ASIC chip, which reduced much of the old discrete IC-based circuitry to a single chip. This change resulted in reducing the cost and size of the motherboard. Some of the hardware features of the Apple III (e.g. bank-switched memory) were borrowed in the design of the Apple IIe, and some from incorporating the Apple II Plus Language card. The culmination of these changes led to increased sales and greater market share of home, education, and small business use. New features One of the most notable improvements of the Apple IIe is the addition of a full ASCII character set and keyboard. The most important addition is the ability to input and display lower-case letters. Other keyboard improvements include four-way cursor control and standard editing keys (Delete and Tab), two special Apple modifier keys (Open and Solid Apple), and a safe off-to-side relocation of the "Reset" key. The auto-repeat function (any key held down to repeat same character continuously) is now automatic, no longer requiring the "REPT" key found on the keyboards of previous models. The machine came standard with 64 KB RAM, with the equivalent of a built-in Apple Language Card in its circuitry, and had a new special "Auxiliary slot" (replacing slot 0, though electronically mapped to slot 3 for compatibility with earlier third-party 80-column cards) for adding more memory via bank-switching RAM cards. Through this slot it also includes built-in support for an 80-column text display on monitors (with the addition of a plug-in 1K memory card, via bank-switching of 40 columns) and could be easily doubled to 128 KB RAM by alternatively plugging in Apple's Extended 80-Column Text Card. As time progressed, even more memory could be added through third-party cards using the same bank-switching slot or, alternatively, general-purpose slot cards that addressed memory 1 byte at a time (i.e. Slinky RAM cards). A new ROM diagnostic routine could be invoked to test the motherboard for faults and also test its main bank of memory. The Apple IIe lowered production costs and improved reliability by merging the function of several off-the-shelf ICs into single custom chips, reducing total chip count to 31 (previous models used 120 chips). The IIe also switched to using newer single-voltage 64x1 DRAM chips instead of the triple-voltage 16x1 DRAM in the II/II+. For this reason the motherboard design is much cleaner and runs cooler as well, with enough room to add a