The Unitron AP II landed on Brazilian desks in 1982 built close enough to the Apple II Plus that peripheral cards designed for Cupertino’s machine could be plugged straight into its eight expansion slots. Nobody at Unitron pretended otherwise: this was a reverse-engineered board, in a market where buying the real thing was against the law.
Why it matters
Brazil’s military government had made importing a microcomputer illegal, so a domestic clone industry grew to fill the gap. English Wikipedia’s own tally puts the number of competing Apple II Plus clones sold in the country in the early 1980s at around twenty, and the AP II was one of the earliest and most complete of them. Unitron, founded on 12 February 1982 in a modest workshop in São Paulo’s Freguesia do Ó district, did well enough out of it to gamble the company on a Macintosh 512K clone three years later, a decision that brought Apple’s lawyers, IBM’s lobbyists and eventually the US Trade Representative’s office down on Brazil’s national computer policy. The AP II itself was never the direct target of that fight; it was the success that funded it, and the reason the fight happened at all.
What to check before you buy
- Finding one at all is the real obstacle. Surviving units rarely if ever surface outside Brazil, so expect to search Brazilian classifieds and collector groups rather than the usual retro-computing marketplaces.
- Confirm which expansion cards are fitted (Z80/CP/M, 80-column, extra RAM) before buying, since period cards are Brazil-specific and cannot be swapped in from a genuine Apple II.
- Check the internal linear power supply carefully: it was built for Brazilian mains voltages, and forty-plus years of electrolytic capacitors is a long time regardless of country.
- Test the keyboard mechanism and any 80-column card thoroughly. Static RAM of this vintage (the 2114 chips used on the 80-column card) is a known failure point.
- Ask for provenance and any surviving disks or manuals, since Apple DOS 3.3 media this old is now scarcer than the hardware itself.
