created 14.11.2008, last changes: 10.02.2019 ps

>>> Patrick's Hardware Page <<<

Here are a few odds and ends I created during the last years. They make more or less sense, and you may find them useful or just funny. Or not at all.

me I am working as a Senior Hardware Design Engineer at an automotive electronics supplier. Here I spend some time designing circuits, and most of my time making them as reliable, cost efficient and easy to manufacture as possible. Therefore sometimes it is really necessary to build something that is quite useless, but in a certain way interesting, funny or just recreative. I like vacuum tubes, I like vintage computers, and I also like robotics. And because I have some other hobbies as well (and a girlfriend who does not share this attitude), I always have more ideas than time to carry them out...

From time to time I will add some more stuff here, but do not expect too much.

Vintage Apple Computers

a few of my machines In 1984, I came across an Apple IIe computer. It was at a trade fair in our local town hall, I was thirteen years old, and I never had seen such a thing before. After that I wanted to have one.

At that time I was not able to afford a genuine Apple (not to mention any genuine software), so one year later I got a "MEWA-48" for DM 999,- from Völkner Electronic. A real Apple II (or IIe) was 2-3 times more expensive, so almost every "Apple II" user had a Taiwanese clone. You could buy them at almost any electronic store and they came in two basic designs:

Taiwanese Apple clones were sold under different names, like "Orange II", "Telstar", "48k-Computer" or whatever. They had Applesoft BASIC inside, which was not really illegal these days because the copyright laws did not fully cover computer software. Usually the greeting string was patched to something like "HELLO" or "COMPUTER" instead of "APPLE ][", which prevented ProDOS from booting. And helped selling EPROM burners.

Many years later I bought a genuine Apple IIe at a surplus sale at our university. It was the machine Prof. Niemeyer used to work on the Hare-Niemeyer-Verfahren, a procedure to allocate the chairs of the German parliament to the political parties. This evolved into a big Apple collection. Today I own a many Apple IIplus, IIe, IIGS, an Apple ///, four Lisa 2, a Mac 128, Plus, SE, SE/30, Classic II and a Portable. And of course my old Apple clone.

Here are some documents and projects related to these great machines:

Hobby Electronic stuff

ScopeClock

Disclaimer & Copyright

This web page has been created by

Dr. Patrick Schäfer
Drei Schepps 26
D-44227 Dortmund
Germany
dr.p.schaefer@gmx.de

As I cannot take any responsibility for anything outside my reach, I explicitly disassociate myself from the contents of any page linked here.


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