Apple II

The Apple II is an 8-bit personal computer released by Apple Computer in June 1977, designed principally by co-founder Steve Wozniak, and regarded as one of the most successful, influential, and long-lived home computers of all time.¹²¹⁹ It was the company’s second computer, a refined successor to the bare-motherboard Apple-1, and it was among the first personal computers sold as a finished consumer product in a case with a built-in keyboard, ready to use straight out of the box.⁷¹⁴ Along with Commodore’s PET 2001 and Tandy’s TRS-80, the Apple II was one of the three 1977 machines that Byte magazine later dubbed the “1977 Trinity,” the products that carried computing from the realm of niche hobbyists to the consumer market.⁷¹⁴

Origins

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, who had met in 1971 and previously collaborated on illegal “blue box” telephone devices, formed the Apple Computer Company on April Fools’ Day in 1976.¹³⁸ Their first product, the Apple-1, was a video-oriented single-board computer Wozniak designed late in 1975; delivered in kit form to Paul Terrell’s Byte Shop for $666.66, it required the buyer to add a power supply, monitor, and keyboard.¹⁶⁸ In ten months only 175 Apple-1 boards were sold.⁷

Wozniak began work on the Apple II in August 1976, and he and Randy Wigginton demonstrated the first prototype at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting that December.¹² Wozniak built the machine around the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, running at roughly 1 MHz, a cheaper cut-down relative of the Motorola 6800 that MOS had offered for twenty dollars.¹³¹² He later attributed several of the machine’s defining features directly to a game: having designed Breakout in hardware for Atari, he wanted to program it in software, so he added color first “so that games could be programmed,” then sound and a speaker, then a paddle circuit for controllers.¹⁷¹³

Design and features

The Apple II shipped in an attractive beige plastic case with a built-in brown keyboard, a look that resembled a household appliance rather than the sheet-metal-and-exposed-wire appearance of most early machines.⁷¹⁰ It was the first computer to use a plastic case, and Wozniak and Jobs took pride in its being the first to use a switching power supply — designed by Atari engineer Rod Holt — which ran efficiently enough that no cooling fan was needed.⁶ The machine came standard with 4K of RAM, expandable to a maximum of 48K, and it displayed color graphics with a resolution of 280 by 192 pixels, six colors, and 40-by-24 text; it could be connected directly to a standard television.¹⁷¹²

Two of Wozniak’s design choices set the machine apart. Wozniak’s BASIC programming language — his Integer BASIC — was built into ROM, so the computer booted straight into a usable language and was ready to work out of the box.¹²¹⁸ More important was a row of eight internal expansion slots, an unusual feature in home computers; the case top lifted off to give direct access to the motherboard, and Apple and third-party developers produced dozens of cards for memory, floppy controllers, serial and parallel ports, processor accelerators, and CP/M and Pascal emulation.¹²¹⁷ Jobs believed no one would need more than two slots, one for a printer and one for a modem, but Wozniak, drawing on his experience at Hewlett-Packard, insisted on eight.¹⁷ Unlike the PET and TRS-80, which could not easily be expanded beyond their base memory, the Apple II was designed for expansion from the start.¹⁷

Wozniak documented the machine’s hardware and system software himself in an article, “System Description: The Apple-II,” published in the May 1977 issue of Byte, complete with circuit diagrams and a BASIC listing.¹⁶

Reception and the killer app

The Apple II debuted at the first West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco in April 1977, where Jobs secured a $5,000 booth and a Plexiglas sign displaying the company’s new logo.¹⁰¹⁴ It retailed for $1,298 with 4K of RAM, or $2,638 with a full 48K — about twice the base price of the TRS-80 Model I and the PET, and initial sales were sluggish, with only about 600 machines sold in 1977.¹²⁷ Sales rose after the 1978 introduction of the Disk II floppy drive, an accessory made possible by an ingenious disk controller Wozniak built with only eight chips; the Apple II sold 7,600 units in 1978 and 35,000 in 1979.⁷¹⁹

What turned the machine from an also-ran into a serious contender was the 1979 release of VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, written by Dan Bricklin, who chose the Apple II simply because it was the machine he had borrowed.⁷¹² Widely regarded as the first true “killer app,” VisiCalc led many companies to buy Apple IIs specifically to run it, proving the machine had a place in business.¹²¹⁰ Aided by the marketing of former Intel executive Regis McKenna, whose advertising was glossy and rich, Apple sold 210,000 units in 1981.⁷ Financial backing and a marketing strategy came from Mike Markkula, a former Intel marketing manager who became a founder and the company’s initial financial backer, while Michael Scott served as Apple’s first president.¹³

Successors and legacy

The Apple II gave rise to a long line of successors: the Apple II Plus in 1979, the Apple IIe in January 1983, and later the IIc and the 16-bit IIGS.¹²¹⁵ The IIe, which reused the same 1.02 MHz 6502 processor, added the ProDOS operating system, Applesoft BASIC in ROM, 64K of RAM expandable to 128K, and support for upper- and lower-case letters; it is arguably the most successful computer Apple ever produced.¹⁵ Apple continued producing Apple II models into the 1990s, with the final IIe discontinued in November 1993, extending the family’s production life past fifteen years and past every other model, including the IIGS discontinued the year before.¹⁵³ In all, more than two million Apple II-family computers were produced.¹⁰

The line laid the foundations not just for Apple but for the mass-market personal computer industry as a whole, and its open architecture and expandability became a template for consumer-grade computers.³¹⁴ Its cheap price and accessibility made it especially popular with educators, and it became ubiquitous in U.S. classrooms during the 1980s.¹⁴¹⁹ Beyond spreadsheets, its color graphics, sound, and paddle controllers made it a popular gaming system, remembered for its ubiquity in U.S. classrooms as much as for its games.¹⁹ Wozniak had built the color, sound, and paddle circuitry into the machine specifically so that he could program a BASIC version of Breakout and demonstrate it at the Homebrew Computer Club, and those same features underpinned an extensive library of commercial titles.¹⁹¹⁷ Among the games that defined the platform were Ultima I and its sequels, Ultima IV, the dungeon-crawling role-playing game Wizardry, Choplifter, Lode Runner, Karateka’s creator Jordan Mechner’s later Prince of Persia—which originated on the Apple II as a late commercial release in 1989—and The Oregon Trail, which became a fixture of American schools.²⁰²¹ Other frequently cited Apple II titles include Castle Wolfenstein, The Bard’s Tale, Aztec, and Broderbund’s Lode Runner.²⁰²¹ The Apple II also laid the groundwork for Apple’s later computers, including the Lisa and the Macintosh, and it stood for years as the company’s only unambiguous commercial success.¹⁴ In 2006 the editors of PC World ranked it the greatest PC of all time, calling it “The Machine That Changed Everything”.¹⁰