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The Apple II was the first microcomputer manufactured by Apple Computer. Its direct ancestor was the Apple I, a circuit board computer for hobbyists that was never produced in quantity but which pioneered many of the features that made the Apple II a success. Introduced at the West Coast Computer Faire in 1977, the Apple II was one of the very first (and most successful) personal computers. A number of different models were sold, and the most popular model was manufactured, with relatively minor changes, into the 1990s.

Unlike any other machine before it, the Apple II looked more like an appliance than a piece of electronic test equipment. This was a computer that would not seem out of place in the home, on a manager's desk, or in a classroom. The lid popped easily off the sleek beige plastic case, allowing access to the entire motherboard and inviting users to look inside and tinker with the computer's eight expansion slots and its bounty of empty RAM sockets, which could hold up to 48 kilobytes of memory.

Also unique for its time were the machine's color and high-resolution graphics modes (which could be used on an ordinary television), its sound capabilities, and its built-in BASIC programming language. Compared to earlier machines, these features were well-documented and easy to learn. The Apple II thus marked the beginning of the personal computer revolution: it was a machine for the masses, not just hobbyists, scientists, and engineers. The Apple II's influence was widespread; most of the machines that followed imitated many aspects of the successful machine.

Throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s, the Apple II was the de facto standard computer in American K-12 schools and even some colleges and universities. Some of these machines are still operational in classrooms today. The Apple II was popular with business users as well as with families and schools, particularly after the release of the first-ever computer spreadsheet, VisiCalc
, which initially ran only on the Apple II.

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, IIc Plus and IIGS.

History

The original Apple II

The first Apple II computers went on sale on June 5, 1977 with a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor running at 1 MHz, 4 KB of RAM (expandable to 48 KB), an audio cassette interface for loading programs and storing data, and the Integer BASIC programming language built into the ROMs. The video controller displayed 24 lines by 40 columns of upper-case-only text on the screen, with NTSC composite video output suitable for display on a monitor, or on a TV set by way of an RF modulator. The original retail price of the computer was $1298 with 4KB of RAM and $2638 with 48KB of RAM, the maximum amount of memory supported on the original motherboard.

To reflect the machine's then-unique color graphics capability, the Apple logo on the computer's case was made up of rainbow stripes, and these remained a part of the logo until early 2000.

Later, an external 5¼-inch floppy disk drive, the Disk II, attached via a controller card that plugged into one of the computer's expansion slots (usually slot 6), gave users much more convenient data storage and retrieval. The Disk II interface, created by Steve Wozniak ("Woz"), is still regarded as an engineering masterpiece. Where other controllers had dozens of chips for synchronizing data I/O with disk rotation, seeking the head to the appropriate track, and encoding the data into magnetic pulses, Woz's controller card had few chips; instead, the Apple DOS used software to perform these functions. The Group Code Recording used by the controller was simpler and easier to implement in software than the more common MFM. According to legend, Woz laid out the circuit board several times as he realized that moving one more function to software would allow him to remove yet another chip. In the end, the low chip count of the controller contributed to making Apple's Disk II the first affordable floppy drive system for personal computers. As a side effect, Woz's scheme also made it easy for proprietary software developers to copy-protect the media on which their software shipped by changing the low-level sector format or stepping the drive's head between the tracks; naturally, other companies eventually sold software to foil such protection.

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