SE with an 80MB SCSI drive as the server. To do this, you need to use a specific version of AppleShare Server (not regular file sharing built into the OS), with Apple II support enabled. I believe I'm using AppleShare 3. It only runs on older MacOS versions; I think I have 7.5.3 or 7.5.5 - I don't think it works in 7.6+. On an older Mac (like the SE), the Mac is noticeably slow when the Apple IIgs is using the server, but it works fine and is faster than a floppy disk. On the Apple IIgs, you set up network booting in the control panel by setting slot 7 to AppleTalk, and maybe changing 1 or 2 other options, then remove any boot disks and reboot. There seem to be instructions here: www.synack.net/~bbraun/iigsboot.html , but I don't think this is what I used to set it up. I did a minimal boot off the server, then used the GS/OS install disks to install from the IIgs to the server, and after that it's able to network boot straight into GS/OS.
I found the comments about the custodian a bit amusing. Back when I was in elementary school, and the only access we had to computers for playing games was the computer lab. It was all about making friends with the custodians, so they would let you in after hours to play games.
29 minutes in, there is a dual 3.5 inch floppy. Does anyone know what this is? I could not find anything about it. The 250 zip disk and drives are rock solid. As recently as 2016 I've used a 250 zip drive to retrieve files for people at work. It is remarkable that there was accessibility built in and pictures of people using them. Sticky keys, mouse via keyboard, and more! Very forward thinking!
Cool, that was an unexpected surprise! I'm the author of that nearly 25 year old "mailing-list e-mail" at 18:20 (actually a Usenet Newsgroup posting) where I documented the ROM 3 differences! It's Mitchell though, not Michael. ;) I still use my Apple IIGS, and it's remained on my desk for nearly 35 years now, as my all time favorite piece of tech! Really enjoyed watching your video, here's some more tidbits of information:
The IIGS actually shipped with only 256K RAM for its first 1.5 years (it only came with 512K by March 1988). The ROM 3 board you have is a developers unit, the regular production run did NOT have a 32-pin machine socket or EPROM, just a dual set of 28-pin sockets with masked ROMs. If you look at the part number, it's a beta revision of the 'ROM 3' firmware. Functionally it works the same, it shouldn't affect compatibility or cause issues (I can describe the differences if you're interested).
Removing the upper lid's metal shielding, or powersupply that is touches, may introduce audio/video noise which may explain the noise you're picking up. Normally the ROM 3 board has very clean audio.
Yes, the official name is indeed "The Apple IIGS with 1 Megabyte of RAM", the name "ROM 3" is just a common nickname. The ROM 3 came with a "Reference manual", whereas the original ROM 00/01 came with a colorful "Owner's Guide" which was more fluff than useful information, but it didn't have those hilarious photographs (hah thanks for the good riff on them, I thought they were a good laugh even back in the day!). The DMA SCSI board (Apple II High-Speed SCSI Card) is far more preferable over the original non-DMA board you have (Rev C SCSI card), and not just for speed, but getting along with removable media among other things.
The "MB0" was a typo, I meant M2BO which is short for "Mega II Bank Zero", which was a required signal for certain I/O boards. You could install both the genlock card and other video boards at the SAME time with the ROM 3; speaking of which, the "Second Sight" was a VGA-output board released for the IIe and IIGS in the mid-90's. It had the capacity for better graphics, and a handful of SS-native programs were written that took advantage of it, but it was generally just used as glorified Apple II-to-VGA monitor interface. I actually helped influence its design, convincing the developer to use a better RAMDAC (bt478 vs bt481) to increase its color depth--little good it did in retrospect.
The "Zip GS" I mention was a CPU accelerator board, the competitor to the TransWarp GS. Those can be finicky with stability when pushed to higher speeds, and the ROM 3 board's cleaner design often helped (those of us wanting to try for 15 or 16 MHz!). It wasn't a compatibility issue per say, just bettered your chances. The speed improvement is not only boot time, but also a slight (but noticeable!) boost when scrolling through windows, screen redraws, etc because of the toolsets being in firmware. Not just for better optimized tools, which they were, but they were being fetched from ROM (@ 2.8 MHz) rather than RAM (@ 2.5 to 2.6 MHz).
Feel free to ask if you have any specific IIGS questions, whether about the ROM 3 or Apple IIGS in general! Lucky you got a nice working condition AppleColor RGB, both mine seem to be failing, and I think I need to recap both (worsening issue with brightness and focus after it's been powered on several minutes). Wouldn't mind knowing what caps to get, based on what you have in those bags! Thanks again for the enjoyable video and crediting my post and my detailed tech spec list below it!
This post should be pinned.
I'd love to see more info on the Video Overlay Card for these. In the late 80s or early 90s I attended a program at a local science-focused school which had a lot of apple gear, andI remember using one of those. One thing I never completely understood was that when connected to their 80s-ish analog video switchers and recorders, the colors came out shifted from what was shown on the IIgs's monitor. We had to alter the palette to make them show as we expected on the video output. Also, I remember one of the instructors showing me an apple prototype of that card which they had been sent before the real one came out.. It was a huge card, incapable of being fit into the actual IIgs case- it had to be run with the top off, I want to say it was nearly a foot tall, but that might be my ancient memories playing tricks on me. I imagine those are pretty rare these days!
Heh, sorry about the slip up on your name Mitchell. :-) Very cool you stumbled across this video with me going over your old post. I have a feeling the audio noise we heard was a ground loop issue as my USB ADC isn't a fancy one and likely connects ground to USB via my desktop PC. Knowing Apple, they likely used a split ground plane on the IIgs which helps with RFI but can cause annoying ground loop issues when hooked up to grounded audio devices. Unlikely to be noticed with most amplified speakers, etc. The Color Classic was one such device where it used the shielding itself to bridge the split ground planes on the audio section and since I had to remove the shielding on that since an exploding battery had destroyed it, it led me down wrong paths until I figured out the silly split ground. The ][+ RFI machine also suffers from excessive jail bars due to a split ground plane --- I never made a video about it, but I bridged the split ground planes and it completely fixed up the ugly jailbars the later II+ machine I have.
Wow, this is a HOF level comment. Thanks for the information!
Holy moly
"I already have a IIgs but I don't have a IIgs with a revision 3 ROM" is going to be something I remember for next time I need to explain to my wife why I need another retro computer
Whenever these videos come out ROM 3 GSs go up on price… I think LGR did a ROM 3 GS review too years ago.
HAHA, normally I would just upgrade the ROM but in the case of the IIgs ROM 03, the newer ROM won't work on the older motherboard due to all the changes.
Also applicable to the IIGS, "I already have a IIGS, but I don't have a Woz edition IIGS..."
Oh, those picture narrations were incredible! That one on the camp was so hilarious I broke into tears.
Also, glad the IIGS worked perfectly, it is a pretty nice machine.
sounds like Adrian was reliving some history with his picture narrations :)
Dark history.
I was thinking that was some way-out Improv with the photos, but now you've got me thinking - lol -.
I remember the clothing, much better quality than today's. Anything Tech wise back then, was presented as "look, we're zooming ahead", & "doing anything" on a computer put you at the head of the pack. I don't remember ppl necessarily 'comparing' what model you had, like is so default today, exceptions were those who were using Commodore, as behind the 8 ball. You owned any brand of separate computer, you were in the race. I couldn't afford anything then, but had school friends who did. They would trade Floppies back and forth, and run by Modem Connection over Bell Canada lines.
You seriously need to start doing more instruction manual reviews. That was hilarious.
22:53 New channel: "Adrian's Digital Reading Basement ]|[" where Adrian just flips through promotional computer books and pokes fun at them.
This picture backstories are just glorious.
I'm just imagining what you could do with a Radio Shack catalog from the late 80s.
(Also, please do a Radio Shack catalog from the late 80s.)
Adrian, been following you for a while and love your channels. Like everything about them. But this one just kicked everything up several notches. I'll never get enough of you interpreting those marketing photos. Holy crap that was awesome! Thank you for making my day!
Adrian is the last guy I will hang out in any apocalypse. He is so calm and likeable guy. He may not know everything but he tries and his voice is very adrimable. Love from Mumbai
Adrian, you are so hilarious when you narrated the photographs. Nearly felt from my chair. I really like your dry humor. Keep up the good work! 👍
A co-worker friend of mine got his IIgs signed by Steve Wozniak himself when he gave a colloquium talk at our work (about 15-ish years ago). I was very envious. Wozniak is easily one of the best and most inspiring speakers we've ever had at our workplace.
The summer-camp looking one has the water at a very weird angle. It looks like the building is about to fall off of that mountain
Hillarious picture captions! I was that kid in the school lab back in the 80's. No computer at home, but a room full of various apples and a stack of floppies at school. Apple Panic, Snakebyte and Robot Odyssey for hours ...
this is my favorite adrian's digital basement ever! i love the commentary on the vintage brochures!
Absolutely priceless commentary on the photos! Thanks for the chuckle!
29:25 Wow Adrian, you're really reading into that scene 🤣
I saw that and was LOL.
C'mon look how he's holding those eggs, and just dropping random peppers on top of the monitor. And are those bananas hovering in mid aid? I need some wine too now
I enjoyed every second of that manual review. Thank you for that!
This has to be your best YT video ever. Really funny and really enjoyable. Great stuff, thanks Adrian.
The pictures story-time was awesome! The day camp story with the whole drama of the kids was hilarious had me in tears. Adrian needs to be the next narrator for Thomas the Tank Engine. Love the channel and the content, cheers!!
"Get away from me, you're just a girl." Who else thinks Adrian said this exact line at some point in his IIgs days? :-D
You're right about the startup sound.. That beep reminds me of a sound effect for when you drop something, or select a menu item that's not available in a retro game.
Gotta admit, as nostaligic as I am about the IIGS system bell (that weird "kronk!") , it isn't the most pleasant sound. Interesting thing is it's NOT produced by the Ensoniq chip, but it's also NOT a standard Apple II sound produced by 1-bit speaker toggling. I've actually challenged a programmer to reproduce it on an Apple II Plus or IIe, which was very close, but wasn't a success. I'm still perplexed all these years later HOW that unique system beep is produced on the GS! I think it may be 1-bit speaker toggling only reshaped or modified in some form using the GS's sound supporting hardware?
Had me cracking up while looking at the photos in the manual....Things were getting awful dark.
I'm not sure what was more awkwardly funny...The IIGS photos in the manual or your description of them....comedy GOLD!
This is probably one of the best videos on the channel.
Adrian, the worst thing about that Mountain view at 33 minutes is the Horizon!! If that backdrop was real, then the house they are in must have been like 20° on the piss!!
Great video as always, thank you!
Just a fun fact, the canteen had the "carpet" on the outside so you could get it wet and evaporation kept the water inside cool.
That view at 33:00, is Lake Tahoe... probably from the highway. The little island is Vikingsholm.
Going through those pictures really brought back memories!!! Thank you!!!
OMG! This is in my top 5 TH-cam videos of all time! I did not think your videos could get any better but today they did! Fantastic Adrian!
Re: Shipping Monitors. Way back in the late 1980's, I was a service tech at Computerland. (remember them?).
One day, about the time UPS normally shows up, I heard our inventory manager laughing loudly from the back room.
We had been expecting a very large CRT monitor from Radius to arrive. UPS had just dropped off the box and it had a large hole punched inward on one side, and on the opposite side was a large hole punched outward.
Someone had driven a forklift fork right through. It had gone dead through the middle of the CRT and out the back case of the monitor. I couldn't believe UPS had bothered to complete the delivery, but found out it was policy. It was on us to file a claim.
That reminds me of when my work was the service company for one large OEM, and after we’d refurbished an unit for one customer, it comes back, and we could only facepalm at the condition of the box… it apparently fell off a pallet and promptly got run over by a forklift. The delivery company ended up having to pay for a brand new unit sent overnight to the customer.
How ridiculous -- and typical! Like all the way along no one noticed the shards of glass and bits of debris falling from the box?
@@adriansdigitalbasement Oh, they noticed. As I mentioned at the end there, they had a policy to complete the delivery and have us file a claim. Within UPS, I'm sure it was one of those 'not my department' deals.
I sent a refurbished Engine Control Unit with DHL (worth about $800). Next day we received an email from DHL with a picture of the package that had clearly been ran over by a forklift. "Please let us know which account number to send the $3 compensation to".
You need a third channel, man.... I haven't laughed so hard in I don't know how long.
You made my day with the manual review! That was awesome.
I think we need to send more computer manuals to Adrian! Adrian's Digital Basement III - Story time!
That would be so funny. Weird 80s pictures and Adrian's narration. Very entertaining.
I love these historical Apple marketing shots. One of my favourite later ones is from the packaging of the original bondi blue iMac, showing someone carrying the machine one-handed by the carrying handle, as if to demonstrate how easy and light it was to move from room to room, which it definitely wasn't.
HAHA yeah! I've lifted more than one of those and yeah, so unwieldly and heavy!
Hey Adrian, love your photo descriptions. You should go through some vintage magazines and decipher some advertisement photos!
The ROM 3 also had a fun little Easter egg. When you get the 'Check Startup Device' screen, press Control-Option-Apple-N it will play an audio clip from the development team.
The SecondSight was a VGA board for the IIGS
The PSU on the ROM 3's had the brushed aluminum case. While the label did read 70W, that's the input power, not the output.
Your monitor seems to be missing that bar that can be used to pitch the monitor up about an inch or so.
I'm surprised you didn't make any mention of the copyright date in the GS/OS about screen. 6.0.2 was released back in 2015 by some people who got a hold of the original source code and made some modifications to fix some bugs and update the Daylight Savings Time. The latest version was 6.0.4. Not sure if there will be any more coming from them though.
Oh the descriptions on the pictures had me leaking the eye water with laughter.
That //GS keyboard was my favorite; so much so that - when I got my first Mac (a Performa 475) - I used the //GS keyboard instead of the one that came with it. I was sad when Apple discontinued the ADB-type connector, as I couldn’t use my favorite keyboard anymore. 🥺
There's a modern adapter called the "USB Wombat" that lets you either use a USB keyboard/mouse on an ADB machine or use an ADB keyboard/mouse on a USB machine. So you can use the IIgs keyboard (or the big Apple Extended II ADB keyboard) with a modern PC or Mac (or a RasPi or whatever).
Excellent funny comments on those manual's photos. The surprise of this video !
Probably the best episode you have ever done, love your commentary of the apple manual!
Story time with Adrian, including pictures! That was fun.
This manual commentary made my day :)
Adrian, you should do more manual reviews like this, it was hilarious.
I bought a used IIGS for my classroom years ago, and I loved it! It was sort of a bridge between the Apple II world and the Macs, and I could swap text files between the two machines.
My elementary school was built in the mid 1970's and had deep, plush (not shag) carpet in the School Library, with flowed nicely into a multi-tier conversation pit (mid-1970's, remember?). It also had house-style moldings at the top of the walls. Also, our Apple IIe lab consisted of about thirty IIe's that netbooted from a central server of some kind rather than using local storage (floppy or hard disk) and had two shared Imagewriter II's (IIRC) on a table at one end of the room. The server had a massive library of educational software on it, which was pretty amazing to a kid in the 80's. (You could also press ESCAPE to boot from a floppy, if desired. A friend of mine and I got permission to program in the lab during recess, so we naturally brought our own floppy disks.) I last used a IIgs in high school around 1999 to operate sensors (light gates, etc.) in our physics lab.
BTW, that's some deep lore you invented for the stock-photo characters, LOL. :-) Why commercial photographers didn't believe in depicting cords on computers, I'll never know.
The manual was fascinating! Would be cool to see more of these if they are as entertaining 😆😎 Your backstories for the people in the photos were hilarious!
oh adrian you should release a kids book..... fkkn hilarious :D i'm actually crying here
If Steve Jobs were at apple when that manual came out, all those pictures would show the winners using Mac's and the loser kids using GS'. With the implied message, if you'd just spent a few thousand more, you'd be more cool in our eyes.
The Apple 2GS was a powerful machine for his time. Great job. Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands
I get a charge out of your stream of consciousness riffs on the advertising photos in the user manual. Very fun to see this old Apple manual!
I absolutely love the way Adrian tears into the photos in the manual.
I think there needs to be a 3rd channel that’s all old computer manual/flyer commentary, hilarious :)
loving the picture examination / deconstruction
The best part of this is de-constructing the manual's photos. I think every manual from that era had an obligatory CAD-type professional doing something technical with his woefully under-powered computer. Hilarious.
Agreed. Fun stuff going through the manual.
I came here for the computer, but stayed for pictures :D
You should start a new series with such commentary ^^
Adrian's Digital Basement: Loved your comments on the pictures of the manual! In my opinion you should do this more often. The piano teacher sure had a mullet! Cannot get more 80s like that. 😀
May be not only comment on pictures like in this video, but sketches and other drawing of other 70s and 80s computer manuals people today facepalm and say "What were they thinking?!".
Luckily that cannot be done for manuals of the 90s and after, because there existed no manuals anymore.
lol, I love the social commentary on the reference manual. I've binge watched tons of your videos now and I feel stupid for making a comment on a video early on in my marathon suggesting something obvious. Cheers-
Pretty funny analyzing the manuals photos. Finding the things that don’t make sense. Keep up the great videos Adrian
lol-LOVE the stories behind all the photos!!
The Apple IIgs gives me fond memories. When I was in elementary school the computer lab was full of these. I didn't see a PC in school until I got to high school.
Loved the description you gave of the apple manual 😅
From the initial angle, it looked like the cards in that computer were bent pretty bad. I didn't realize they were just cut that way by design as I could see in another angle later.
Your commentary on the manual pictures. Absolutely love it!!!!!
Notice how everybody wore sweaters in the 80s?
Adrians 1980 dramas from photos love the summer camp story... brilliant!
@23:17 - I like how the Apple just 'magically' works, sitting on a desk in the middle of the floor with no power cables or anything else visible in the picture... *magic!* ;)
Interesting commentary on those photos, I don't know how relevant that is, but whatever. I have fond memories of using Apple IIGS computers between 1990 and 1996 when I was in primary school.
29:24 That about sums up growing up in the 80's and 90's where I lived in yuppie suburbia. 😁
Darn, I was totally hoping the introduction would be: "Today on Adrian's Digital Basement we're bobbing for Apples!"
Loved this video, hope you can do this again with another catalog!!!
I was really surprised by the sound of the game,sounds great.Very interesting,cheers.
Second Sight was an addon card that allowed you to use multiple monitors with your IIgs.
Or specifically, VGA frequency monitors (~30 KHz) so back in the day we could connect our IIGS's to larger 14, 15, 17 or even 21" SVGA monitor that were so common place on Windows PC's and Mac's. It also allowed for higher resolutions and more colors per screen, but few, if any, programs took advantage of that feature. The card was generally a flop, not only in sales numbers (it came out in late 1995!) but in design. The firmware was never really completed, leaving the card glitchy and unstable.
this is one of the first computers i started out with in elementary school for the school district. it didnt run gs os but yet a very special school district text menu based os with a mainframe computer for the networking of all the computers in the computer lab. oh sure there were disk drives but we didnt have any software for any machine other then what was on the network or whatever it was called for the os. the machines always booted up to a blue screen with white text saying mukilteo school district no 6 on it and then certain menus u could choose the type of software you wanted to run. oh and there were 2 computers that had printers but no one was allowed to use them unless given special permission to do so otherwise you would get in big trouble and whatever printed was confiscated and thrown out and all computer privileges for the day or how ever long were taken away. i would love to find one sometime if i ever could. big childhood memories with this machine
PLEASE!!! Do more going through photos imaging what the situation is. This was CLASSIC!!! "Maybe she needs to drink herself to sleep!!" nice...
Literally laughing out loud as you decompose the PR pics in the Apple manual!!!! haha
Adrian will be headlining at The Improv this weekend in the Portland area! Also, it was called The Dewey Decimal Classification/System.
Computer for smart kids thought the vid was on the Amiga lol, seriously interesting to learn more about the apple IIgs
I nearly died laughing. Watching you chase down that blue meanie zip tie was comedy gold. lol. Thanks for another great video, Adrian:)
I really was waiting for you to run a copy of "Oregon Trail" on this thing. For some reason, that's the game I saw most often on pictures of these things.
"MB0" is "Mega II Bank 0". It allows cards which snoop the bus to show video (like the modern VidHD HDMI card) to determine where in the 128K of slow RAM accesses were to.
Still have my IIGS ROM 01 with monitor, 3.5" drives, Toolbox Reference, Hardware Reference, and Technical Reference manuals since '86. Good to see 4MB and 8MB memory cards available. Had its power supply and ][ Plus power supply re-capped in '20. Reactive Micro's TransWarp clone might be in its future. 😁
Takes shielding off of every computer he fixes, then wonders why he has an audio buzz. 😁
Lovely, nice book and gear!
I hate to say it, but that's what libraries looked like in the early 80s.
Exactly what I was thinking, especially some smaller municipal libraries. I know of one just west of me that looked like that well into the mid 90s. We helped convert their card catalog to electronic format.
Yes, I remember our Carnegie library had the picture moldings and at some point in the 70s they covered the worn but still beautiful marble floors with ugly brown carpeting.
The DOC chip in the IIGs is very capable. It's used in Ensoniq Mirage, ESQ-1, SQ-80 and other professional synths from the 1980s. Of course, when used in those synths they were coupled with high quality analogue VCAs for envelopes and CEM filter chips.
Ahahaha, I laughed my apple ass off sooo hard when you did the review of all the pics in the manual!!! Great stuff!
The GS has a special place in my heart. It was just an Apple II, but it had better graphics and sound than almost everything else out there at the time. (At least anything that was cheap enough for me to put my hands on).
lolll fun review of the manual pictures!
1) Photoshop 1.0 was a great friend (and ran well on a Mac Iicx/x with the 24bit color card though it was eh on the 8bit card...)
2) Speaking as a retired teacher, school libraries were usually a double or triple sized class room. So that library pictured in the video would be a school library and not a full building community library.
Heh -- yeah in most cases, it's a non issue since I would just upgrade the ROM -- but in this case the motherboard is actually different and you can't run ROM 03 on the older machines.
Absolutely loved review of the pictures book- ... Sorry, review of the manual :D
Thanks for sharing Adrian. 👍
Regarding the PSU fan, you'll find the exact same situation with the Commodore 128D(CR). It was going to have a fan, and some very early production models reportedly actually have one installed (and certainly the 'plastic' 128D came with one, but this machine is extremely rare outside Europe). Most of them however did not come with a fan installed, but still have the provisions for mounting and powering a fan. By 1989 (very late production models) those provisions are gone, and you actually have to modify the PSU if you want to install a fan.
According to Commodore engineers, it was originally planned to have a fan, but Commodore found they could get away with not installing it, and decided to save a little money. One has to realize that even when installing that fan costs a mere 50 cents per machine, you are still looking at over $1500000 on savings by not installing it (in case of the 128DCR, based on sales estimates). Removing the mounting position and power connection was only done when Commodore redesigned the power supply for other cost reduction considerations.
As none of those machines were made to last decades, and (quoting Bil Herd) have no right to still be working... not installing the fan made sense at the time. Still, I'd certainly install one myself, as keeping the inside of the machine at around room temperature, and providing airflow to voltage regulators and capacitors in the PSU is a really good idea.
I love how he calls a 51 minute video a mini mail call!
I love your intro song and video to go with.
My elementary school had a computer lab of IiGS and IIe computers and Imagewriter II printers networked together using localtalk phonenet adapters. All of the Apple II computers booted off a Mac SE/30 and ran all of the MECC and other software from the network. Each student had a user account, logged in and saved their work on the server. The lab was effectively diskless. If you are serious about making the localtalk work on your IIGS, it'd make my day to see a video of that in action.
Yes, back in the 80s I had both a Mac IIci and IIGS, and I did do a network boot on the IIgs. It was so long ago I can't remember the details of the setup. Might have needed to use the pre-boot control panel (BIOS) to set it up to boot from network. It was designed for schools so that all systems in a computer lab would boot to the exact same config. Networking in those days was so damn cool and was years ahead of the PC because networking was builtin both the Mac and Apple IIgs. All you need was some cheap AppleTalk cabling.
I have netboot set up on my Apple IIgs with AppleTalk. I'm using a Mac SE with an 80MB SCSI drive as the server. To do this, you need to use a specific version of AppleShare Server (not regular file sharing built into the OS), with Apple II support enabled. I believe I'm using AppleShare 3. It only runs on older MacOS versions; I think I have 7.5.3 or 7.5.5 - I don't think it works in 7.6+. On an older Mac (like the SE), the Mac is noticeably slow when the Apple IIgs is using the server, but it works fine and is faster than a floppy disk. On the Apple IIgs, you set up network booting in the control panel by setting slot 7 to AppleTalk, and maybe changing 1 or 2 other options, then remove any boot disks and reboot. There seem to be instructions here: www.synack.net/~bbraun/iigsboot.html , but I don't think this is what I used to set it up. I did a minimal boot off the server, then used the GS/OS install disks to install from the IIgs to the server, and after that it's able to network boot straight into GS/OS.
My memory is that wasn't necessarily the smart kids that had an Apple IIgs. It was the rich kids.
My school had a lab full of IIgses, I was a PC kid but I loved those things.
I found the comments about the custodian a bit amusing. Back when I was in elementary school, and the only access we had to computers for playing games was the computer lab. It was all about making friends with the custodians, so they would let you in after hours to play games.
I also watch your videos during my workouts!
29 minutes in, there is a dual 3.5 inch floppy. Does anyone know what this is? I could not find anything about it.
The 250 zip disk and drives are rock solid. As recently as 2016 I've used a 250 zip drive to retrieve files for people at work.
It is remarkable that there was accessibility built in and pictures of people using them. Sticky keys, mouse via keyboard, and more! Very forward thinking!
Apple. Their old shenanigans were cheeky and fun. Now their shenanigans are cruel and tragic. And a corporate listening device!