Steve Hix's Profile

Since I worked in the Apple/// engineering group at the time, I feel mildly impelled to offer a couple of corrections. 1 - Yep, the clock chip was a problem. The manufacturer screwed up. 2 - The /// had a massive heatsink in the back; the lack of a fan was not an oversight, or cost-cutting measure, it was intended to provide a quieter workplace. We used lots of them, by the way, and never found overheating to be an issue. 3 - Loose sockets? No, on the contrary, the sockets on the motherboard were too *tight*, if anything. The result was that some of the chips in those sockets would gradually "walk" up and out of solid electrical contact as the motherboard and the pan in which it was installed flexed slightly as the system heated and cooled. Eventually, you'd get erratic operation, or it wouldn't boot on power up. This made the initial workaround for the problem possible; you would lift the front of the (attached) keyboard about an inch, then release it. The chips would reseat at the thump, and off you'd go. These problems were addressed in part by relaying the motherboard; the old "fine-line" boards were replaced by the newer "coarse-line" boards, for free, for all Apple/// customers who had the early machines. The problems went away, along with some troublesome manufacturing contractors. The biggest problems with the system came from marketing demands, though. A huge amount of engineering effort went into making sure that the Apple][ emulation mode of the Apple/// was restricted to a subset of the Apple]['s expandability. Some in marketing were apparently certain that otherwise the $3K+ Apple/// would cannibalize sales of the much less expensive Apple//. (That never made sense to any of us.) Once the "Six-million Dollar Solution" (replacing the initial motherboard for all existing customers at no charge to them) was done, the Apple/// went on to work very well; but its reputation never really recovered. It was interesting to see, though, that the final version included 512K of RAM and mouse support, and Profile hard drive support. By then, though it was too late for the machine. Apple made a few machines after that that really did deserve general opproprium, such as the Performa 6300CD, or PowerBook 5300, or some of the profusion of confusing and poor performing low-end Macs during the Spindler era. Any of them were much worse than the Apple///.