In early 1991, Apple introduced a new Apple IIe, the Macintosh LC Apple IIe Card. This card was designed to be used in the Mac LC computer (and it works in almost any of the LC series machines). It allowed the use of the IIgs and IIc 3.5" and 5.25" floppy drives, and supported a joystick/paddles. The drives and controllers are connected to the "computer" via a special cable that connected to the card. Apple's hard drive partitioning software allowed one to create an Apple II partition (ProDOS format) on the Mac's hard disk and store your Apple II programs there.
To boot the IIe, you just double clicked on the IIe Startup Icon form the Mac screen. To get back to the Mac side, you hit Control-Command-ESC to enter a control panel. From here, you click on a "Quit IIe" button. This control panel also allows one to more software based peripheral cards (the actual IIe card supported no IIe hardware cards) from slot to slot.
As far as IIe computers, it was pretty good. It came with a serial card, mouse card, printer card, disk drive card, and extended memory/80 column card (all in software and chips on the card). It could also run at 1 MHz or 2 MHz.
Here is the complete LC/IIe system. It is using Apple
IIgs floppy drives and joystick - the IIe system could also use the
Mac's internal floppy drive. The softwrae shown is VisiCalc.
This photo shows the LC's PDS connector, and the
connector for the external disk drive/controller cable. The card used
the Mac's disk drives as well as any attached to the external
connector. Notice that the MOS Technology's 6502 CPU is not even on
the card - it uses custom chips throughout.
This shows the IIe control
panel. This is a part of the IIe system, not the Mac system. All
settings are made here, including resetting the card and exiting back
to the Mac system.Click on it for a better view.
Please note: All photographs and info are copyright 1996 Justin Mayrand - if you would like to copy items, e-mail me with which one and what you would like to do with it, I should be back to you in 24 hours. Thanks!