One improvement was the amount of RAM on the system board. It came standard with 48 kilobytes of RAM, on the mother board, and could be expanded to a full 64 kilobytes by inserting a 16 kilobyte expansion card into slot 0 and using a bank switching technique to trick the MOS Technology 6502 processor into seeing it. 

      This was necessary because the 6502 processor is an 8 bit chip with only 16 address lines which limits it to be able to address only 65,536 (64k)address locations. And since the Apple II Plus uses 16 kilobytes of those locations to store it's ROM instructions, only 48 kilobytes of space is left for RAM usage. But the engineers at Apple came up with this neat little trick of swapping 16k blocks of RAM into the address area reserved for ROM as needed to give the illusion that there is a full 64k of RAM available for programming.

      The ROM was rewritten and gone was the hand assembled BASIC written by the man who invented the Apple II, Steve Wozniak, replaced with a new integer BASIC written by a small software company owned by..... [ you hard core Apple types should look away now :-) ] ...Bill Gates. An auto-starting routine was added to the ROM to speed up booting and a spring was put under the reset key to solve that little problem that must have annoyed the early Apple users who would accidentally hit the reset key and lose hours of typed work.

      This Apple II Plus is one of two working models I have in my colection. I was able to put them together from three broken ones and some spare parts acquired from Ebay auctions. I would like to thank Brandon Cobb, Ron Watson, and Robert Ackermann for their contributions to this exhibit.