Iie Interface

I recently got an Apple II keyboard to use instead of the IIe keyboard I was using. This keyboard has an onboard encoder and a layout that is closer to the original Datanetics keyboards. One thing to watch out for when hooking an Apple II keyboard to an Apple I, when you rewire it if you hook it up backwards, you will blow the 7404 on the encoder board. I know that this has happened to several people, and it happened to me as well. »

My effort to find the right keyboard for my Apple 1 was a long and relatively fruitless process. Since the original Apple 1 did not supply a keyboard, a variety of keyboards were used. The requirement is that the keyboard needs to provide an ASCII interface that you can wire into the Apple 1 keyboard socket. A common choice for this was a Datanetics keyboard. As it turns out, datanetics and every other variety of ASCII keyboards have become very tough to find. »