Throwback Thursday: Apple IIgs

By on Sep 30, 2010 at 4:59 PM
General September 30, 2010

Apple made a lot of beige boxes back in the 1980′s, but for some reason, if you ask someone about their first computer, the Apple IIgs often comes up. The IIgs was originally released on September 15, 1986, and was one of the first Apple computers to use a 16-bit microprocessor. Running at a blistering 2.8 MHz, the “g” and “s” stood for “graphics” and “sound” respectively. The IIgs packed an 8-bit Ensoniq wavetable sound chip that offered 32 separate channels of sound, and a video card that could dazzle the eye with a 12-bit pallet of 4,096 colors. The graphics card could also push graphics in native resolutions of 320 x 200 pixels or 640 x 200 pixels. The IIgs originally came with 256 KB of RAM built-in (later updated to 1.125 MB) and could be upped to 8.125 MB for those power users; the IIgs also included 128 KB of ROM (later updated to 256 KB). You would often see a matching beige floppy drive, keyboard, mouse, and dot-matrix printer hanging off the side of the GS; making this the ultimate Oregon Trail, word processing machine. Anyone out there ever own an Apple IIgs? How about the Woz: Special Edition?

BGR Throwback Thursday is a weekly series covering our (and your) favorite gadgets, games, and software of yesterday and yesteryear.

Tags:
, , , , , , ,
55 Comments

Related Articles

  • Yowza

    Was that picture taken in a museum? What’s with glass partition?

  • Dan J.

    Best game by far for the Apple II GS (I too had the Woz: Limited Ed) had to be the Japanese game called “Thexder”. It truly did show off the graphics and sound capabilities of this rig. The only thing that could stand up to it at the time was the Amiga…I think the Amiga had better sounds, but the graphics were just short of the super-HiRes that the IIGS offered. Go figure.

    • haz

      The Amiga FAR, FAR out shined the Apple II gs in both graphics and sound… actually everything really.

      Way higher rez graphics (up to 640×480) with lots more colors (4096 out of a pallet of 16.8M) and a much faster CPU 7.14Mhz 16/32-bit Motorola 68000 chip and 512+ MBs of RAM. And it had custom graphics, sound and I/O chips that were the precursor to what we know today as video cards (and soundcards) that offloaded those functions off the main CPU.

      The Amiga was actually more of a competitor to the Mac (used same CPU originally), except that it underbid both the Mac and II gs in price.

      • dNYCE

        i’m not an amiga person or anything, but I’m pretty certain it didn’t have 512MB of RAM. i’d bet the farm on that one.

      • QuantumLeaper

        Amiga 1000 came with 256KB (chip ram) and 256KB (Write only memory) of Ram and multitasking.

  • Andrew

    Great comp. My favorite game though was definitely Wings of Fury. Amen.

    • Hondaf17

      Amen to Wings of Fury. Spent countless hours on that game. Also Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego.

      This is the first computer my Dad bought for us when I was about 5 or 6. It’s the Woz edition. He was going to throw it out and I convinced him to keep it so it’s now in my possession, still hooked up and ready to rock in my basement. Works great.

  • NuShrike

    Still have mine, probably still works if I can find the external scsi setup.

    With 8MB of ram, 12MHz cpu, video overlay card and FutureSound setup, it was wayyy better than all the 1 or 2MB Mac Pluses in the university labs, and PCs up until 1993. That’s a lot of mileage.

    Did a lot of assembly game hacking on the IIGS, and I find hacking ARM on WinMob and Android to be a natural extension.

    First and last Apple product I’ve purchased and used extensively. After the IIGS, it was all Jobs-wasteland.

    • NuShrike

      I think I was probably up to 16MHz with the last TurboZip available. There’s more past 20MHz, but pointless and hard to find.

      • A2Retro

        The fastest heavily-modded IIGS accelerators top out at 18MHz.

  • Brett

    Great computer. Spent a lot of time Test Drive II & Grand Prix Circuit.

    Wings of fury was incredible, but never could get landing on the aircraft carrier down.

  • Wes

    Ah yes, but my first Apple was a IIc then moved to this Woz version Mac. I loved it, it was great, those were the days.

    • NuShrike

      It’s not a Mac.

      o First Apple computer in full color RGB (instead of the greens or B&W Macs)
      o First Apple with wavetable sound
      o First with detached ADB keyboard and mouse (which predates USB and instead of phone cabling Macs used)
      o First with that Platinum color instead of the beige of the Macs and the previous Apple IIs

    • gquaglia

      This was not a Mac. I was a II series with a GUI interface.

  • AndroidsOfTara

    Here’s a bunch of Apple //e and IIgs you can play in a browser based Apple emulator (with a plugin, I think).

    http://www.virtualapple.org/

  • JCWDriver

    Added a AE Transwarp Drive and harddrive (40 meg woohoo) to mine. Help keep Apple going while they dumped money into the Mac. It also cause a stink with Apple Records over the sound capability.

  • PAPINYC

    This was definitely before my time; I don’t even think I know anyone who might have had this.

    My question is: is this how all the GREAT APPLE products end up, including that Apple TV posted here earlier?

  • Fyrfyter

    I remember this. We had one of these back in the day. There was a magazine you could subscribe to, called soft-something GS, and they sent you a high tech 3.5″ floppy with games and trials on it every month. Loved that computer and that magazine. Was rocking the Oregon Trail, Family Feud, and I can’t remember what else I played. I also remember typing a few papers for elementary school on that.

    • Fyrfyter

      I found it — Softdisk GS, for those of you that remember that!

  • RichP

    This was my second Apple computer. I had an Apple IIe before this one, but this was really my first exposure to a GUI on a computer. I used Apple’s word processor (can’t remember the name) and an Apple Imagewriter dot matrix printer. I remember my college classmates being really jealous that I had a computer to write my papers on. :-)

  • andyg8180

    somebody watch’d big bang theory nice and early didnt they??

  • CatatonicBug

    My elementary school computer labs were full of Apple IIe’s. We never got the gs’s. We played Oregon Trail on them after we got done with the math or typing excercises.

  • dNYCE

    I remember unwrapping that Apple IIgs and imagewriter 2 for my birthday, 1986. (December) I just turned 5 and NOBODY knew how to use the thing. My first course of action was to open it up and start poking around.

    Within about 6 months, the computer was in my room since nobodoy else used it.

    Best IIgs software?!? – - – - > Print Shop Deluxe. Who didn’t like printing out those banners just because you could (at least you could if u were willing to wait till at least the third try for it to work/not rip the paper).

    Also pretty baller was Winter Games…

    I remember forcing my father to buy the 1MB of RAM upgrade. I still have it. Weighs about 3/4 pound lol.

    • dNYCE

      yeah…world games, not winter games.

  • Sam

    I never forget about that Apple IIGS from old school. I found it go to http://portune.net/cgi-bin/gs/main?speed=3&s5d1=&s5d2=&s6d1=&s6d2=&s7=&boot=5&x=7&y=12 called “Apple IIGS Explorer” If you want use that.

    This really awesome!!!

  • Max

    Still more advanced than anything Blackberry has created

  • David

    I grew up with an Apple II, II+, IIC, and IIE, but never made it to the IIGS :( Somehow I don’t feel like I missed out.Lode Runner was a family favorite. Now I can play it on my dinc.

  • simys1

    This was one of our first computers growing up. I remember oregon trail..tank bomer.

  • http://worldturns.wordpress.com Barry O’Toole

    IIGS was my first computer (Woz edition) and I had an Apple dot-matrix printer. Appleworks (I think was the name) was a great program.

    It gad 500KB RAM, upgradable to 1MB, for about $500!

    The only thing was that I had no answer when my wife asked: “Why do you need a computer?”

1 2
blog comments powered by Disqus