The Apple IIGS at 40: the 16-bit Apple II that Apple built, then left to sell itself

On 15 September 1986 the Los Angeles Times told its readers that Apple was "scheduled to unveil the Apple IIGS today". The paper gave a base price of $999 and put a typically configured system, including the enhanced colour monitor and a disk drive, at about $1,800. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, which holds one, records the price as $999 without a monitor or $1,498 with the RGB monitor. Accounts differ on what the base price bought: Steven Weyhrich's history of the Apple II says it included a 3.5-inch drive, while the Times counted the disk drive among the extras in its $1,800 system.

Apple's executive vice president, Del Yocam, used the launch to answer a question the company had been asked for years. "I get a real kick out of it when people start to corner me about the life cycle of the Apple II," he told the Times, adding that "it's really all up to us, how long it goes." Apple drew that line for the IIGS six years later.

A cancelled IIx and a cost-cutting chip

The IIGS was the second attempt at a 16-bit Apple II. A+ magazine's account of its making, published in November 1986 and drawing on interviews with the engineers, describes an earlier project, code-named Brooklyn and Golden Gate, that became known outside Apple as the Apple IIx after Steve Wozniak talked about it to user groups. To Apple's executives, A+ says, it was an insurance policy in case the Macintosh failed. The Macintosh did not fail, Western Design Center's 65816 processor ran late, and the team leaders themselves suggested cancelling the project.

The engineering manager Dan Hillman was moved to cutting the cost of the existing Apple II. With Jay Rickard he put almost the whole machine on one custom chip, the Mega II. "When we designed the Mega II, we didn't know what the machine was for," Hillman told the magazine. Strong Apple II sales after the Apple IIc's launch in April 1984 and a working 65816 revived the 16-bit idea, which Wozniak raised at a meeting about where the Mega II should go. The new project was called Phoenix; BYTE lists Columbia, Cortland and Granny Smith among the other names it went by. Hillman's first goal was compatibility: "It had to work with Apple IIe software and Apple IIc software. That was goal number 1." Then came more memory, more speed, better graphics and better sound.

Two machines in one

BYTE's preview in October 1986, written after two days with the engineers, set out how the designers did it. The W65C816 can run as a 6502 for old software or as a 16-bit processor whose 16-bit address bus and eight bank lines reach 16 megabytes. It runs at 2.8 MHz, though memory refresh brings the average speed of RAM access down to about 2.5 MHz, and BYTE reported that the faster setting made most software run two to three times faster than at normal Apple II speed. Memory that old programs expect to find at Apple II speed, such as the video pages, stays at 1 MHz, and a second custom chip, the Fast Processor Interface, sits between the processor and the Mega II to, in A+'s words, "route tasks to the appropriate chip". The Mega II itself, BYTE reported, held about 3,000 gates and replaced the character ROMs and the MMU, IOU, timing and logic chips of the IIe and IIc.

The base machine had 256K of RAM and 128K of ROM. New "super hi-res" modes offered 320 by 200 pixels with 16 colours or 640 by 200 with four, chosen from 4,096, with up to 16 palettes on one screen. Sound came from the Ensoniq 5503 Digital Oscillator Chip, which Apple's hardware reference describes as a synthesizer with 32 independent oscillators and 64K of RAM of its own for waveforms. Compute! noted that it was similar to the chip in Ensoniq's $1,700 Mirage synthesizer.

It nearly did not happen. The first sound chip proposed gave "arcade-quality sound" and was "nothing special", A+ reports, until the engineer Rob Moore proposed the Ensoniq part. "Ensoniq sent the chip to Woz," Moore said. "He wasn't that interested in sound, so he passed it on to another engineer, who thought it was too complicated. But I went crazy over it." The risk, A+ explained, was that such sound would typecast the machine as a games computer. Hillman won over upper management by calling the chip "an enabling technology", a phrase the magazine says he borrowed from Macintosh marketing.

Between the Apple II and the Macintosh

Compute!'s David Thornburg called the IIGS "two machines in one", a product that "bridges the gap between the Macintosh and Apple IIe". The Mac-like half was plain to see: a mouse, which no Apple II had shipped with before, a desktop and Finder, desk accessories, and the Apple Desktop Bus for keyboards and pointing devices. The Smithsonian's record calls it the first computer to use ADB, which let Apple sell one set of input devices for both product lines, and BYTE read the styling as a sign that Apple II and Macintosh products would come to share keyboards and 3.5-inch drives.

BYTE's engineers were not persuaded by the whole bargain. "What do you say about such innovative energy that has been directed primarily toward preserving a hardware design that is 10 years old?" the preview asked. The designers' achievements were "remarkable", it said, but the classic architecture, "now as venerable (and outdated) as COBOL and batch processing", may have limited the result to "an exercise in miniaturization".

Software publishers hedged. By December 1987 Compute!'s Apple Applications reported that "many publishers have canceled or postponed their plans for Apple IIGS software", and that the hottest product on the machine was AppleWorks, carried over from the IIe and IIc with "no mouse interface, no pull-down menus, no color, no graphics."

The Woz edition

The Times reported at launch that "a 'designer' limited edition of the new Apple will bear a 'Woz' signature plate." On a surviving machine photographed for Wikimedia Commons it is a printed "Woz" signature over a dotted line, with the words "Limited Edition" beneath, on the front of the case. Early buyers received it: in II Computing's February/March 1987 issue, Neil Shapiro wrote that his new IIGS had "arrived (the special 'Woz' limited edition)". The figure usually given for the run, the first 50,000 machines, appears widely online, but we could not trace it to an Apple document or a period report.

Revisions, and the end

The IIGS was not widely available until November 1986, according to Weyhrich, after problems with one of the new chips. A revised ROM, ROM 01, followed in September 1987, he writes. Apple's Technical Note #26 records that from August 1989 machines shipped with a 256K ROM 3, double the size of its predecessor; "ROM 2 was skipped since there was already enough confusion about the first version, ROM 0, and the second version, ROM 1."

There was no successor. After the launch, Weyhrich writes, Apple "left the Apple IIGS to sell itself", and its technical support staff steered developers towards the Macintosh. In a clarification Weyhrich quotes from an October 1990 posting, Apple USA's president, Bob Puette, said the company had "no plans at this time to introduce new, standalone Apple II models". The Smithsonian's record says the IIGS suffered from limited marketing while Apple put its energy into the Mac. In December 1992, by Weyhrich's account, the IIGS did not appear on Apple's new price lists and Apple representatives told the Bay Area Apple User Group that production had ended; the Smithsonian also dates the end to December 1992. The Apple IIe, whose software the IIGS was built to run, stayed in Apple's line until November 1993, according to Weyhrich's chart of model dates.