Apple II

The Apple II wasn’t the first personal computer, but it was the first that ordinary people could use. Steve Wozniak’s elegant engineering, combined with Steve Jobs’s vision for a consumer product, created a machine that launched Apple, defined educational computing, and proved the personal computer could be more than a hobbyist curiosity.

Fast facts

Manufacturer: Apple Computer.
Released: June 1977.
CPU: MOS 6502 at 1.023 MHz.
RAM: 4KB expandable to 48KB (later 64KB+).
Graphics: 280×192 high-res, 40×48 low-res, text modes.
Sound: Built-in speaker, 1-bit toggle.
Storage: Cassette, then Disk II floppy drive.
Price: $1,298 (4KB), $2,638 (48KB).
Discontinued: 1993 (Apple IIe).

The 1977 trinity

Three machines launched in 1977:

Apple II: Consumer-friendly, colour graphics.
TRS-80: Radio Shack’s affordable entry.
Commodore PET: All-in-one business focus.

The Apple II outlasted both, remaining in production for 16 years.

Wozniak’s engineering

Wozniak described the machine himself, in BYTE for May 1977 — the month before the Apple II reached buyers. The article is the best account of what “elegant” meant here, because it says which circuits were left out.

The video generator refreshes the memory. Dynamic RAM forgets unless something walks its addresses and recharges the cells, and most designs paid for dedicated refresh logic to do it. The Apple’s display circuit already scans memory continuously to draw the screen, so Wozniak let that scan do both jobs: “Since all of memory is continuously being scanned by the low order bits out of video generator, the entire 48 K byte field (maximum) of dynamic memory is refreshed by the video portion of the cycle.” A whole subsystem disappears because another one was already doing its work.

Colour is a side effect of timing, not a circuit. In high resolution the palette is not a choice of registers but of bit positions against the NTSC colour subcarrier, and Wozniak lists what that yields: “the available colors are black, white, violet and green”. A mixed mode of “160 rows of 280 dots plus four lines of scrolling text” was available too.

Eight expansion slots, and published schematics, which is the part of the design that the machine’s later software library rests on.

⚠ The cassette interface is worth a number, because the platform comparisons in this Vault usually run the other way. Wozniak reports it “averages over 180 bytes per second” — roughly five times what the C64’s Datasette managed at around 37 bytes a second, on a machine five years older.

The Disk II revolution

Wozniak’s floppy drive (1978) transformed the platform:

Faster, more reliable than cassette.
Enabled serious software development.
VisiCalc (1979) required disk storage.
Cost $495—expensive but essential.

VisiCalc and business

The first spreadsheet made Apple II essential:

Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston’s creation.
Businesses bought Apple IIs specifically for VisiCalc.
Proved personal computers had professional applications.
“VisiCalc sells Apple IIs” became industry wisdom.

Educational dominance

Apple II became the classroom standard:

Apple’s education discounts and donations.
Oregon Trail, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
A generation learned computing on Apple II.
Schools kept machines running into the 1990s.

Gaming library

Despite business focus, games thrived:

Ultima series: Richard Garriott’s RPGs.
Wizardry: Dungeon-crawling pioneer.
Karateka: Jordan Mechner’s cinematic action.
Prince of Persia: Later Mechner masterpiece.

Model evolution

The line expanded and improved:

Apple II+ (1979): More RAM, Applesoft BASIC.
Apple IIe (1983): Enhanced, most popular model.
Apple IIc (1984): Compact, portable.
Apple IIGS (1986): 16-bit upgrade, sound chip.

Legacy

The Apple II established Apple as a company and personal computing as an industry. Its longevity—16 years in production—speaks to the original design’s quality. VisiCalc proved business applications could drive hardware sales. Educational adoption created a generation of computer-literate users.

The computer that launched an industry