Museum

Computers - Clones:"Laser 128"

VTech Corporation in 1984 built the Laser 128 EX as a "me-too" Apple IIc, with a built-in 5.25 inch floppy disk drive. The company managed to reverse engineer the Apple IIc ROM, rather than copying it, and thus avoided the restriction on sales that had landed the Franklin Computer Corporation in trouble. Unlike the Apple IIc, the Laser 128 had a nice numeric keypad, and sold for less money than the IIc. Surprisingly, VTech managed to duplicate all of the major features of the Apple IIc, including the Smartport disk connector, that allowed larger capacity disk drives (3.5 disks, and at least one model of hard drive) to be attached. A later version, the Laser 128 EX/2 tried to keep up with the Apple IIc Plus, with an internal 3.5 drive, and a faster processor speed.

More pictures can be found at the Applefritter site. More information about it can be found at the Old-Computers.com.