Is this rare? Apple IIe/GS upgrade

It is fairly rare and valuable.

dafivehole,

What Transwarp said.

This is the IIe to IIgs Upgrade.
They came in a kit that you bought from Apple.

They are pretty rare.

Congrats on a great find.

Steven

They are a bit on the rare side if you are looking for the modified case for it.

It was not a practical upgrade for many reasons and it did not sell too well which is why it is rare.

I'm trying to remember -- was this sold as a DIY kit, or did Apple only make it available for dealers to install?

Dr. Webster,

If I remember reading correctly, it could be done either way.
You could take your IIe to Apple and have it installed,
or you could buy the kit and do it yourself.

I remember seeing an auction on eBay about a year ago
where the seller had bought an extra Lid with the IIgs
emblem where the IIe emblem used to be.
He also had the box it came in.

Steven

So I started playing around with this and it powers up just fine... the little apple goes back and forth, side to side looking for a disk drive I assume? All I have are the older Disk II drives that connect internally but this has a newer connector on the rear of the unit... do they make adapters for this? Do I have to use a newer disk drive? What are my options?

Thank you,
Roger

You can install a new cable (you can call it an adapter if you want to) into your Disk II drive and then connect it to the Smartport (newer connector on the rear of the unit...) but even then you will only be able to attach one drive since the Disk II cannot be daisychained to another Disk II drive.

-OR-

If you have two Disk II drives that you want to use on the iigs and a Disk II controller card, you can install that card in slot 6 of the Apple iiGS and connect the two Disk II drives to the Disk II controller card and this way you will have the use of both drives without the need for daisychaining them.

If you choose to use the Disk II controller card in slot 6, you will have to go into the Apple iigs control panel and change slot 6 to "your card".

I'm trying to remember -- was this sold as a DIY kit, or did Apple only make it available for dealers to install?

The original Apple IIGS upgrade was only available from authorized dealers and required dealer installation.

Many years later a company called Shreve sold an aftermarket pan with a ROM 01 motherboard (not nearly as nice as the original but functional) for schools (and individuals) to upgrade their IIe machines on the cheap.

Picked it up this morning at a Garage Sale... I'd never seen one before.

You lucked out. If it works, it's worth $400-$600 to *some* people.

You might want to check the ROM version. ROM 00 had some issues with it, can't recall what though, and upgrade to a ROM 01. Just have to plug the newer ROM in. Although being a school computer would more than likely already have the upgrade.

And the nice thing about this motherboard is, you can use either a IIe keyboard or an adb keyboard, a IIe power supply or IIGS power supply, cards that support IIGS such as PC Transporter.

But a definite must would be a Hard drive of some kind via a SCSI card, CFFA card, Microdrive, VS drive, etc, to be able to run GSOS 6.0.1-6.0.3.

The case itself is probably worth as much as the computer complete. I saw an empty upgrade case go for $400, and this was a few years back.