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Home > Vintage Computers Section > Platinum Apple IIe
 
My favorite Apple II is the Platinum Apple IIe. It is the quintessential Apple II. The casing is a cool blue "platinum" color and it sports a nifty keypad, which is great for programming BASIC. The older beige IIe did not have this keypad. The beige IIe has a similar keyboard but it is centered without the keypad. There were many third party keypads that could be connected to it via the joystick point. Without the pad, typing numbers is tortuous. The keyboard is built into all models of the II line except for the IIgs, which has a detachable ADB keyboard. The Platinum motherboard is basically the same as the older beige IIe but with fewer, more powerful chips and a smaller 80COL/64K card. I have a beige IIe but prefer to use the Platinum because of the keypad. Both computers could definitely give you a case of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, as the keyboard is a full two inches off the table! Without some padding, my wrists begin to hurt almost immediately. I have an older IIe color composite monitor but it is pretty much worn out. Its focus is shot and the colors tend to bleed. Back in the 1980's when the Apple IIe was king, very few home televisions had an AV jack. There were some, but they were few and expensive. If you wanted to hook one up to a television back then, you would probably have to use an RF modulator to change the composite signal to UHF/VHF, similar to an Atari game switch. This degrades the signal and ambient interference can cause static to be introduced on the screen. Today, AV jacks are on almost every television sold. All you need is an RCA cable to connect the IIe to the television. A shielded RCA cable means no static and no degraded picture.  Unfortunately, the composite signal and the low resolution of television CRT's keep you from taking advantage of 80 columns. Even on an Apple-branded color composite monitor, you have to turn off the color in order to use 80 columns due to "color-blast" and the funny way the Apple IIe generates the composite signal. The Apple II uses a method designed for economy in an age when color was rare and expensive. 40 columns on a television is not a problem. This is unfortunate but acceptable. You can also use an RGB card with an RGB monitor but I have found that many games optimized for the Apple II look funny on a monitor with that much resolution. Games designed for the Apple IIe were designed to run with a composite signal. I use a 13-inch television with an RCA jack on the front. It fits nicely on top of my Platinum IIe.  Note the Macintosh LC III sitting by my IIe in the above picture. It has an Apple IIe Card installed in it. I use it to convert disk images, downloaded from the Internet, into real Apple II floppies. For more information on this, see the article "How to get software stored on the Internet to run in a real Apple II." Also, note the disk drive setup in the above pictures. The Apple IIe has two 5.25 floppy drives and an 800K floppy drive. I think that this is the best overall setup for the IIe. In my opinion, hard drives just don't work well with the IIe. Unless you need to store a huge amount of data, they are more trouble than they are worth. The Apple IIe is a 5.25 floppy machine.  The growing software collection I am starting to amass a huge collection of vintage Apple II software. All the disks you see in the picture were once stored on the Internet as disk images. This is what makes the Apple II experience so unique. You have access to almost anything Apple II from hardware to software for almost nothing. The software is virtually free and the hardware can be purchased for pennies. Take a look at some of the Apple II programs I enjoy:
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