Here we are one more Sunday, reviewing the history of the largest and best computer company, today we are going to talk about Apple II.
Apple II, the computer that for the first time demonstrated that the general public could have an interest in having a computer in their home and probably the first to which the title of personal computer could rightly be applied.
Based on a 6502 processor from MOS Technology at 1 MHz (yes, 1 megahertz) and with a whopping 4 KB of RAM (expandable to a maximum of 48 KB) the Apple II also had a built-in keyboard, two BASIC interpreters built into it. its ROM, a color video output capable of displaying 24 lines of 40 columns on a monitor or television (using an optional radio frequency modulator), speaker, and could be connected to a cassette to record or load programs; it would not be until 1978 when floppy disk drives would appear that would allow greater speed and storage capacity.
It also had 8 slots for expansion cards for which all kinds of cards were developed that allowed it to run other operating systems - some estimates say that in the 80s half of the computers that used CP / M were Apple II with Z80- cards to connect all kinds of peripherals, including laboratory instruments, through memory extensions or video cards with better features than the built-in one.
Oddly enough because Apple's market share is now below 10%, during the 80s and part of the 90s the Apple II was the de facto standard in the US education market, and was also hugely successful in the business world thanks to Visicalc, the first spreadsheet in history.
It was in production until October 15, 1993, when it was definitively replaced by the Macintosh after having sold between five and six million units among all its variants, without anyone daring even to estimate how many more millions of clones, legal or no, they were sold.
The series Apple II It marked the beginning of series manufacturing for Apple and it introduced into the market a microcomputer designed by Steve Wozniak and based on an 8-bit architecture with a MOS 6502 processor with which it was intended to penetrate much deeper in the sector and reach beyond the hobbyists and engineers who had purchased the Apple I (handcrafted). Thinking about the introduction of the computer into homes, a design was thought that would look more like an appliance than an advanced electronic device so that it would not attract attention in an office, a child's room, a classroom or the classroom. a house. With these design guidelines, the Apple II It was implemented in a beige plastic chassis that was easy to remove and that allowed access to the interior of the machine so that it could be extended (extending its useful life and adding future benefits). In addition, since it had to be an all-terrain computer, it had to offer high-resolution and color graphics, sound and the ability to program in BASIC language (initially Integer BASIC and later Applesoft BASIC).
As we said at the beginning, the first units went on sale on June 5, 77 and included a 6502 1 MHz processor, 4 KB of RAM, 12 KB of ROM including Integer BASIC and an interface for cassette tapes. The graphic capacity was fixed in a screen resolution of 24 lines by 40 columns of uppercase text and an NTSC composite video output to be able to connect to a TV or a monitor, although there were some manufacturers that launched an expansion card that allowed to show 80 columns and supported lowercase.
With a price that oscillated the 1.298 dollars of the time in its version of 4 KB of RAM and 2.638 dollars in the version of 48 KB of RAM, a computer arrived on the market that allowed to save and to recover both programs and data from cassette tapes of audio, a revolution for the home user. Anyway, the Apple II didn't just use tapes to store the data since, shortly after, it was launched on the market an external disk drive (5,25 ″) that was connected to one of the computer's expansion ports and that, today, its controller is still considered a benchmark in the world of electronic design.
This controller, designed by Wozniak, implemented a different encoding than the one usually used. Woz opted for GCR (Group Code Recording) because it was easier to implement (and therefore cheaper) than MFM (Modified Frequency Modulation) and which opened the door for developers to introduce protections into their programs by changing the low-level format of disk sectors or moving the drive head.
But what is really significant about Apple II is open layout for which Wozniak chose and the inclusion of expansion slots that facilitated the development of extensions and peripherals not only by Apple but also by other companies: serial port controllers, video cards, accelerator cards, sound cards, hard drives, extensions memory cards or emulator cards (for example CP / M) allowed the Apple II adapts to any need.
But the Apple II was not revolutionary only for its features or its design, advertising and marketing They also did their bit to boost the sales of this machine. The first advertisement for the Apple II appeared in July 1977 in Byte magazine in a two-page article introducing the product and followed by a third page containing the order form. From there they jumped in September of the same year to Scientific American and, later, eight TV commercials of the Aplle IIGS model that focused on the benefits of the device within the school environment. In 1981, the advertising company Chiat-Day took over the Apple account and its art director, Rob Janoff, came up with the logo for the bitten apple, which was initially olive green. But Steve Jobs wanted to demonstrate the ability to process color graphics of the Apple II and wanted the logo to appear in the colors of the rainbow, a graphic image that was developed in an advertisement and a brochure.
Since the beginning of the sales of the Apple II, Steve Jobs paid close attention to product packaging and their personal opinions served as a guide to design the presentation of the Apple II that, really, is not very different from what is used today: a box in which the white color predominates and in which the logo of the bitten apple stands out, in that time with the colors of the rainbow and in which they used the Motter Tekkura typeface until, in the 80s, they switched to Apple Garamond.
El Apple II It was the first computer that consumers knew thanks to advertisements in the press or on TV, and it was also installed in schools and had a moderately affordable price, so it could be bought for the home. Thanks to its popularity, it boosted the market for computer games (the first version of the game Where is Carmen Sandiego? Of 1985, was first released for the Apple II), that of educational software and, above all, it entered the full in the business sector thanks to the world's first spreadsheet application: VisiCalc.
But, in addition to these sectors and that of peripheral manufacturers, the Apple II had a great impact on the domestic sector because it made the rest of the industry react and showed them the viability of sales in that segment. The Apple II was followed by low-cost computers such as the VIC-20 (1980), the IBM PC (1981) or the Commodore 64 (1982).
Apple IIPlus
In 1979 the Apple IIPlus, which included the Applesoft BASIC programming language in ROM, written by Microsoft, and was previously available as an enhancement. Applesoft BASIC added support for floating point arithmetic but sacrificed integer speed in the process. The Apple II Plus had between 16 and 48 KB of RAM, expandable to 64 KB via a "language card" that allowed users to quickly switch between the BASIC "INT" (Integer) and "FP" dialects. »(Applesoft), but destroying any unsaved program in the process. The addition of language card it also allowed the use of the UCSD Pascal and FORTRAN 77 compilers released for Apple at that time.
