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Comment by Finnucane | Hacker News Reader

The II+ was basically a II with support for lowercase and 80-column lines added by means of an expansion card.

Actually, the ][+ was still 40-column, uppercase. I remember wiring a pin off my keyboard controller card to the paddle button input and add a replacement character ROM to get lowercase support.

It was the //e and //c that had built-in lowercase support.

We had an Apple II+ with the limitations you describe. However, we purchased and installed the 80-column card that provided both 80-columns and lowercase characters, which is what I think the parent comment is suggesting.

I remember adding 16KB or 32KB to get to a total of 48KB of RAM with a card that piggybacked onto the existing chips. Was that the same upgrade that enabled lowercase letters?

I mostly remember that the RAM upgrade changed the gauges in MS Flight Simulator from octagons into rounder circles.

Interesting... did the ][+ support an add on 80 column card? My hunch is no, but not sure at all

Yeah, it did. Also a Z80 card so you could run CP/M. With CP/M I could run Fortran and C on my ][+, it was a lot easier to get pirated versions of CP/M SW than original Apple Pascal or Fortran.

The first computer I ever used was a second-hand Apple ][e my parents brought home one day when I was little. I got started with BASIC on that thing.

I actually didn't realize until I had to use a ][+ at school later that some computers didn't do lower case :)

No, that's not correct. The II+ was a II with Applesoft BASIC instead of Woz's Integer BASIC, and the ability to automatically boot from disk at power on. That's it.

Lowercase and 80 columns were available from third-party vendors for both the II and the II+.

Source: I still own my II. Also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_series

Huh. I got my II+ with the 80-column card installed. I guess I just assumed that was standard. Being more than 40 yrs ago, I could be misremembering.

It was probably a Videx Videoterm:

https://archive.org/details/Videx_Videoterm_Installation_and...

It was common for Apple resellers at the time to sell them with third-party add-ons.

Worth pointing out (for those interested) that Applesoft BASIC provided floating point support, and was provided by Microsoft.

BASIC and the monitor were stored on ROM chips on the motherboard. The II and II+ were basically the same computer with a different set of BASIC ROM chips installed.

Edit: It is actually possible to have both sets of ROM chips installed if you use a Firmware card. Very handy!

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