Apple III

The Apple III (rendered as Apple ///) was a business-oriented personal computer produced by Apple Inc. in the 1980s as a successor to the Apple II.

It was designed to provide a true typewriter-style upper/lowercase keyboard, and an 80-column display, key features desired in a computer by business users.

Why it had Failed and was Crummy

 * 1) According to Apple co-founder Steve "Woz" Wozniak, the main reason why the Apple III had failed is because the system was designed by the company's marketing department, unlike previous engineering-driven projects.
 * 2) In a vain attempt to make the computer quiet, the Apple III had forgone the use of a cooling fan or air vents, instead using the case as a large heatsink, as suggested by Steve Jobs himself, no less! Since the system had a metal case and chips crammed together with no air vents, it was impossible for enough heat to escape for sufficient cooling. Some users accounted that their Apple IIIs became so hot that the chips started dislodging from the circuit board, the screen displaying garbled data, or floppy disks coming out of the slot melted.
 * 3) *Not helping things is the fact that circuit board used the immature "fineline" technology with narrow spaces, and when the chips are wave-soldered directly onto the board, solder bridges would form between traces that weren't supposed to be connected. This caused plenty of short circuits, which required hours of costly diagnosis and hand rework to repair.
 * 4) It had a limited software library.
 * 5) Though compatible with Apple II software, emulation was made intentionally hobbled that it could not make use of the III's features (specifically 64 KB RAM or higher, required by a large number of Apple II programs written in PASCAL), limiting its usefulness.
 * 6) The real-time clock chip, a first for an Apple computer, would fail after prolonged use.
 * 7) *Moreover, the manufacturer of the chip, National Semiconductor, had a reputation of knowingly shipping faulty parts, confident that they could do another production run before they had to send replacements. While not a problem for customers who put chips in sockets and had extensive repair facilities, the fact that Apple soldered chips directly to the system's circuit board and were unable to easily test a board for bad chips did not help. This problem was solved by deleting the real-time clock from the Apple III's specifications.

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