| 1984 was a very productive year
for Apple. In January they introduced the Macintosh and
within four months they introduced the latest in the
Apple II line, the Apple IIc. This computer proved to be
very popular. For example; it took 2 1/2 years to sell
50,000 units of the original Apple II, it took IBM 7 1/2
months to sell the same amount of PCs. In April 1984
Apple introduced the IIc at a day long exposition in San
Francisco, Apple sold 50,000 IIc's in a little over 7
hours to more than 2000 retail dealers. The IIc was targeted at the segment of
consumers who owned low end computers and were now ready
to move up to a more powerful computer. Apple felt that
this was a niche in the home computer market as yet
untapped. Apple dubbed the IIc as the 'appliance'
computer in that it was designed to be as easy and
convenient to use as would your toaster, television, or
stereo system.
It was designed so that all you
needed was in one box to get you up and running. The IIc
was capable of hooking to any standard TV, composite
monitor, or
RGB
display. The theory I guess was to make
it very portable, just find a TV and your up and running.
Still the IIc was indeed a
rather powerful machine for its time. It came with a new
breed of 6502 processor, a low power consumption CMOS
version called 65C02, The 65C02 processor came with 27
new instructions and was backward compatible to the older
6502 processors in the Apple II, II+, and IIe family. It came
with a whopping 128k RAM
(that's large for that time
period) and a 16k ROM.
Like the other Apple
IIs, the
IIc comes with Applesoft BASIC
burned into ROM
and a
machine language monitor. The overall look and feel of
the IIc is a change from the Apple II family, compact yet
very comfortable to type on. New in the IIc is the
ultrahigh-resolution mode of 560 x 192.
There also is an internal
speaker with a volume control on the side of the case. On
the right side of the case is a built in 5.25 single
sided floppy drive and on the back panel are all the
peripheral ports. This is a departure from the previous
Apple products in that there are no slots for drop in
cards. In fact you can't even open the computer unless
you disassemble it.
The IIc was after all intended
for a consumer who did not want to be bothered with
installing cards or setting up expansion interfaces. They
just want to use it.
The Apple
IIc displayed here is one of 5 that I have acquired from various
local thrift shops and flea markets. This one was added to the museum
on August 3rd 1997. It was purchased at a flea market along with an Apple
color composite monitor and a box of software.
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