Apple II SchoolBus Card

I don't see these threads often so I'm late coming to the party.  Very late.  This definitely is a trip down memory lane for me.

I was one of three Apple employees that developed SchoolBus.  I did most of the architecture and hardware while the software was done by the guy that had just finished co-writing ProDOS.

The SchoolBus hardware was the precursor to Localtalk and was identical to what eventually got built into the first Mac, though the Mac team initially intended to use the serial port capabilities of the Motorola 6850 chip at that time for its two serial ports.  My lobbying made them change that.  This used the brand new SSC Chip from Zilog to not only handle the asynchronous serial stuff (RS-232) but also facilitate I2C communication (now USB), though I2C was just an implementation of the older IBM SDLC protocol.  It's interesting that this was the first such implementation in the PC world, pre-dating Localtalk, USB, and even Ethernet.

This product was beta tested at a local high school in the San Jose area.  The teacher and students had identical Apple IIs outfitted with these cards and were connected in a daisy chain fashion.  The teacher's computer ran a specialized program while the students all had a fairly vanilla Apple II installation.  The disk drive and printer on the teacher's machine was shared to/with all the students and the teacher could "see" what was on each students display.

SchoolBus was introduced to the world at the 1983 NCC in Anaheim, I seem to recall.  I still have a poster from that event that states:

"Apple Computer, Inc.

is exhibiting in the Junior Ballroom,

second floor featuring:

Super Pilot

Schoolbus (TM) Preview

'Apple's Low Cost

Computer Classroom'"

with a logo of a school bus with "SchoolBus" in the destination display at the top of the bus windshield.

I'm not sure if the product shipped after that.  A certain exec at Apple at that time did not want any other Apple product to succeed in any market intended for the upcoming Mac.  So many products that Apple had invested heavily in were killed as quietly as possible from that time on.

It also is interesting that someone in the Lisa group took an interest in my card and whipped together an ability for Lisa to use it, so that we could actually boot Apple IIs, IIIs, and Lisa computers over the network created by the card.

I wasn't aware of any of the product out in the wild beyond that of the beta testing.  The Computer History Museum has my only prototypes, cabling, and related periphernalia that survived with me only until I discovered them while cleaning and purging my house.  You can search their catalog collections for them.