See below for specifications and information on this system.
Specifications and information
| Introduced: | Announced May 1980 Ships spring 1981 |
| Original Price: | $4340 with 128K and no options |
| CPU: | 6502, 2 MHz |
| Memory: | 128K-512K |
| Operating System: | |
| Input/Output: | Built-in floppy drive, composite color video output
with selectable interlacing, built-in speaker, joystick
port, diskette port Other I/O options on cards |
| Bus: | Apple II bus, 3 slots |
| Other Items in Collection: | Some documentation, non-working external floppy drive, Apple ProFile hard disk controller, Apple ProFile 5 MB external hard disk |
| Items Needed: | Any cards, external floppy drive, software (e.g., /// EZ Pieces) |
Apple III was intended to add a serious business machine to the Apple lineup, working together with the Apple II rather than replacing it.
The Apple III is notorious for being one of the biggest failures of microcomputer history (along with other notable examples, such as the Apple Lisa and the IBM PCjr). An oft-repeated story goes that the motherboard chips would loosen in their sockets due to excess heat. Apple technical support personnel told owners to drop the unit 2"-3" onto the desk to re-seat the chips. Naturally the owners didn't respond happily to this advice, and Apple ended up replacing every single motherboard under warranty.
The III was fully redesigned and re-launched as the Apple III+, but it was too little too late.
The Apple III was designed to be a business computer. It featured an advanced operating system called SOS (the Sophisticated Operating System) and a new BASIC interpreter. Other features included an 80-column display with upper and lowercase characters, a numeric keypad, a real-time clock, a hierarchal file system, and the ability to emulate a 48KB Apple II+. There was a built-in 5¼" floppy disk drive, with a 5 megabyte hard disk drive as an option.
The Apple III was powered by a 2 MHz 6502 8-bit CPU and used banked memory techniques to address up to 128K of memory (the Apple II family was limited to 64K due to that being the limit of its 8-bit address space).
It was a commercial failure, mainly due to the cost, lack of good programs designed specifically for it, and a large number of hardware and software bugss. One popular anecdote about the Apple III is probably better remembered than the machine itself: in a technical bulletin, customers were instructed to lift the machine three inches and drop it – this was supposed to reseat internal DIP chips that had a tendency to come loose.
An improved version, the Apple III Plus, was introduced in December 1983. The III Plus fixed the hardware problems of the original III, included 256K of memory, and featured a keyboard in the style of the Apple IIe. The Apple III line was discontinued four months later.