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The Apple II was one of the most popular personal computers of the 1980s. As can be seen, the Apple II came with an integrated keyboard, common with early personal computers, but very uncommon today. The one pictured is shown with two official Apple floppy disk drives and a monitor.The Apple II family was the first series of microcomputers made by Apple Computer, in the late 1970s and early-to-mid 1980s. Completely different from Apple's later Macintosh computers, the Apple II was a predominantly 8-bit architecture.
The progenitor was the Apple I, which was a hand-built machine sold to hobbyists. It was never produced in quantity, but pioneered many of the features making the Apple II a success. The first large-scale production computer was the Apple II. It became popular with home users, as well as occasionally being sold to business users, particularly after the release of the first ever spreadsheet on any computer, VisiCalc. See the computing timeline for dates of Apple II family model releases – the 1977 Apple II and its younger siblings, the II Plus, IIe, IIc and IIGS.
The "II" portion of the name was alternately rendered in a variety of creative ways using punctuation symbols. For example, the II and IIe was most commonly written ][ and ][e, and the IIc was most commonly written //c, both on product literature and the machines themselves.
1 History
1.1 The original Apple II
The first Apple II computers went on sale starting on June 5, 1977 with a MOS Technology 6502The MOS Technology 6502 is an 8-bit microprocessor designed by MOS Technology in 1975. When it was introduced it was the least expensive full featured CPU on the market by far, at about 1/6th the price, or less, of competing designs from larger companies microprocessor running at 1 MHz, 4 KBThe kilobyte comes in two flavours, depending on the context in which it is used, meaning either 1,000 or 1,024 bytes. The kilobyte (kB) This uses the SI prefix kilo, and simply refers to 1,000 bytes (as a kilometre equals 1,000 metres). This is the notat of RAM, an audio cassetteFor the meaning of cassette in genetics, see cassette (genetics). The compact audio cassette audio storage medium was introduced by Philips in 1963. It consists of a length of magnetic tape from BASF inside a protective plastic shell. Four tracks are avai interface, and the Integer BASICInteger BASIC written by Steve Wozniak, was the BASIC interpreter included in ROM on the original Apple II computer at release in 1977, and as such was the first version of BASIC used by many early home computer owners. Thousands of programs were written programming language built into the ROMs. The video controller displayed 24 lines by 40 columns of upper-case-only text on the screen, with NTSCNTSC is the analog television system in use in the United States and many other countries, including most of the Americas and some parts of East Asia. It is named for the National Television System(s) Committee the industry-wide standardization body that composite videoComposite video is the format of an analog television signal before it is modulated onto an RF carrier. It is usually in a standard format such as NTSC, PAL or SECAM. It is a composite of three source signals called Y, U and V (together referred to as YUV output for display on a monitor, or on a TV set by way of an RF modulator. Users could save and retrieve programs and data on audio cassettes; other programming languages, games, applications and other software were available on cassette too. The original retail price was $1298 with 4KB of RAM and $2638 with 48KB of RAM.
Later, an external 5¼-inch floppy disk drive, the Disk II, with controller card that plugged into one of the computer's slots, enabled much more convenient data storage and retrieval. This disk drive interface created by Steve Wozniak is still regarded as an engineering design marvel. The controller card had very little hardware support, relying on software timing loops instead to provide the necessary encoding; the controller also used a form of Group Code Recording, which was simpler and easier to implement in software than the more common MFM. That reduced the overall cost significantly, leaving the total system price low enough for home users. It also made it easy for proprietary software developers to make the media on which their applications shipped hard to copy by using tricks such as changing the low-level sector format or even stepping the drive's head between the tracks; however, other groups eventually sold software such as Copy II Plus and Locksmith that could foil such restrictions.
Wozniak's open design and the Apple's multiple expansion slots permitted a wide variety of third-party devices to expand the capabilities of the machine. Serial controllers, improved display controllers, memory boards, hard disks, and networking components were available for this system in its day. There were also emulator cards, such as the Z80 card which permitted the Apple to switch to the Z80 processor and run a multitude of programs developed under the CP/M operating system such as the dBase II database and the WordStar word processing program. There was also a third-party 6809 card with which one could run OS-9 Level One. The Mockingboard sound card greatly improved the audio capabilities of the Apple. Even so-called accelerator boards were eventually created which would double or quadruple the computer's speed.
