Apple III Design
The Apple III was designed to be a business computer and an eventual successor for the Apple II. While the Apple II contributed to the inspirations of several important business products, such as VisiCalc, Multiplan and Apple Writer, the computer's hardware architecture, operating system and developer environment were limited. The Apple III addressed these weaknesses.
The Apple III was powered by a 1.8 MHz Synertek 6502A or B 8-bit CPU and, like some of the more advanced machines in the Apple II family, used bank switching techniques to address up to 256 KB of memory. Third-party vendors also produced memory upgrade kits that allowed the Apple III to reach up to 512 KB. Other Apple III built-in features included an 80-column display with upper and lowercase characters, a numeric keypad, dual-speed (pressure sensitive) cursor control keys, 6-bit (DAC) audio, 16-color high-resolution graphics, and a built-in 140 KB 5.25" floppy disk drive. Unlike the Apple II, the Disk III controller was built into the logic board.
The Apple III was the first Apple product that allowed the user to choose both a screen font and a keyboard layout: either QWERTY or Dvorak. These choices could not be changed while programs were running, unlike the Apple IIc, which had a keyboard switch directly above the keyboard, allowing switching on the fly.
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