Syscom-II

Syscom - front

Like most Apple II clones, the Syscom II, made by Syscom 2 Inc. in Carson City, Nevada, is housed in a case virtually identical to the actual Apple II's. The floppy drives are R-G-B Taur II disk drives. This particular unit is serial number 0381.

Syscom - topdown

Inside is an Apple Disk II interface card, an Image Perfect SMT board (1985), and a 1982 CDP 16K board.

Syscom - screen

The Apple II's ROMs required the boot name be eight characters, like "APPLE II". Thus "SYSCOM 2" instead of "SYSCOM II".

Syscom - board

The motherboard is blue, makred "©1982 SYNTRON Patent Pending.

Submitted by time-warp.

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Comments

I had one of these when I was a kid. I didn't realize at the time that it was basically an illegal clone of the II+ due to the fact that it had pirated Apple II+ roms in it. I don't know if the system originally had Syscom's own roms in it or not, although I doubt that even their roms were a clean-room re-implemenation. I'll bet you that Apple lawyers chewed them up in the end.

The keyboard on the Syscom 2 was better than what Apple used on the II+. In terms of quality I'd put it on par with the IIe or maybe even a little better. The only thing better about the IIe's keyboard as compared to the Syscom's was the IIe's layout.

The other thing that was different on this system was the power supply connector. When I went to buy a replacement power supply I had to cut its connector off and solder the wires into the connector from the original power supply.

I had a lot of fun with this computer and consider it to be the first "real" computer I ever had. The Apple II will always have a special place in my heart. Before that I was using a CoCo MC-10 (think Sinclair 1000 with a chicket keyboard) that I'd gotten for my 10th birthday.