Let me just start by saying I have never seen one of these machines in real life. This is my first time using one.
I found an Apple IIe being sold in "as-is" condition because the seller didn't have any of the peripherals to go with it - no disk drive, no hard drive, no monitor, etc. So I brought it home and hooked it up to my TV and decided to write some simple BASIC code. It starts up and shows me the Apple ][ text at the top and gives me a prompt, " ] " but when I type nothing shows up. The cursor moves but it looks like I hit the space bar. Occasionally another ] will show up on the screen or a white rectangle. Pressing return does not give me a line break. It behaves the same as the other buttons.
I ran the self test (both apple keys and the reset button) and it says "KERNEL OK". I'm not sure what else to do. Am I missing something? How do I troubleshoot this?
Check for good and firm internal cable connection between keyboard and keyboard-connector at mainboard
(front right side ) and probably make picture from that area inside and post here a link to that picture.Check for missing chips related to keyboard decoding.
Also try reseating the power supply plug on the board. The -12v is a corner pin that on the IIe model only feeds the keyboard encoder chip so the symptom
of a missing -12v is a dead keyboard.