TMPLee@DOCKMASTER.ARPA (11/19/86)
Mine finally showed up. DOA -- something bad in the ROM. The dealer however was able to get a new board shipped from Apple so I was back on the air only five days later. Quick observations. (This from a II+ owner who has never really used an e or c.) Hardware's very nice. Monitor still shows a few color fringes on some characters with some color combinations. (The one used by the DeskTop especially.) It came with one system disk and a quite long tutorial. The documentation furnished is horrible -- very incomplete. The system disk has both a version of ProDOS 8 and 16; 16 I think is V1.1.1 or something like that. Most of the stuff seems to work, but the DeskTop has a lot of shaky parts to it. I bought one 3.5 drive and one 5.25 (for old disks.) (didn't have the heart to cannabalize the old system.) So if I want to copy from 3.5 to another there is a *LOT* of disk swapping. (I think I'll expand my memory expansion to one Meg rather than adding another drive.) Some of the DeskTop utilities can't seem to handle more than one disk in the same drive -- there is one which you are supposed to be able to use to take a quick look at a text file -- it asks for the sytem disk to be re-inserted and then loses the file you want to look at (or something like that.) Obviously some of this stuff has been released prematurely -- I only hope they have an update policy. But I'm not displeased. Appleworks looks good, even though there's bound to be much better word processors -- can't wait til WordPerfect comes out with a GS version. The Imagewriter is very nice (compared to my MX80). The only problem is: the whole point of getting a new computer was to have a second one so that we all here weren't fighting over one -- we still will be!