Staff C1 (Apple II clone)

Staff C1

One of the many Apple II clones, this was designed to look more professional, moving away from the “all-in-one” concept by having a more pc-like style with a central unit, double drive and a separate keyboard. Besides a small ad in an old magazine, I couldn’t find any information about this Staff company.

The top case can be easily lifted to gain access to the expansion slots. The add-on boards I found in this machine are a floppy drive controller and a language card with just the ROMs to boot from a floppy: the 48KB memory expansion for a total of 64KB is directly present on the motherboard, as is the Z80 processor for the CP/M compatibility, quite common on some clones. Booting from a genuine Apple floppy, the system is recognized as an Apple II Plus; the startup screen shows “STAFF C1” in place of the “APPLE ][” message. I wonder if the name of the Company was chosen to be 5 letters long to be able to replace the portion of the original ROM without having to truncate it.

Stored in a basement, the initial condition of the system wasn’t very good:

Staff C1 - dirty keyboard

Luckily the moist didn’t damage the computer. The build quality of the system is anyway quite low. Here’s the motherboard:

Staff C1 - motherboard

The capacitors in the power supply unit are a bit rusty, I should replace them as soon as possible.

Staff C1 - power supply unit

The two floppy drives are built by Chinon, model F-051MD.

Chinon floppy drive F-051MD

 

Chinon floppy drive F-051MD

A small board was designed to connect a keyboard with more keys than the original one, you can see it right after the top case in the teardown view.

Staff C1 - teardown

 

3 thoughts on “Staff C1 (Apple II clone)

  1. Pingback: Open Apple #60 (June 2016) : Sean Fahey, KansasFest 2016 Warmup | Open Apple

  2. Pingback: Open Apple #60 (June 2016) : Sean Fahey, KansasFest 2016 Warmup | Open Apple

  3. Steven Vanhetgoor

    This is remarkable, recently I acquired an Apple Clone with exactly the same motherboard. It was housed in the classical Apple housing with included keyboard. The drives are missing. Only a few differences, near the Z80 is in your case a red resistance network, and in my Apple Clone it is black. Your ROM-board has two extra chips. mine hasn’t.

    Oh yeah, and mine doesn’t have the Z80. But first I have to check all capacitors. I can hardly wait.

    Steven

    Reply

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