Paul Schlyter <pausch@saaf.se> wrote:

> In article <3c891a4e_3@news.onlynews.com>,
> Bryan Villados <news002@macgeek.org> wrote:
>  
> > There were two ROM cards. The Applesoft BASIC ROM card was for Apple IIs
> > with Integer BASIC. The Integer BASIC ROM card was for Apple II+ that has
> > Applesoft BASIC.
> > 
> > What I don't understand is exactly what's the thought pattern of these
> > products were... Why would someone buy a ROM card when they can easily buy a
> > 16K RAM card (Language Card what Apple called it) and load the BASIC you
> > want to it.
>  
> Two reasons:
>  
> 1. The ROM card was available before the Language Card.  So if you
> wanted both BASIC's before the Language Card was available, the ROM
> card was the only way to go.
>  
> 2. Even after Apple's Language Card was available, there was still
> a reason to buy the ROM card instead: since the Language Card initially
> was sold only with the Apple Pascal system, it was quite expensive;
> a ROM card was only approx. 1/3 the price of a Language Card with
> Apple Pascal.
>  
> Later, when other 16K RAM cards became available from third-party
> sources, cards you could buy without having to buy Apple Pascal at
> the same time, and cards with did cost about as much as a ROM card
> from Apple, the reasons for buying a ROM card vanished.

There was one other reason: the switch on the card lets the user control
whether the motherboard or ROM card gets control at reset time.  This
has some useful applications in the hacking vein (the old monitor ROM
can be useful as a poor man's cracking card, or you can use custom
firmware on the card).

By comparison, the language card doesn't change its enable state for a
hardware reset (but is disabled after a power-on reset).  Apple II
Pascal made use of this feature: Ctrl-Reset does a warm start of the
operating system, reinitializing and returning to the main menu.

The built-in language card emulation in the IIe and later machines
doesn't retain this behaviour - the language card is disabled by a
hardware reset, so Ctrl-Reset in Apple II Pascal will reboot the
computer.

-- 
David Empson
dempson@actrix.gen.nz