FAQ & Things to Know

The earliest Apple II computers used keyboards manufactured by Datanetics. From above, several of these keyboards look nearly identical — but Datanetics actually produced at least four distinct versions during the early evolution of the Apple II. "Raised Key" and "Raised Key (V2)" in this registry refer to the two earliest, both of which share the same distinctive two-tone raised power-light assembly (brown lower section, white upper portion) but differ underneath.

Generation 1 — the original raised power light

Raised Key

First-generation (Raised Key) keyboard — note the large PCB and the encoder positioned toward the upper-left.

• An unusually large printed circuit board that extends well beyond the key mechanism — when installed, it overlaps part of the motherboard.
• The keyboard encoder IC sits toward the upper-left of the PCB.
• Roughly 3,000 made, paired with approximately the first half of Rev. 0 motherboards.

The encoder's exposed position turned out to be a reliability problem: it sat somewhere easy to touch accidentally when the case was opened, and electrostatic discharge could damage the encoder chip itself — the black IC visible near the top of the board — rendering the keyboard unusable even though the rest of the board was fine. Because relatively few were made — and because failed units were likely swapped out by Apple for the newer design — surviving first-generation keyboards are considered particularly uncommon today.

Generation 2 — the redesign

Raised Key (V2)

Second-generation (Raised Key V2) keyboard — the PCB is much smaller, with the encoder electronics at the lower-right.

• Same recognizable two-tone raised power light from above.
• A substantially smaller PCB.
• The encoder relocated to the lower-right of the board, far less exposed with the case open.

For reference, Datanetics also produced two later designs using the more familiar flat power light — one with the keyboard matrix and encoder combined on a single PCB, and one using a separate second PCB just for the encoder. Those aren't covered by the Raised Key / Raised Key (V2) distinction above, since they're a different power-light style entirely.

Short answer: no. The ITT 2020 wasn't an unauthorized copy of the Apple II — it was built in the United Kingdom by ITT Consumer Products under license from Apple Computer, specifically for the European market. It's widely documented as the first licensed Apple II clone, introduced in 1979, which is a meaningfully different category than the unlicensed Apple II copies that came out of other regions later.

At a glance

Why it exists

The Apple II was designed around North American electrical and television standards. Europe used 220–240 volt, 50 Hz mains and PAL television instead of NTSC — so rather than simply importing an American machine, Apple's early European strategy included licensing the Apple II design to ITT, letting them build a properly localized version. A British advertisement from January 1979 already described the ITT 2020 as "Apple II based," so it was marketed as part of the Apple ecosystem from day one. In the UK it was distributed by Microsense Computer Limited; in the Benelux, by Bell Telephone Manufacturing.

How close is it to an Apple II?

Architecturally, very close — same 6502-family foundation, an Apple-style keyboard and expansion architecture, and it was intended to run Apple II software and peripherals.

The PAL video redesign

The biggest engineering change was video. A US Apple II leaned on quirks of NTSC color encoding to produce a 280 × 192 high-resolution display. ITT redesigned the video system for PAL and pushed horizontal high-res graphics to 360 pixels while keeping 192 vertical lines — which meant adding a ninth video bit, implemented with extra memory on the motherboard. That's what makes the ITT 2020 more than just a voltage-converted Apple II — and it's also the source of its most important tradeoff: better suited to European displays, at some cost to exact software compatibility.

PALSOFT and compatibility

Because the graphics memory was organized differently, ITT modified Apple's floating-point BASIC into a ROM called PALSOFT. Its graphics routines understood the 360-pixel display fine, but software that bypassed those ROM routines and wrote directly to Apple II high-res memory could come out distorted, or show blank vertical "tram lines." Programs relying on exact Applesoft ROM entry points could also fail, since PALSOFT had been modified and recompiled. That's the honest way to describe the ITT 2020: Apple II compatible, not byte-for-byte identical. Some owners reportedly swapped in genuine Apple II Plus ROMs to improve compatibility, at the cost of the ITT-specific PALSOFT behavior.

Disk drives and peripheral timing

The 50 Hz European environment also introduced timing differences that could affect some Apple II peripheral cards, particularly disk hardware. ITT shipped its own controller and drive setup based on the earlier 13-sector Apple disk format and DOS 3.2 — and that controller never got the usual 16-sector DOS 3.3 conversion path, which became a growing compatibility gap as the wider Apple II ecosystem moved on.

Manufacture and the end of the ITT 2020

The Centre for Computing History has a firsthand account from Alan Campion, who worked at ITT Consumer Products, describing the ITT 2020 as assembled at ITT's Basildon facility by a small team inside a much larger television factory, with some production shipped to Germany — a useful reminder of how limited and specialized this manufacturing run really was. The ITT 2020's time on the market was short: Apple soon released its own European model, the Apple II Europlus, and Microsense — the UK distributor of both the ITT 2020 and Apple products — was acquired by Apple Computer in 1981, forming the basis of Apple Computer UK. The licensed ITT machine was then displaced by Apple's own European lineup.

So it's not an unauthorized clone

It looks like an Apple II because its design really does come from the Apple II — but it isn't simply a rebadged machine. ITT altered the video subsystem, the ROM software, the graphics architecture, and some timing behavior to make it work in Europe. For a collector, the most historically significant features are the ITT-branded case and badge, the original PAL-oriented motherboard and ROMs, the ITT disk controller and drive hardware (when present), surviving manuals, and PALSOFT software itself. A unit that's been heavily converted with Apple II Plus ROMs may be more usable day-to-day, but it's less representative of the ITT 2020's original engineering.

Several Apple II-family serial numbers quietly encode a factory location and a build date right in the string — the registry decodes this automatically wherever the format allows, rather than asking anyone to work it out by hand. The Lisa is the one exception: its date lives in a separate field, not the serial itself. This entry covers all four registries — IIc Plus, IIe, IIGS, and Lisa — and, just as important, explains where the decoders deliberately decline to guess.

Apple IIc Plus — one consistent format

Apple IIe — three systems in the serial, plus an independent board date

This is the part most existing "serial decoders" get wrong: Apple didn't use one formula for the IIe's whole 1983–1993 production run. The registry checks for each of these, in order, and falls back honestly when none apply.

Apple IIGS — factory and date embedded the same way as IIc Plus

Apple Lisa — a separate field, not embedded in the serial

The Lisa is architecturally different from the other three: its date isn't hidden inside the case serial at all. It's a distinct field ("Mfr. Date") that you enter separately, usually pulled from the board or service-mode display rather than the case badge.

AppleNet is a separate identifying number some Lisas carry alongside — and sometimes instead of matching — the case serial. It isn't itself decoded into a date; it's tracked as its own field precisely because a small number of documented units share a serial but carry different AppleNet numbers, so both are treated as meaningful identifiers rather than one being derived from the other.

Why some entries just show a dash

If a serial (or, for Lisa, the Mfr. Date field) doesn't match any of the above — including anything that looks like a genuinely new or unusual format — the registry shows "—" rather than forcing a guess. A wrong date presented confidently is worse than an honest blank, especially on a reference site other collectors rely on.

It's on the bottom of the case — a white rectangular label roughly in the center, between the ventilation slots. Flip the machine over (with the keyboard disconnected, or the whole system if the keyboard is built into the case) and look for the sticker circled below:

The label sits among the ventilation slots on the underside of the case — easy to miss at a glance, but unmistakable once you know where to look.

The label carries the Apple logo, model information, a barcode, and the serial number itself beneath it. If you're registering your machine here, that's the string to enter as the Case Serial — see the Production Dates entry above for how the registry decodes a manufacturing site and date from it.

They're on a small label under the monitor — look at the lower-left corner of the monitor, on the underside of the panel there. Circled below:

Lower-left corner, underside of the monitor panel.

The label lists three separate lines: Serial No, AppleNet No, and Manufactured — all three worth entering if you're registering your machine here. Serial Number and AppleNet Number are tracked as two separate identifiers in the registry (a small number of documented units share one but not the other), and "Manufactured" is exactly the value the Mfr. Date field decodes — see the Production Dates entry above for how that turns into an actual date.