So many comments I have to make here … supporting and detracting from David Fradin’ assertions about the Sara (Apple ///.)

I was the founding employee of a midwestern independent Apple dealer (Central Iowa) who sold a relative huge number of Apple ///’s along with 10's of thousands of Apple ][s.

Ignoring the breathtaking Apple /// price, plus the virtual imperative that an Apple ProFile (5 MB) hard drive and an Apple Daisy Wheel Printer to be really a business class personal computer solution, the fact is, it could be done. It existed. And it ran an 80 column display of VisiCalc. (VisiCalc ///)

We were successful selling incremental Apple /// in spite of flawed mother board design (every chip was socket mounted inside a cast aluminum, fanless enclosure), the lack of initially shipping the first-in-market Real Time Clock single chip IC, and shipped with only 128K RAM daughter card — delivering 256 RAM only just before the Apple /// was canceled.

As a dealership, I personally opened every Apple /// and properly re-seated every chip on every logic board plus reseated and shimmed the memory daughter board so it would not work itself loose as the system heated and cooled with power cycle.

The Apple /// operating system (SOS) was a giant leap forward in computer engineering — the hierarchical file system model and the ability to grok not only floppy drive volumes but also the 5 MB, then 10 MB Apple Profile hard drives. Remarkable — especially compared to the monolithic Lisa OS and the impotent Mac OS. I will not denigrate Apple ][ DOS 3.2 & 3.3 by trying to compare them. Nor do anything but mention the Apple // ProDOS.

I realize Dave Fradin is posting this article to promote his book. I wish him all good fortune with that. But the coolest part of seeing this article posted is to pause and say that as an independent dealer, the only Apple product family leader’s name we knew was David Fradin. Thank you for being visible back then.

PS: If anyone has a soft copy of the Apple /// Solutions Guide titled (something like) “Will somebody tell me what an Apple /// can do”, I would love to take a walk down memory lane. (My theripist thanks you in advance :-)