Tube🌿Timei've heard a lot about this MS-DOS thing, and i want to give it a try. my Apple IIe Platinum should be perfect for this, right?
and i've got an MS-DOS 5 boot disk. it says there is BASIC on it as well, so i'll give that a try
oh here it goes. it just took a while to find the MS-DOS disk, i guess. time to try out BASIC.
i actually like this BASIC a bit better, see how the text is 80 columns? there's also a nice menu bar at the bottom. well, it would be nice if the Apple IIe had function keys.
let's pop the top and see how this thing can run MS-DOS. now that's a rather long expansion card there on the right...
it is a PC Transporter card! there are a bunch of custom chips on the board. CGA graphics, glue logic, floppy controller...
the CPU on the card is an NEC V30. it is a faster clone of the Intel 8086. the ceramic chip you can see on the left is an 8087 floating point coprocessor.
cuba200611oddly, the floppy chip is from Apple. the part number is 010-0101-0, which is a special floppy controller chip that supports both GCR (standard Apple II) and MFM. the card has a separate 19-pin floppy port.
yakkoj 🦊@tubetime thats the SWIM chip (or some version of it), with Woz's GCR stuff and Wendell Sander's MFM stuff on it. Wendell had been running The Engineering Department, which did work leading up to this PC Transporter.
bitsavers.orgIt isn't jumping out at me, but wasn't the card designed by the Engineering Department (ie. the Sanders)
found it
https://www.digibarn.com/collections/systems/appleIII/sandersinterview.html
@bitsavers ahh that explains a lot. the card really feels like it was designed by Apple so i figured it was done by ex-Apple engineers.