Apple IIa

He is probably thinking of a II+. There is no such machine as the IIa. There was, however, the II, II+, IIc, IIe, and the IIgs. A true, original II (no plus) is pretty valuable, in that it's the first of the line, and they're fairly rare. The II+, which has the exact same case, motherboard (different ROMs), etc - but with a badge reading "Apple ][ Plus", is a very common machine, but is generally harder to find than the IIe. The IIe comes in two flavors - beige and "platinum". The platinum version has a numeric keypad. Both of these machines are EXTREMELY common - at one point just about every school had forty of these things. They're worth about ten bucks. The IIc is a small, compact machine with a built-in floppy drive. It's very common as well. The IIgs is a 16 bit machine, and is a box with a detached ADB keyboard. These are very common too, and usually not worth anything unless they've got some third-party upgrades like an accellerator, a SCSI controller, or something like that. You may, however, have some kind of clone machine - there were lots - and they usually looked just like the real thing. Those are interesting to people that are in to that sort of thing. The Apple II series was and still is very popular. There are lots of people out there, such as myself, that still regularly tinker and hack on these machines, building hardware and writing software. If you have a good clean working machine, you should have no problem finding a home for it. Apple II's without school names engraved into them are nice to find :) -Ian