More Hardware!
I have an Apple Super Serial Card II now. Which means my Apple can talk to other computers at speeds up to 19.2Kbps. At that speed you can move a medium-sized text file in, literally, seconds.
Of course, I can’t actually connect to the card at the moment, because cards for the Apple II were generally deigned to have ribbon cable connector (generally an IDC pin header) on the card and then the actual socket would be on the other end of the ribbon cable. And I don’t have the ribbon cable. Ebay is great for getting into this sort of situation. On the other hand, this gives me a chance to make the necessary cable (which isn’t too hard), and I could even make one with a DB-9 socket like every other computer today, as opposed to the archaic DB-25 that the card would have come with originally.
As for the age of the SSC, I have no real idea. Apple introduced the card in 1981, but they kept making them up to around 1993. The card I have is a Rev.C, which is the last revision, and most of the chips have 88 in their date codes, so I’d hazard a guess that it was made in ‘88 or ‘89, but it could have ben manufactured last year for all I really know.
And yes, all the logic on the card is done with standard 74-series parts, and the parts are socketed. There’s something to be said for a computer whose internal workings can actually be laid out on paper by hand. Everything the Apple does can actually be traced right down to the opcodes and the I/O logic. It’s wonderful.
