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Some of the Apple clones, such as the Franklin ACE models and others, offered lowercase. Do a quick search for "apple II shift key mod" and you'll find vintage

• zwieback 6y ago
  I did that on my German Apple ][ Europlus and also got a re-burned EEProm to display the lower case. I like the original Woz story but it seems strange that the later models didn't enable lowercase.
• NelsonMinar 6y ago
  Yeah the Franklin Ace was mostly an Apple ][+ clone but had lower case (but no 80 columns). It's kind of a miracle so much software worked with that.
• Syzygies 6y ago
  As a math grad student in 1980, I took out a student loan for $3,000 (equal to my annual stipend) to buy an Apple II computer. (Eventually, computation established my career, just not on this machine.) I recall making a "shift key mod" within days, that no doubt voided my warranty. It wasn't the mod described in this article. I recall some card that gave me 80 columns, Pascal, and increased my memory from 48K to 64K. I believe that my shift key mod involved cutting a single trace? In any case it worked. Various out-of-school friends learned computers on this machine, and changed careers. I learned the low memory locations like the back of my hand, and wrote crude Pascal programs, while my "real" code was in the relatively young C language on a Unix timesharing machine. That all changed when I bought one of the first Mac 128K's. Manx Aztec C!