TimelineApple II
Apple II
The plastic box that made the home computer an appliance
The Apple II went on sale on 10 June 1977 as a finished product in a moulded plastic case, with a keyboard, colour graphics and BASIC waiting in ROM the moment it was switched on. It cost $1,298, sold into homes rather than workshops, and became the machine that turned the microcomputer from a hobbyist project into a consumer purchase.
A computer meant for the living room
Steve Wozniak designed the Apple II as the machine he wanted to own. The electrical design was his, Howard Cantin laid out the printed circuit board, Jerry Manock shaped the plastic case, and Rod Holt built the switching power supply. Steve Jobs took no part in the circuitry, but he set the pitch: not a kit for a soldering iron, an appliance that could sit under a television.
Jobs and Wozniak introduced it at the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977, and the first units went on sale on 10 June 1977. The price was $1,298 with 4 kilobytes of memory, or $2,638 fully loaded with 48 kilobytes. Byte magazine predicted in April 1977 that the Apple II "may be the first product to fully qualify as the 'appliance computer'", a completed system that could be bought off a shelf, taken home and plugged in.
What the specification sheet actually said
Inside was a MOS Technology 6502, an eight-bit microprocessor running at 1.023 MHz, a speed chosen for arithmetic convenience: it is two sevenths of the NTSC colour subcarrier frequency. Jumper settings let a buyer populate memory at 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 32, 36 or 48 kilobytes. Integer BASIC, written by Wozniak, sat in ROM, so the machine answered with a prompt instead of a blank screen.
Video came out of an RCA jack as composite NTSC, ready for a monitor or, through an RF modulator, a domestic television set. Text was 24 lines of 40 characters, uppercase only. Graphics came in two modes: a low-resolution mode of 40 by 48 blocks in up to sixteen colours, and a high-resolution mode of 280 by 192 pixels in six colours. Sound was a single toggle circuit that clicked the built-in speaker; anything more musical was coaxed out of it by software timing.
Colour from a monochrome broadcast standard
The colour display was cheap because it borrowed from the signal. Rather than a dedicated video chip, Wozniak exploited a property of NTSC itself: the phase of the colour subcarrier relative to its reference burst determines hue. By timing pixel output against the subcarrier, the machine produced green, violet, blue and orange as artefacts of a black-and-white standard, at the cost of visible fringing.
Wozniak's motive was a game. He had designed Breakout for Atari in hardware and wanted to write it in software, so the Apple II gained colour graphics, paddle support, sound and plotting commands in BASIC largely to run a clone of it. "A lot of features of the Apple II went in because I had designed Breakout for Atari," he later said. To advertise the capability, the Apple logo on the case was redrawn with rainbow stripes, a mark the company kept until early 1998.
Eight slots and an industry to fill them
The motherboard carried eight expansion slots wired so that any card could take control of the bus and address memory directly. The case opened without tools. Memory boards, serial and parallel controllers, hard disks, networking cards and accelerators all arrived as plug-ins.
The most consequential accessory was storage. In June 1978 Apple shipped the Disk II, a 5.25-inch floppy drive with a controller designed by Wozniak using far fewer chips than existing designs, and commissioned the disk operating system from Shepardson Microsystems for $13,000. Apple DOS replaced the cassette interface. The first 6,000 Apple IIs used a Revision 0 board that booted into random characters and showed only four high-resolution colours; later revisions fixed both.
VisiCalc and the buyer nobody expected
For two years the Apple II sold mainly to hobbyists. That changed on 17 October 1979, when VisiCalc was released for the Apple II by VisiCorp. The first spreadsheet program for a personal computer cost under $100, needed 32 kilobytes, and recalculated an entire model the instant one cell changed. Businesses bought an Apple II to run one program, and more than 700,000 copies of VisiCalc were sold in six years.
The effect ran wider than Apple. VisiCalc had no equivalent on larger machines, and its existence was part of the argument that pushed IBM to build the IBM PC, whose early business software was largely ported from Apple II versions. Revenue went from $775,000 in the fiscal year ending 1977 to $118 million by September 1980, with the Apple II and its peripherals the company's only products.
Clones, schools, spacecraft
Apple had sold more than 100,000 Apple IIs by the end of 1980. Sales peaked in 1983 at roughly one million units, and about six million machines were sold across the whole series. Even after the Macintosh arrived in 1984, the Apple II still accounted for a reported 85 percent of Apple's hardware sales in the first quarter of fiscal 1985, sustained by schools.
Success invited copying. More than 190 models of Apple II clone were built in the United States and abroad, most of them illegal to import, and Apple pursued makers with lawsuits and criminal complaints in more than a dozen countries. The platform itself refused to die on schedule: the IIe stayed in production for nearly eleven years and was discontinued in November 1993, and Apple IIs were still monitoring air quality in the clean rooms at the Kennedy Space Center well into the 1990s. In 2006 PC World named the Apple II the greatest personal computer of all time.