Hi There,
A couple years back I picked up an Apple II "SchoolBus" networking card, made by Apple. According to the promotional literature I was able to find, it looks like it allowed several II/IIe's to be daisy-chained together and share a "server" Apple II and share a Disk II and software. Essentially a teacher could "push" programs to students to work on, similar to teachers using Google Classroom, etc, today.
I haven't found much more information than this, and I'd really like to hear from someone who has had experience with it. My interest in retro apple tech stems from the K-12 world, anyone with experience with this, I'd like to hear from.
Thanks
I have a similar prouct from another company. If the Apple card was the same, there was a MASTER card, an a SLAVE card type. You installe the master car in the lea (professor) machine, and the slave cars in student machines. This allowe very minimal networking.
If you want to know more about what I have (not for sale at present, as I want to dump the ROMs and make a schematic and gerber file for them), I will provide more. Please post the Apple p/n on your card so that I can cross-reference it/
Hello Again,
It appears the SchoolBus card is the same for teacher and student computers. There is no primary (teacher) and secondary (student) cards, individually. I'm not sure if this allows for role-switching, such as one student could potentially teach/demonstrate from their machine, but it would be cool.
Attached are photos of the card, and promotional literature I was able to find. I'm still looking for someone who used the card in action.
Beyond that, this article in wired this week talks about changing terminology in tech. For myself, I'm being more mindful of the impact and mindset of terms.
Thanks.
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These seem to pop up every now and then. I've never seen one, so perhaps they're native to the USA. This appears to be the third variant out of 3 cards I have images for. An 83 version I don't have an image of the back for, but shows the DIN plug it would have had. And two 82 versions with those patches across the back.
I did see somewhere... its a serial bus of some sort, so maybe a super prehistoric appletalk kind of thing. Anyone was s'posed to be able to talk to anyone I think and the example give showed only 1 system with floppies on it.
For whats its worth... http://pineapple.zapto.org/hardware/display.php?query=66