It’s been 35 years since the Apple II was born – happy birthday!
For those of you who have never heard of the Apple II (!) here is a description from Wikipedia:
The Apple II (styled as Apple ][ ) is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and introduced in 1977. It is the first model in a series of computers which were produced until Apple IIe production ceased in November 1993.
The first Apple II computers went on sale on June 5, 1977 with a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor running at 1 MHz, 4 kB of RAM, an audio cassette interface for loading programs and storing data, and the Integer BASIC programming language built into the ROMs. The video controller displayed 24 lines by 40 columns of monochrome, upper-case-only (the original character set matches ASCII characters 20h to 5Fh) text on the screen, with NTSC composite video output suitable for display on a TV monitor, or on a regular TV set by way of a separate RF modulator. The original retail price of the computer was 1298 USD(with 4 kB of RAM) and 2638 USD (with the maximum 48 kB of RAM). To reflect the computer’s color graphics capability, the Apple logo on the casing was represented using rainbow stripes, which remained a part of Apple’s corporate logo until early 1998. The earliest Apple II’s were assembled in Silicon Valley, and later in Texas; printed circuit boards were manufactured in Ireland and Singapore.
Did you ever use one? Share your memories with us.
…and it seems like just yesterday!