One of the first things a hobbyist venturing into the deep, dark and still-largely uncharted waters of the Apple /// learns is that you need a driver for just about everything on (and in) the machine that isn’t the actual bits floating around. Want to plug in a printer? Need a driver. Does that Apple II card work in the ///? Probably… If someone wrote a driver. Hey, look at that shiny rare /// card I just got on eBay! Didn’t come with a driver though, so it just sits there.
Keyboard. Disk drive. Sound. Video output. SOS needs a driver for all of ’em. And now we’ve moved far enough away from the ///’s “heyday” (such as it was) that we may have lost some entirely to the mists of time. Or no one knows where to find them any more. Witness the Great UniDisk 3.5″ Driver Hunt that took place recently.
Fortunately, there exists a list. Less than (but still somewhat) fortunately, it lives on a disk image on the WAP DVD. In AppleWorks database format. So not inaccessible to hobbyists, but not exactly intuitively reachable for new ///’ers. To alleviate some of the difficulty associated with learning about the /// (but mostly because I’m just massively lazy in a weirdly paradoxical way – my indolence comes at great personal effort), I extracted the database from the disk image (APPLE-3-WAP-shr-04a, obviously) and made a handy PDF.
The list is dated 30 May 1988, and I know Bob Consorti published at least one or two more as late as possibly 1995, so it isn’t complete but it’s pretty close. The file contains information for more than 75 known drivers: name, version, size, producer and description – it’s all there.
If I can find a later version in the WAP archive, I’ll update this file. In the meantime, share and enjoy.