The Computer That Could Have Changed The World
Copyright Joe Kohn 1996-2009

Meet Mark Twain

Each year, Apple's User Group Connection co-sponsors a mid-summer
conference and convention for Apple User Group leaders, and it was at
the July, 1991 convention that I first learned about Apple's imminent
plans to release a new souped-up Apple IIGS computer, code-named Mark
Twain.

The 1991 National Apple User Group Convention was held near me at the
University of California in Berkeley. Usually the convention is
co-sponsored by a local user group, but that year it was co-sponsored by
an individual - Raines Cohen - the founder of the Berkeley Macintosh
User Group. At the time, I was wondering whether there would be anything
of interest at the convention for an Apple II User Group officer, so I
contacted Raines and was somewhat dismayed to find out that absolutely
no arrangements had yet been made to offer any Apple II sessions.

Not being one who is easily discouraged when it comes to the Apple II, I
asked Raines about the possibility of offering some sessions for Apple
II User Group leaders, and he agreed that if I wanted to coordinate all
of the Apple II activities, I was welcome to do so. I was off and
running.

I immediately contacted Tim Swihart, a well-known Apple II programmer
who had been hired by Apple to serve in a managerial position in the
then-Apple II division. Tim agreed to attend the convention and to give
a talk. At the time, both HyperCard IIGS and System 5.0.4 had recently
been released, so I expected that one or both of these would be the
subject of his talk.

On the day the convention started, I was surprised to see that Tim
Swihart didn't come alone; all of the top level managers of the Apple II
division accompanied him. Besides myself, there were no more than five
other Apple II owners in attendance. What we heard that day was
remarkable in that it was the first time, and possibly the only time,
that Apple employees ever spoke to the public about the Mark Twain
computer.

The Big Picture

During the summer of 1991, the Apple IIGS was alive and well, and Apple
was still more than 1.5 years away from announcing its discontinuation.
System 6 hadn't yet been announced, and the SuperDrive Controller Card
was still six months away from being released. Those were hopeful and
optimistic times; not even a year had passed since Apple CEO John
Sculley proclaimed in an open letter to the Apple II community, "Apple's
commitment to its 5 million Apple II users is to continue to create
products that improve the functionality and performance of their
computers. Apple will sell, service, and support the Apple II line well
into the 1990s."

At the 1991 User Group Convention, the Apple employees were very excited
and they had one item, and one item only, that they wanted to discuss
with those in attendance: the soon-to-be released Mark Twain. They
quickly rattled off some basic technical specifications: the machine
would have a built-in 3.5" disk drive and a built-in 40 megabyte hard
drive, and it would ship with System Software, HyperCard IIGS and
AppleWorks GS pre-installed on the hard drive. They stated that the Mark
Twain was intended to be sold primarily in the educational marketplace.
They waved about a copy of Apple's most current marketing brochure, and
it was there that our attention was directed towards the "Educational
Bundle" - a package deal for educators that included a ROM 3 IIGS,
external 3.5" and 5.25" disk drives, a 40 megabyte hard drive that came
with System 5.0.4 pre-installed, along with HyperCard IIGS and
AppleWorks GS.

As excited as the Apple employees were about the imminent release of a
new model IIGS, they kept trying to point out that the Mark Twain was
simply intended to replace the "Educational Bundle" then being offered
for $1,299. Although we never actually saw the new IIGS, we were led to
believe that it was just mere weeks or months away from being released
and that the last step in the process was to determine the pricing.
Although no firm price was announced that day, the Apple employees
indicated that the cost would be about $999, which would place it in the
same price range as the first of the "low cost" Macintoshes that had
been released in late 1990.

That was truly an exciting meeting, and I think all of us were thrilled
to be the first Apple users informed of Apple's upcoming plans. Several
weeks later, that same Apple II team traveled to Peterborough, New
Hampshire to give employees of inCider Magazine their own sneak peek at
the Mark Twain. Unlike at the User Group convention, an actual Mark
Twain prototype was shown to the inCider editors. At the time, inCider
had plans to devote an issue to the Mark Twain; alas, those plans never
materialized because in the late summer of 1991, inCider was informed
that the Mark Twain project had been cancelled. And, nothing more was
ever heard from Apple about the Mark Twain.

Fast Forward

After its cancellation, tales of the Mark Twain project took on almost
mythic proportions. Stories circulated in the Apple II world about the
cancelled project, and that community renamed the Mark Twain as the ROM
4 computer. Rumors about the capabilities of the Mark Twain circulated
for years but nothing was ever heard from Apple, except for a well
disguised reference to Mark Twain that appeared on the cover of the 1992
edition of Apple's "The Apple II Guide." But certainly no outsiders,
aside from the inCider staff, had ever seen a Mark Twain. Until October,
1995, that is.

At the end of October, 1995, I was presiding over the monthly meeting of
The GravenStein Apple User Group, and was busy answering some technical
questions about the Apple II when several Mark Twain computers literally
walked themselves into my life.

Several days prior to the meeting, a fellow club officer received a cry
for help over the telephone. The call started innocently enough: "Help.
Something is wrong with my IIGS computer." The club officer tried to
determine which model IIGS the caller had and tried to get as many
details as possible. From the way the caller described her system, the
club officer was unable to determine which model Apple IIGS she had, as
there had been several references to a built-in disk drive. So, the
caller was invited to bring her computer to the next meeting.

She did, and when the woman walked into the room, I was in the middle of
describing how to convert various foreign format graphics to a IIGS
format. I glanced over at her and her computer, and my jaw instantly
dropped. I completely lost my train of thought, and quite frankly, I was
so stunned by what I saw that I was temporarily at a loss for words.

The computer, at first glance, looked like a standard Apple IIGS. But, I
noticed, there really was a built-in 3.5" disk drive. How was that
possible? Needless to say, I no longer cared about explaining how to
convert graphics. I wanted to know what that IIGS was. I rushed over and
immediately opened the case, and there was a motherboard unlike anything
I had ever seen before. It had only five slots, and a square shaped
power supply. It had a built-in 3.5" disk drive and a built-in SCSI hard
drive sitting just under the 3.5" disk.

Upon turning the machine over, I saw, just as plain as day, the notation
on the sticker attached to the underside of the case - "Prototype: Mark
Twain." The woman said she had two of them, along with a spare
motherboard!!! Apparently, she had gotten them from a friend of a friend
of a friend's ex-husband whose former sister-in-law's cousin used to
work for Apple.

The woman had absolutely no idea how rare her computers were; to her
they were just IIGS computers. On the spot, I offered to purchase her
Mark Twains, but they were both currently in daily use, and there was no
way she was going to part with them. Or, so she said.

Wheelin' And Dealin'

I was so distracted for the rest of the meeting that I never even
noticed that the woman with the Mark Twain had left, and much to my
dismay, I never even learned her name. While more excited than I'd been
in a long time, I was also quite dismayed that the secrets which lay
within the Mark Twain might really be lost forever.

Several days later, I was contacted by our user group's hardware wizard,
our club's very own Mr Fix It, Ray MacAnally. Apparently, while I was
distracted, Ray had made arrangements to take a look at the Mark Twains
and to fix them if at all possible. Almost as if to taunt me, he told me
that he was going to get the Mark Twains that very day. Upon receipt of
the Mark Twains, he reported "the supports for the drives are fabricated
from metal that have an unfinished look to them, and it is a real bear
to disassemble the whole thing." He noticed that each of the three
motherboards he examined were slightly different. He also stated that
"the floppy disk will not eject when the button is pushed, and this is
due to a problem on the motherboard and not on the drive or switch." He
bypassed that problem by rewiring the eject switch directly to the drive
connector.

Before returning the Mark Twains to their owner, Ray told me that he
planned to wheel and deal and to get one of those machines for himself,
and wondered what it would be worth to me. I blurted out: "What do you
want?" The response was: "A full blown, state of the art Macintosh
system." I wondered, "How on earth am I going to be able to get such a
system and not go bankrupt?"

During the next month, there were many more desperate phone calls made,
and I eventually learned the name of the woman who owned the Mark Twains
and was able to extract a price from her for the one remaining Mark
Twain. All she wanted was "a full blown, state of the art PC clone." I
wondered, "How on earth am I going to be able to get such a system and
not go bankrupt?"

I looked at ads in the local newspaper, and saw that modern day Macs and
PC clones started at about $1,500, and that putting together two "full
blown" systems for trading purposes was beyond my means. Who do I know,
I wondered, who loves the Apple II but who sells Macs and PC clones? The
long list I came up with had exactly one name on it, and that was Tony
Diaz of Alltech Electronics. If anyone had access to great systems at
low cost, it would be Tony. As if on cue, Tony contacted me before I had
a chance to contact him; he had already heard the tale of the Mark Twain
through the Apple II grapevine.

Within just a few days, the deals were concluded, and I was heading off
to sunny Southern California, with two Mark Twain computers well packed
for the long ride. One of those Mark Twains was destined to be the one
this very article was prepared on, and the other was destined to enter
Tony Diaz's unofficial Apple II museum.

The Age Of Discovery

Tony Diaz and I spent the next four or five days literally immersed in
the Mark Twain computers. We ripped them apart and put them back
together again. We connected Focus hard Drives and CD-ROM drives. We
tried every piece of software we had at our disposal. We ran System 6
and System 6.0.1. We ran diagnostics and dumped the ROMs to disk. We
examined and compared the Mark Twain to both the ROM 01 and ROM 3. And,
we've continued to examine those machines for the past six months. And
in all that time, the only software programs we've found that wouldn't
work on the Mark Twain were a few of the early FTA demo programs. We've
made quite a few discoveries, the highlights of which follow.

A Guided Tour

Let's first get a perspective; when comparing the innards of a ROM 3 and
a ROM 01, for the most part, the motherboards appear to be quite
similar. Some more custom chips were added to the ROM 3, a new battery
holder was installed, and the amount of RAM on the motherboard was
increased. There were also some minor improvements in power routing to
decrease the "noise interference" levels that plagued the ROM 01, but to
the average Apple IIGS user, the ROM 3 was essentially just a ROM 01
with an additional megabyte of RAM.

One look at the motherboard of the Mark Twain leaves no doubt that there
were major and remarkable engineering changes made since the ROM 3 had
been released. For starters, there is a slot cut into the front of the
case where a 3.5" disk can be inserted. Upon opening the case, it is
clear that the motherboard is 1.5" wider than in the two previous models
and there are only five slots instead of the customary seven. The
built-in 3.5" drive sits above a Quantum LPS 40 megabyte hard drive
which in turn is connected to the built-in High Speed SCSI Controller
which includes daisy chain capabilities, so Slot 7 is no longer needed.
Additionally, the new built-in stereo sound circuitry has been improved
over the previous models by virtually isolating it electrically from the
rest of the motherboard; in essence, the entire area surrounding where
Slot 7 would appear has been taken over by the built-in equivalent to a
stereo card.

In addition to the 2 megabytes of RAM found on the motherboard, there
are two 30 pin SIMM sockets that can each accept 1 megabyte SIMMs,
making 4 megabytes the maximum amount of RAM that can be utilized on the
Mark Twain. Among the other new elements found on the motherboard are a
Piezo Electric Speaker, the High Speed SCSI card and a FDHD SuperDrive
Controller chip set.

To add all of those additional components and still fit the motherboard
in the same case, a lot of engineering miracles had to happen. In some
ways, the Mark Twain has the perfect motherboard in terms of layout as
everything is contained in its own area of the board. The built-in RAM
has been moved to the very front edge of the motherboard, located near
the power LED, and higher density surface mount RAM chips have been used
so that only four chips are required to total the 2 megabytes of RAM
supplied on the motherboard. In comparison, the ROM 01 uses eight chips
to equal 256K, and the ROM 3 uses eight chips to equal 1 megabyte. Like
both other IIGS models, the Mark Twain has 128K of "slow" RAM to remain
compatible with the original design and to insure backward compatibility
with the Apple IIe.

The two 30 Pin SIMM sockets on the Mark Twain are found in the exact
same spot where the ROM 01 and ROM 3 memory expansion slot is located.
Directly next to and above the SIMM sockets is the sound area with the
Ensoniq chip. The Piezo Electric Speaker is also located above the SIMM
sockets. Although that speaker actually sounds worse than the speaker
found in all other Apple II models, full stereo output is provided via
the rear port connection jack, making stereo speakers connected to the
back of the GS essentially plug and play. Perhaps Apple never really
intended for anyone to actually use the Piezo Electric Speaker.

Built-in sound digitizing capabilities similar to that of the
HyperStudio Slotless digitizer have been integrated into this section as
well, with the input connector straddled on top of the stereo
headphone/speaker jack. The sound hardware stretches over to the inner
side of the printer port and immediately next to it is the last slot,
slot 6.

Despite rumors that the Mark Twain is a speed demon, a standard 65C816-4
CPU running at 2.8 Mhz is found in the same physical location as it is
on the other IIGS models; therefore, standard TransWarp GS and ZIP GS
accelerators can be used on the Mark Twain. To the left of slot 1 is a
square shaped higher output half size power supply with two +5 supply
wires and a built-in cooling fan.

The power supply sits on top of a long metal assembly that extends the
full length of the computer and attached to that assembly, in front of
the power supply, is the floppy disk and hard drive unit. In between the
power supply and the disk assembly is a gap of less than .5", and
peering into that gap you can easily see the new location of the floppy
controller hardware. Directly beneath that is the power supply
connector and a 50 pin header for the SCSI/Floppy daughterboard. Below,
and occupying the rest of the board to the lower edge, is the High Speed
SCSI controller. The floppy controller consists of a 344S0061A chip,
which is Apple's SWIM (Super Woz Integrated Machine) chip that is also
found on the SuperDrive Controller card and on newer Macintosh models.
Despite the fact that the disk drive appears to be capable of handling
high density disks, the functionality is limited to 800K due to lack of
the FDHD firmware. Please note that the FDHD SuperDrive controller card
wasn't actually released until November, 1991, several months after the
Mark Twain was cancelled.

The SCSI hardware is also in a similar unfinished state; it consists of
hardware similar to a High Speed DMA SCSI card, but it does not operate
quite as fast as the High Speed SCSI card. Although the $C700 memory
location looks just like there is a Apple High Speed SCSI card attached
to Slot 7, none of the standard SCSI utilities aside from ADU work with
the built-in SCSI hardware.

Located in front of slot 1, and to the right of the SCSI/Floppy
daughterboard header, is a 26 pin male header for attaching a ribbon
cable that connects to the back of the computer in order to permit more
SCSI devices to be part of a daisy chain. There is only one SCSI bus
built-in, so there is a maximum of six additional SCSI devices that can
be daisy chained to the SCSI controller.

Impressions

After discussing for months our joint and individual Mark Twain
discoveries, Tony Diaz and I have reached many of the same conclusions
about the computer, and we have both enjoyed speculating on the
motivations Apple had for designing such a computer and the possible
reasons why Apple cancelled the project. Aside from the technical data
presented above, all of which was directly observed with our own eyes,
our conclusions are completely unsubstantiated and therefore impossible
to prove. But, as long time Apple followers, we like to think that our
conclusions are educated guesses.

For the past ten years, Apple has desperately been trying to cut
manufacturing costs, and we believe that it was cost cutting measures
that led to the development of the Mark Twain. After all, the Mark Twain
borrowed several important parts from the Macintosh, including SIMM
Sockets and the hard drive/3.5" disk assembly. Although the Mark Twain
was a technological and engineering marvel, we speculate that the
machine was dreamed up by Apple's marketing department as a way to
partially reverse IBM's inroads into the classroom. It seems to us that
if Apple offered a complete computer system for less than $1,000 that
would run all the thousands of Apple II educational software titles,
they'd have a big seller on their hands.

As things turned out, in late 1990 Apple did release a complete
Macintosh computer system for less than $1,000 and in March, 1991 Apple
released the IIe card for the Macintosh LC. We speculate that it was the
LC/IIe card combination that most probably delivered the 1-2 punch that
knocked the Apple II family out of Apple's product line-up and that was
directly responsible for the cancellation of the Mark Twain.

Of course, we had several flights of fancy and imagined that the Mark
Twain was actually dreamed up and built by several Apple II loyalist
engineers who were trying to keep the Apple II alive by lowering the
manufacturing costs. Or, we even imagined that it was to be Apple's
"swan song," a parting present to the Apple II world.

In any case, the Mark Twain could have been a wonderful computer with
amazing capabilities that didn't require lots of expensive add-ons. It
could have been the ultimate Apple II. It could have been the second
Apple II to change the world.

(Note: You are cordially invited to attend a public showing/demo of the
Mark Twain prototype on Saturday, June 15, 1996 at 10 AM at the Trinity
Community Church, 1675 Grand Avenue, San Rafael, CA. The Mark Twain will
be shown as a fund raising benefit for the GravenStein Apple User Group;
admission for non-members will be $5.)

Joe Kohn's profile photo
Joe Kohn
unread,
Sep 2, 2009, 6:38:46 PM
to
And, here's another blurb from 1996 talking about the video demonstration
of the Mark Twain...

In mid-June, 1996, the GravenStein Apple User Group hosted a
demonstration of the Mark Twain IIGS (aka, the ROM4) prototype computer.
The event was captured on videotape, and it is that 96 minute VHS video
that I could have transfered to DVD if there's any interest.

The video is hosted by me (Joe Kohn), the then Vice President of
GravenStein.

Since the video is about a computer that doesn't officially exist, it
seemed appropriate at the time to use that non-existant computer to show
off some non-existant IIGS software...such as Brutal Deluxe's System
6.0.2 and Wolfenstein 3-D.

System 6.0.2 was supplied by Brutal Deluxe and Wolf 3-D was supplied by
the author of the program. The Wolf 3-D Easter Eggs, of course, were
supplied by Burger Bill Heineman. The Mark Twain was supplied by Joe
Kohn. Heckling was supplied by The Lovely Shiva ;-)

In many ways, the video parallels the article about the Mark Twain that
was just posted to csa2. Actually, I think you can say that the article
served as an informal script for the video.

Previously, the video was available for $20 as a fund raiser for the
GravenStein Apple IIGS User Group, but has been unavailable for years.

Joe Kohn