120-679: The Apple II Plus (stylized as Apple ][+ or apple ][ plus ) is the second model of the Apple II series of personal computers produced by Apple Computer . It was sold from June 1979 to December 1982. Approximately 380,000 II Pluses were sold during its four years in production before being replaced by the Apple IIe in January 1983. The Apple II Plus shipped with 16 KB, 32 KB or 48 KB of main RAM, expandable to 64 KB by means of
240-600: A machine to an appliance ." But the company also had "to negotiate the attitudes of its potential buyers, bearing in mind social anxieties about the uptake of new technologies in multiple contexts. The office, the home and the 'office-in-the-home' were implicated in these changing spheres of gender stereotypes and technological development." After seeing a crude, wire-wrapped prototype demonstrated by Wozniak and Steve Jobs in November 1976, Byte predicted in April 1977, that
360-577: A "language card". This was completely different from the language card sold for the original II, which contained Applesoft BASIC in ROM. Since the II Plus already had Applesoft present in the ROMs on the system board, its language card contained RAM rather than ROM and if installed will boost the system to 64K. While on the original II, Integer BASIC resided in ROM at memory address $ E000 , this area contains RAM on
480-555: A DOS, and with Wozniak inexperienced in operating system design, Jobs approached Shepardson Microsystems with the project. On April 10, 1978, Apple signed a contract for $ 13,000 with Shepardson to develop the DOS. Even after disk drives made the cassette tape interfaces obsolete they were still used by enthusiasts as simple one-bit audio input-output ports. Ham radio operators used the cassette input to receive slow scan TV (single frame images). A commercial speech recognition Blackjack program
600-630: A breakout cable which connected to the back of the card, the user could attach up to two UniDisk or Apple 5.25 Drives , up to one UniDisk 3.5 drive , and a DE-9 Apple II joystick. Many of the LC's built-in Macintosh peripherals could also be "borrowed" by the card when in Apple II mode, including extra RAM, the Mac's internal 3.5-inch floppy drives, AppleTalk networking, any ProDOS-formatted hard disk partitions,
720-501: A built-in BASIC programming language. The motherboard holds eight expansion slots and an array of random access memory (RAM) sockets that can hold up to 48 kilobytes . Over the course of the Apple II series' life, an enormous amount of first- and third-party hardware was made available to extend the capabilities of the machine. The IIc was designed as a compact, portable unit, not intended to be disassembled, and cannot use most of
840-563: A built-in disk controller that could control external drives, composite video (NTSC or PAL), serial interfaces for modem and printer, and a port usable by either a joystick or mouse. Unlike previous Apple II models, the IIc had no internal expansion slots at all. Two different monochrome LC displays were sold for use with the IIc's video expansion port, although both were short-lived due to high cost and poor legibility. The IIc had an external power supply that converted AC power to 15 V DC, though
960-446: A built-in music synthesizer that far exceeded any other home computer. The Apple II GS evolved the platform while still maintaining near-complete backward compatibility. Its Mega II chip contains the functional equivalent of an entire Apple IIe computer (sans processor). This, combined with the 65816's ability to execute 65C02 code directly, provides full support for legacy software, while also supporting 16-bit software running under
1080-467: A complex arrangement. For instance, the scanlines were not stored in sequential areas of memory. This complexity was reportedly due to Wozniak's realization that the method would allow for the refresh of dynamic RAM as a side effect (as described above). This method had no cost overhead to have software calculate or look up the address of the required scanline and avoided the need for significant extra hardware. Similarly, in high-resolution graphics mode, color
1200-407: A custom ROM chip that contained lowercase letters in the font, or purchase one of several third-party 80-column cards that enable a text mode that can display 80-column, upper- and lower-case text. The Videx Videoterm and its many clones were especially popular. For lowercase input, since it is not possible to detect whether the keyboard's Shift keys are in use, the common "shift-key mod" connects
1320-408: A different machine running CP/M. The SoftCard shipped with CP/M 2.2 and a special version of MBASIC that supported a subset of Applesoft BASIC's graphics commands. Other third party CP/M cards for the Apple II offered additional memory, CP/M 3.0, and CPU speeds up to 8 MHz. The II Plus had the so-called "Autostart ROMs", meaning that it will attempt to boot from disk on power-up. If no system disk
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#17327731401021440-586: A huge step to me. After designing hardware arcade games , I knew that being able to program them in BASIC was going to change the world." In the May 1977 issue of Byte , Steve Wozniak published a detailed description of his design; the article began, "To me, a personal computer should be small, reliable, convenient to use, and inexpensive." The Apple II used peculiar engineering shortcuts to save hardware and reduce costs, such as: The text and graphics screens have
1560-532: A multitude of programs developed under the CP/M operating system, including the dBase II database and the WordStar word processor. There was also a third-party 6809 card that would allow OS-9 Level One to be run. Third-party sound cards greatly improved audio capabilities, allowing simple music synthesis and text-to-speech functions. Eventually, Apple II accelerator cards were created to double or quadruple
1680-843: A new OS. The OS eventually included a Macintosh-like graphical Finder for managing disks and files and opening documents and applications, along with desk accessories . Later, the II GS gained the ability to read and write Macintosh disks and, through third-party software, a multitasking Unix-like shell and TrueType font support. The GS includes a 32-voice Ensoniq 5503 DOC sample-based sound synthesizer chip with 64 KB dedicated RAM, 256 KB (or later 1.125 MB) of standard RAM, built-in peripheral ports (switchable between IIe-style card slots and IIc-style onboard controllers for disk drives, mouse, RGB video, and serial devices) and, built-in AppleTalk networking. The final Apple II model
1800-413: A non-DOS operating system based on UCSD P-System , which had its own disk format and included a " virtual machine " that allowed it to run on many different types of hardware. The first-year Apple II Plus retained the original Apple II's jumper blocks to select the RAM size, but a drop in memory prices during 1980 resulted in all machines being shipped with 48K and the blocks being removed. Shortly after
1920-580: A part of Apple's corporate logo until early 1998. Perhaps most significantly, the Apple II was a catalyst for personal computers across many industries; it opened the doors to software marketed at consumers. Certain aspects of the system's design were influenced by Atari, Inc. 's arcade video game Breakout (1976), which was designed by Wozniak, who said: "A lot of features of the Apple II went in because I had designed Breakout for Atari. I had designed it in hardware. I wanted to write it in software now". This included his design of color graphics circuitry,
2040-529: A pattern of dots per pixel to offer more color options. These patterns are stored in the character generator ROM, and replace the text character bit patterns when the computer is switched to low-res graphics mode. The text mode and low-res graphics mode use the same memory region and the same circuitry is used for both. A single HGR page occupied 8 KiB of RAM; in practice this meant that the user had to have at least 12 KiB of total RAM to use HGR mode and 20 KiB to use two pages. Early Apple II games from
2160-406: A point database of intelligence data such as order of battle , airfields, roadways, and bridges. Apple II Apple II ("apple two ") is a series of microcomputers manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1977 to 1993. The first Apple II model , that gave the series its name, was designed by Steve Wozniak , and was first sold on June 10, 1977. Its success led to it being followed by
2280-453: A time, by turning them over and notching a hole for the write protect sensor. The first disk operating systems for the Apple II were DOS 3.1 and DOS 3.2, which stored 113.75 KB on each disk, organized into 35 tracks of 13 256-byte sectors each. After about two years, DOS 3.3 was introduced, storing 140 KB thanks to a minor firmware change on the disk controller that allowed it to store 16 sectors per track. (This upgrade
2400-435: A time, or in blocks of 256 bytes at once. This enabled programmers to write and debug machine code programs without further development software. The computer powers on into the monitor ROM, displaying a * prompt. From there, Ctrl + B enters BASIC, or a machine language program can be loaded from cassette. Disk software can be booted with Ctrl + P followed by 6 , referring to Slot 6 which normally contained
2520-459: A video monitor or on a regular TV set (by way of a separate RF modulator ). The original retail price of the computer with 4 KiB of RAM was US$ 1,298 (equivalent to $ 6,530 in 2023) and with the maximum 48 KiB of RAM, it was US$ 2,638 (equivalent to $ 13,260 in 2023) To reflect the computer's color graphics capability, the Apple logo on the casing has rainbow stripes, which remained
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#17327731401022640-565: A wide variety of third-party devices, including peripheral cards , such as serial controllers , display controllers, memory boards, hard disks, networking components, and real-time clocks . There were plug-in expansion cards —such as the Z-80 SoftCard —that permitted Apple II to use the Z80 processor and run programs for the CP/M operating system, including the dBase II database and the WordStar word processor. The Z80 card also allowed
2760-448: A wider variety of (presumably pirated) Apple II software, but at the expense of less RAM. Because of that Soviet developers preferred native mode over "Apple II" compatibility mode. In 1978, Bob Bishop of Apple Computer, Inc. programmed 9 Apple II computers to run the gameboard on the TV game show Tic-Tac-Dough ;. Each Apple was responsible for displaying various contents for each box of
2880-557: Is activated by swapping out the Applesoft ROM and switching in the RAM with Integer BASIC. By typing "FP", Integer BASIC is switched out and Applesoft switched back in. The machine language monitor at $ F800 may also be banked out for RAM. Like the Apple II , the Apple II Plus has no lowercase functionality. All letters from the keyboard are upper-case, there is no caps lock key, and there are no lowercase letters in
3000-406: Is determined by pixel position and thus can be implemented in software, saving Wozniak the chips needed to convert bit patterns to colors. This also allowed to draw text with subpixel rendering , since orange and blue pixels appear half a pixel-width farther to the right on the screen than green and purple pixels. The Apple II at first used data cassette storage, like most other microcomputers of
3120-518: Is present, Drive 0 will spin endlessly until the user presses Reset (or Ctrl+Reset on machines with the Ctrl+Reset safety switch enabled) to enter Applesoft BASIC. If DOS has not been booted up, the user will only be able to load and save files to cassette from BASIC. The II Plus had a revised version of BASIC known as Applesoft II which incorporated most of the functionality from Integer BASIC, including HGR graphics commands. Most II Pluses came with
3240-557: Is turned on and the computer attached to a color display, it can display green by showing one alternating pattern of pixels, magenta with an opposite pattern of alternating pixels, and white by placing two pixels next to each other. Blue and orange are available by tweaking the pixel offset by half a pixel-width in relation to the color-burst signal. The high-resolution display offers more colors by compressing more (and narrower) pixels into each subcarrier cycle. The coarse, low-resolution graphics display mode works differently, as it can output
3360-629: The Apple II GS , was added in 1986. It remained compatible with earlier Apple II models, but the II GS has more in common with mid-1980s systems like the Atari ST , Amiga , and Acorn Archimedes . Despite the introduction of the Motorola 68000 -based Macintosh in 1984, the Apple II series still reportedly accounted for 85% of the company's hardware sales in the first quarter of fiscal 1985. Apple continued to sell Apple II systems alongside
3480-607: The Apple II J-Plus (Japan). In these models, Apple made the necessary hardware, software and firmware changes in order to comply to standards outside of the US. The Apple II Plus was followed in 1983 by the Apple IIe, a cost-reduced yet more powerful machine that used newer chips to reduce the component count and add new features, such as the display of upper and lowercase letters and a standard 64 KB of RAM. The IIe RAM
3600-587: The Apple II Plus , Apple IIe , Apple IIc , and Apple IIc Plus , with the 1983 IIe being the most popular. The name is trademarked with square brackets as Apple ][ , then, beginning with the IIe, as Apple // . The Apple II was a major advancement over its predecessor, the Apple I , in terms of ease of use, features, and expandability. It became one of several recognizable and successful computers during
3720-416: The CP/M operating system and run WordStar , dBase II , and other CP/M software. Apple released Applesoft BASIC in 1977, a more advanced variant of the language which users could run instead of Integer BASIC for more capabilities, such as the ability to use floating point numbers . Some commercial Apple II software came on self-booting disks and did not use standard DOS disk formats. This discouraged
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3840-629: The NTSC color subcarrier ), two game paddles (bundled until 1980, when they were found to violate FCC regulations ), 4 KiB of RAM , an audio cassette interface for loading programs and storing data, and the Integer BASIC programming language built into ROMs . The video controller displayed 24 lines by 40 columns of monochrome, uppercase-only text on the screen (the original character set matches ASCII characters 20 h to 5F h ), with NTSC composite video output suitable for display on
3960-408: The phase of this signal in relation to a reference color burst signal. The result is that the position, size, and intensity of a series of pulses define color information. These pulses can translate into pixels on the computer screen, with the possibility of exploiting composite artifact colors . The Apple II display provides two pixels per subcarrier cycle. When the color burst reference signal
4080-918: The 16-bit Apple IIGS —all of which remained compatible. Production of the last available model, the Apple IIe, ceased in November 1993. By 1976, Steve Jobs had convinced product designer Jerry Manock (who had formerly worked at Hewlett Packard designing calculators) to create the "shell" for the Apple II—a smooth case inspired by kitchen appliances that concealed the internal mechanics. The earliest Apple II computers were assembled in Silicon Valley and later in Texas; printed circuit boards were manufactured in Ireland and Singapore . The first computers went on sale on June 10, 1977 with an MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor running at 1.023 MHz ( 2 ⁄ 7 of
4200-444: The 1977–79 period often ran only in text or low-resolution mode in order to support users with small memory configurations; HGR not being near universally supported by games until 1980. Rather than a dedicated sound-synthesis chip, the Apple II contains a toggle circuit that can only emit a click through a built-in speaker or a line-out jack. More complex sounds, such as music or audio samples, are generated by software manually toggling
4320-404: The 1979 release of the popular VisiCalc spreadsheet , made the computer especially popular with business users and families. The Apple II computers are based on the 6502 8-bit processor and can display text and two resolutions of color graphics. A software-controlled speaker provides one channel of low-fidelity audio. A model with more advanced graphics and sound and a 16-bit processor,
4440-455: The 1980s and early 1990s, although this was mainly limited to the US. It was aggressively marketed through volume discounts and manufacturing arrangements to educational institutions, which made it the first computer in widespread use in American secondary schools, displacing the early leader Commodore PET . The effort to develop educational and business software for the Apple II, including
4560-452: The Apple II "may be the first product to fully qualify as the 'appliance computer' ... a completed system which is purchased off the retail shelf, taken home, plugged in and used". The computer's color graphics capability especially impressed the magazine. The magazine published a favorable review of the computer in March 1978, concluding: "For the user that wants color graphics, the Apple II is
4680-541: The Apple II could boot into the CP/M operating system and run WordStar , dBase II , and other CP/M software. With the release of MousePaint in 1984 and the Apple II GS in 1986, the platform took on the look of the Macintosh user interface, including a mouse. Much commercial Apple II software shipped on self-booting disks and does not use standard DOS disk formats. This discouraged the copying or modifying of
4800-638: The Apple II series looked similar, featuring much clean white space and showing the Apple rainbow logo prominently. For several years up until the late 1980s, Apple used the Motter Tektura font for packaging, until changing to the Apple Garamond font. Apple ran the first advertisement for the Apple II, a two-page spread ad titled "Introducing Apple II", in BYTE in July 1977. The first brochure,
4920-462: The Apple II, Commodore PET 2001 , and TRS-80 as the "1977 Trinity". As the Apple II had the defining feature of being able to display color graphics, the Apple logo was redesigned to have a spectrum of colors. The Apple II was the first in a series of computers collectively referred to by the Apple II name. It was followed by the Apple II+ , Apple IIe , Apple IIc , Apple IIc Plus , and
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5040-527: The Apple logo on the casing was represented using rainbow stripes, which remained a part of Apple's corporate logo until early 1998. The earliest Apple IIs were assembled in Silicon Valley , and later in Texas; printed circuit boards were manufactured in Ireland and Singapore . An external 5 + 1 ⁄ 4 -inch floppy disk drive, the Disk II , attached via a controller card that plugged into one of
5160-524: The Disk II became available in 1978, tape-based Apple II software essentially disappeared from the market. The initial price of the Disk II drive and controller was US$ 595, although a $ 100 off coupon was available through the Apple newsletter "Contact". The controller could handle two drives and a second drive (without controller) retailed for $ 495. The Disk II single-sided floppy drive used 5.25-inch floppy disks ; double-sided disks could be used, one side at
5280-425: The Disk II controller is typical of Wozniak's designs. With a few small-scale logic chips and a cheap PROM ( programmable read-only memory ), he created a functional floppy disk interface at a fraction of the component cost of standard circuit configurations. The first production Apple II computers had hand-molded cases; these had visible bubbles and other lumps in them from the imperfect plastic molding process, which
5400-591: The Disk II controller. A 6502 assembler was soon offered on disk, and later the UCSD compiler and operating system for the Pascal language were made available. The Pascal system requires a 16 KiB RAM card to be installed in the language card position (expansion slot 0) in addition to the full 48 KiB of motherboard memory. The first 1,000 or so Apple IIs shipped in 1977 with a 68-page mimeographed "Apple II Mini Manual", hand-bound with brass paper fasteners. This
5520-468: The ESC key as a substitute lowercase toggle if the modification is not installed. The Apple II Plus, like its predecessor the Apple II, features a repeat key on its keyboard. The key is labeled "REPT" and is located just to the left of the "RETURN" key. The II Plus is the last Apple Computer to have this key, as later Apple computers would incorporate the ability to hold down a key for a period of time to repeat
5640-427: The II Plus if a language card is present. Integer BASIC is not in ROM on the II Plus and is instead loaded by DOS 3.x during boot up into the RAM at $ D000 (if a language card is present, otherwise this step is skipped--II Pluses without a language card cannot run Integer BASIC). Normally, the RAM containing Integer BASIC is banked out and the Applesoft ROM is present at $ D000 . If the user types "INT", Integer BASIC
5760-658: The IIc itself will accept between 12 V and 17 V DC, allowing third parties to offer battery packs and automobile power adapters that connected in place of the supplied AC adapter. The Apple II GS , released on September 15, 1986, is the penultimate and most advanced model in the Apple II series, and a radical departure from prior models. It uses a 16-bit microprocessor, the 65C816 operating at 2.8 MHz with 24-bit addressing, allowing expansion up to 8 MB of RAM. The graphics are significantly improved, with 4096 colors and new modes with resolutions of 320×200 and 640×400. The audio capabilities are vastly improved, with
5880-611: The Integer BASIC ROM in system memory. The user could switch between either BASIC by typing FP or INT in BASIC prompt. Apple also offered a different version of Applesoft for cassette users, which occupied low memory, and was started by using the LOAD command in Integer BASIC. As shipped, Apple II incorporated a machine code monitor with commands for displaying and altering the computer's RAM, either one byte at
6000-509: The Language Card, an expansion card that could be installed in the computer's slot 0. The Apple's 6502 microprocessor could support a maximum of 64 KB of address space , and a machine with 48 KB RAM reached this limit because of the additional 12 KB of read-only memory and 4 KB of I/O addresses. For this reason, the extra RAM in the language card was bank-switched over the machine's built-in ROM, allowing code loaded into
6120-552: The Macintosh until terminating the II GS in December 1992 and the IIe in November 1993. The last II-series Apple in production, the IIe card for Macintoshes , was discontinued on October 15, 1993; having been one of the longest running mass-produced home computer series, the total Apple II sales of all of its models during its 16-year production run were about 6 million units (including about 1.25 million Apple II GS models) with
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#17327731401026240-710: The Platinum IIe and II GS . Unlike the IIe IIc and II GS , the IIc Plus came only in one version (American) and was not officially sold anywhere outside the US. The Apple IIc Plus ceased production in 1990, with its two-year production run being the shortest of all the Apple II computers. Although not an extension of the Apple II line, in 1990 the Apple IIe Card, an expansion card for the Macintosh LC ,
6360-522: The Shift key to one of the pins on the motherboard's paddle connector. Compatible applications, including nearly all word processors , can then detect whether the shift key was being pressed. This modification involves adding wires inside the Apple II; Apple distributed literature on how to build it, however, assuring readers that it was "the most simple and least expensive addition anyone could do". Most applications that support lower-case letters can also use
6480-453: The TRS-80 was launched last of the three. However, during the first five years of operations, revenues doubled about every four months. Between September 1977 and September 1980, annual sales grew from $ 775,000 to $ 118 million . During this period the sole products of the company were the Apple II and its peripherals, accessories, and software. In 2006, PC World wrote that the Apple II was
6600-527: The addition of game paddle support and sound, and graphics commands in Integer BASIC , with which he wrote Brick Out , a software clone of his own hardware game. Wozniak said in 1984: "Basically, all the game features were put in just so I could show off the game I was familiar with— Breakout —at the Homebrew Computer Club . It was the most satisfying day of my life [when] I demonstrated Breakout —totally written in BASIC. It seemed like
6720-525: The additional memory to be used as if it actually were ROM. Users could thus load Integer BASIC into the language card from disk and switch between the Integer and Applesoft dialects of BASIC with DOS 3.3 's INT and FP commands just as if they had the BASIC ROM expansion card. The Language Card was also required to use LOGO , Apple Pascal , and FORTRAN 77 . Apple Pascal and FORTRAN ran under
6840-402: The business and professional market, when the spreadsheet program VisiCalc was launched in mid-1979. VisiCalc is credited as the defining killer app in the microcomputer industry. By the end of 1977 Apple had sales of $ 775,000 for the fiscal year, which included sales of the Apple I. This puts Apple clearly behind the others of the "holy trinity" of the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, even though
6960-471: The cassette. Initially, the Apple II was shipped with Integer BASIC encoded in the motherboard ROM chips. Written by Wozniak, the interpreter enabled users to write software applications without needing to purchase additional development utilities. Written with game programmers and hobbyists in mind, the language only supported the encoding of numbers in 16-bit integer format. Since it only supported integers between -32768 and +32767 (signed 16-bit integer), it
7080-408: The computer as a teaching tool. Color on the Apple II series uses a quirk of the NTSC television signal standard, which made color display relatively easy and inexpensive to implement. The original NTSC television signal specification was black and white. Color was added later by adding a 3.58-megahertz subcarrier signal that was partially ignored by black-and-white TV sets. Color is encoded based on
7200-568: The computer's expansion slots (usually slot 6), was used for data storage and retrieval to replace cassettes. The Disk II interface, created by Steve Wozniak , was regarded as an engineering masterpiece for its economy of electronic components. Rather than having a dedicated sound-synthesis chip, the Apple II had a toggle circuit that could only emit a click through a built-in speaker; all other sounds (including two, three and, eventually, four-voice music and playback of audio samples and speech synthesis) were generated entirely by software that clicked
7320-661: The computer's speed. Rod Holt designed the Apple II's power supply. He employed a switched-mode power supply design, which was far smaller and generated less unwanted heat than the linear power supply some other home computers used. The original Apple II was discontinued at the start of 1981, superseded by the Apple II+ . The Apple II Plus, introduced in June 1979, included the Applesoft BASIC programming language in ROM. This Microsoft -authored dialect of BASIC, which
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#17327731401027440-487: The computer's speed. Early Apple IIs were often sold with a Sup'R'Mod , which allowed the composite video signal to be viewed in a television. The Soviet Union radio-electronics industry designed Apple II-compatible computer Agat . Roughly 12,000 Agat 7 and 9 models were produced and they were widely used in Soviet schools. Agat 9 computers could run "Apple II" compatibility and native modes. "Apple II" mode allowed to run
7560-487: The connection to a modem, and thereby to any networks that a user might have access to. In the early days, such networks were scarce. But they expanded significantly with the development of bulletin board systems in later years. There was also a third-party 6809 card that allowed OS-9 Level One to be run. Third-party sound cards greatly improved audio capabilities, allowing simple music synthesis and text-to-speech functions. Apple II accelerator cards doubled or quadrupled
7680-434: The copying or modifying of the software on the disks, and improved loading speed. When the Apple II initially shipped in June 1977, no expansion cards were available for the slots. This meant that the user did not have any way of connecting a modem or a printer. One popular hack involved connecting a teletype machine to the cassette output. Wozniak's open-architecture design and Apple II's multiple expansion slots permitted
7800-504: The end of the rail – and read and execute code from sector 0. The code contained in there would then pull in the rest of the operating system. DOS stored the disk's directory on track 17, smack in the middle of the 35-track disks, in order to reduce the average seek time to the frequently used directory track. The directory was fixed in size and could hold a maximum of 105 files. Subdirectories were not supported. Most game publishers did not include DOS on their floppy disks, since they needed
7920-419: The expansion hardware sold for the other machines in the series. The original Apple II has the operating system in ROM along with a BASIC variant called Integer BASIC . Apple eventually released Applesoft BASIC , a more advanced variant of the language which users can run instead of Integer BASIC. The Apple II series eventually supported over 1,500 software programs. When the Disk II floppy disk drive
8040-623: The features of the later model Apple IIc ) and the Apple IIe Platinum (a modernized case color to match other Apple products of the era, along with the addition of a numeric keypad ). Some of the feature of the IIe were carried over from the less successful Apple III , among them the ProDOS operating system. The Apple IIc was released in April 1984, billed as a portable Apple II because it could be easily carried due to its size and carrying handle, which could be flipped down to prop
8160-416: The foam-molded plastic case, Rod Holt developed the switching power supply , while Steve Jobs was not involved in the design of the computer. It was introduced by Jobs and Wozniak at the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire , and marks Apple's first launch of a computer aimed at a consumer market—branded toward American households rather than businessmen or computer hobbyists. Byte magazine referred to
8280-410: The gameboard (category, X, O, bonus game numbers and amounts, TIC, TAC or Dragon, as well displaying custom messages and an active screensaver), and in turn controlled by an Altair 8800 system. It was the first game show to use computerized graphics. Jesse Adams Stein wrote, "As the first company to release a 'consumer appliance' micro-computer, Apple Computer offers us a clear view of this shift from
8400-579: The introduction of the II Plus in 1979, Microsoft came out with the Z-80 SoftCard , an expansion card for the Apple II line that allowed the use of CP/M and contained its own Z80 CPU and logic to adapt the Z80 CPU to the Apple bus. The SoftCard was extremely popular and Microsoft's single most successful product for two years, although on the downside, it was limited to using the Apple II's GCR disk format and thus CP/M software either had to be obtained on Apple format disks or transferred via serial link from
8520-401: The key. The II Plus has a plastic case with a brass mesh running along the inside of the case. This mesh helped reduce the electromagnetic interference emitted from the computer, keeping the machine in compliance with newly implemented FCC regulations covering microcomputers. Small grids of plastic pins, and sometimes Velcro , were used to hold the case's top onto the computer. In comparison,
8640-571: The lines of the Commodore Datasette was never produced; Apple recommended using the Panasonic RQ309 in some of its early printed documentation. The uses of common consumer cassette recorders and a standard video monitor or television set (with a third-party RF modulator ) made the total cost of owning an Apple II less expensive and helped contribute to the Apple II's success. Cassette storage may have been inexpensive, but it
8760-490: The machine up into a typing position. Unlike modern portables , it lacked a built-in display and battery. It was the first of three Apple II models to be made in the Snow White design language , and the only one that used its unique creamy off-white color. The Apple IIc was the first Apple II to use the 65C02 low-power variant of the 6502 processor, and featured a built-in 5.25-inch floppy drive and 128 KB RAM, with
8880-490: The machine's BIOS . An Apple II manual signed by Steve Jobs in 1980 with the inscription "Julian, your generation is the first to grow up with computers. Go change the world." sold at auction for $ 787,484 in 2021. The original Apple II came with an 8 KiB ROM containing a BASIC variant called Integer BASIC as well as a resident monitor called the Apple System Monitor. Initially, only cassette tape
9000-606: The machine), but in most other countries the international Apple was sold with an unmodified American keyboard; thus the German model still lacked the umlauts , for example, and had a QWERTY layout instead of the standard German QWERTZ . For the most part, the Apple II Europlus and J-Plus were identical to the Apple II Plus and software compatibility was near 100%. Production of the Europlus ended in 1983. The ITT 2020
9120-446: The memory it occupied more than its capabilities; instead, they often wrote their own boot loaders and read-only file systems. This also served to discourage "crackers" from snooping around in the game's copy-protection code, since the data on the disk was not in files that could be accessed easily. Apple II (1977 computer) The Apple II (stylized as apple ][ ) is a personal computer released by Apple Inc. in June 1977. It
9240-496: The necessary hardware, software and firmware changes in order to comply with standards outside of the US and Canada. The power supply was modified to accept the local voltage, and in the European model the video output signal was changed from color NTSC to monochrome PAL by changing some jumpers on the motherboard and using a slightly different frequency crystal oscillator — an extra video card (which only worked in slot 7)
9360-533: The only practical choice available in the 'appliance' computer class." Personal Computer World in August 1978 also cited the color capability as a strength, stating that "the prime reason that anyone buys an Apple II must surely be for the colour graphics". While mentioning the "oddity" of the artifact colors that produced output "that is not always what one wishes to do", it noted that "no-one has colour graphics like this at this sort of price". The magazine praised
9480-648: The original Apple II lacked RF shielding and was often unusable with certain TVs and monitors (Apple recommended Sony TVs as they had better RF insulation than other brands). After the success of the first Apple II in the United States, Apple expanded its market to include Europe and the Far East in 1978, with the Apple II Europlus (Europe) and the Apple II J-Plus (Japan). In these models, Apple made
9600-499: The original II in terms of electronic functionality. There were small differences in the physical appearance and keyboard. RAM prices fell during 1980–81 and all II+ machines came from the factory with a full 48 KB of memory already installed. After the success of the first Apple II in the United States, Apple expanded its market to include Europe, Australia and the Far East in 1979, with the Apple II Europlus (Europe, Australia) and
9720-404: The peak occurring in 1983 when 1 million were sold. Unlike preceding home microcomputers, the Apple II was sold as a finished consumer appliance rather than as a kit (unassembled or preassembled). Apple marketed the Apple II as a durable product, including a 1981 ad in which an Apple II survived a fire started when a cat belonging to one early user knocked over a lamp. All the machines in
9840-476: The possibility of loose chips causing a system malfunction, it was considered preferable to make servicing and replacement of bad chips easier. The Apple II PCB lacks any means of generating an interrupt request , although expansion cards may generate one. Program code had to stop everything to perform any I/O task; like many of the computer's other idiosyncrasies, this was due to cost reasons and Steve Wozniak assuming interrupts were not needed for gaming or using
9960-464: The rounded "a" of the logotype echoed the "bite" in the logo. This logo was developed simultaneously with an advertisement and a brochure; the latter being produced for distribution initially at the first West Coast Computer Faire . Since the original Apple II, Apple has paid high attention to its quality of packaging, partly because of Steve Jobs ' personal preferences and opinions on packaging and final product appearance. All of Apple's packaging for
10080-545: The same size). The early Apple II+ models retained this feature, but after a drop in DRAM prices, Apple redesigned the circuit boards without the jumpers, so that only 16kx1 chips were supported. A few months later, they started shipping all machines with a full 48 KiB complement of DRAM. Unlike most machines, all integrated circuits on the Apple II PCB were socketed; although this cost more to manufacture and created
10200-407: The screen, with NTSC composite video output suitable for display on a TV monitor, or on a regular TV set by way of a separate RF modulator . The original retail price of the computer was US$ 1,298 (equivalent to $ 6,500 in 2023) (with 4 KB of RAM) and US$ 2,638 (equivalent to $ 13,300 in 2023) (with the maximum 48 KB of RAM). To reflect the computer's color graphics capability,
10320-526: The serial ports, mouse, and real-time clock. The IIe card could not, however, run software intended for the 16-bit Apple II GS . Mike Markkula , a retired Intel marketing manager, provided the early critical funding for Apple Computer. From 1977 to 1981, Apple used the Regis McKenna agency for its advertisements and marketing. In 1981, Chiat-Day acquired Regis McKenna's advertising operations and Apple used Chiat-Day. At Regis McKenna Advertising,
10440-437: The series, except the IIc, share similar overall design elements. The plastic case was designed to look more like a home appliance than a piece of electronic equipment, and the case can be opened without the use of tools. All models in the Apple II series have a built-in keyboard, with the exception of the II GS which has a separate keyboard. Apple IIs have color and high-resolution graphics modes , sound capabilities and
10560-404: The software in just 35 days, a remarkably short deadline, even for the time. The Disk II and Apple DOS were released in late 1978. The final and most popular version of this software was Apple DOS 3.3. Apple DOS was superseded by ProDOS , which supported a hierarchical filesystem and larger storage devices. With an optional third-party Z80 -based expansion card , the Apple II could boot into
10680-579: The software on the disks, and improved loading speed. The first Apple II computers went on sale on June 10, 1977 with a MOS Technology 6502 (later Synertek ) microprocessor running at 1.023 MHz , 4 KB of RAM , an audio cassette interface for loading programs and storing data, and the Integer BASIC programming language built into the ROMs . The video controller displayed 40 columns by 24 lines of monochrome, upper-case-only (the original character set matches ASCII characters 0x20 to 0x5F) text on
10800-411: The sophisticated monitor software, user expandability, and comprehensive documentation. The author concluded that "the Apple II is a very promising machine" which "would be even more of a temptation were its price slightly lower ... for the moment, colour is an Apple II". Although it sold well from the launch, the initial market was to hobbyists and computer enthusiasts. Sales expanded exponentially into
10920-501: The speaker at an appropriate frequency. This technique requires careful and precise timing, rendering it difficult to display moving graphics while sound is playing. Third party expansion cards were later released which addressed this problem. A similar technique is used for cassette storage: cassette output works the same as the speaker, and input uses a simple zero-crossing detector as a 1-bit audio digitizer. Routines in machine ROM encode and decode data in frequency-shift keying for
11040-420: The speaker at just the right times. The Apple II's multiple expansion slots permitted a wide variety of third-party devices, including Apple II peripheral cards such as serial controllers , display controllers, memory boards, hard disks, networking components, and real-time clocks . There were plug-in expansion cards – such as the Z-80 SoftCard – that permitted the Apple to use the Z80 processor and run
11160-462: The team assigned to launch the Apple II consisted of Rob Janoff , art director, Chip Schafer, copywriter and Bill Kelley, account executive. Janoff came up with the Apple logo with a bite out of it. The design was originally an olive green with matching company logotype all in lowercase. Steve Jobs insisted on promoting the color capability of the Apple II by putting rainbow stripes on the Apple logo. In its letterhead and business card implementation,
11280-462: The text-mode font stored in the computer's ROM . To display lowercase letters, some applications run in the slower hi-res graphics mode and use a custom font, rather than running in the fast text mode using the font in ROM. Other programs, primarily those where both capitalization and text movement were important, such as word processors , use inverse text mode to represent text that would be uppercase when printed. Alternatively, users can install
11400-403: The time. In 1978, the company introduced an external 5 + 1 ⁄ 4 -inch floppy disk drive, called Disk II (stylized as Disk ][), attached through a controller card that plugs into one of the computer's expansion slots (usually slot 6). The Disk II interface, created by Wozniak, is regarded as an engineering masterpiece for its economy of electronic components. The approach taken in
11520-461: The top could be opened; the B&;H model was the same as the consumer version sold by Apple except that it came in a black case, which could not be opened as easily, and a special A/V package allowing it to be sold as audio/visual equipment. Bell & Howell packaged the unit with optional "back packs" that offered various inputs and outputs for A/V equipment to easily interface with the II Plus. This
11640-503: Was able to increase this to six hi-res colors on later board revisions. (Technically it was eight, but only six were visible. ) The PCB had three RAM banks for a total of 24 RAM chips. Original Apple IIs had jumper switches to adjust RAM size, and RAM configurations could be 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 32, 36, or 48 KiB. The three smallest memory configurations used 4kx1 DRAMs , with larger ones using 16kx1 DRAMs, or mix of 4-kilobyte and 16-kilobyte banks (the chips in any one bank have to be
11760-509: Was also slow and unreliable. The Apple II's lack of a disk drive was "a glaring weakness" in what was otherwise intended to be a polished, professional product. Recognizing that the II needed a disk drive to be taken seriously, Apple set out to develop a disk drive and a DOS to run it. Wozniak spent the 1977 Christmas holidays designing a disk controller that reduced the number of chips used by a factor of 10 compared to existing controllers. Still lacking
11880-457: Was an Apple II clone manufactured by ITT under license from Apple Computer (the first licensed clone), specifically for the European market. In contrast to the Apple II Europlus, the ITT 2020 supported full PAL color graphics The Apple II Plus was also sold by Bell & Howell specifically to educational markets under special license from Apple. The standard Apple II Plus was not UL -listed because
12000-449: Was available for storage, which was considered too slow and unreliable for business use. In late 1977, Apple began to develop the Disk II floppy disk drive and required an operating system to utilize it. The existing standard at the time was CP/M , but due to incompatibility with the 6502 processor and a perceived clunkiness, Apple contracted Shepardson Microsystems for $ 13,000 to write Apple DOS . At Shepardson, Paul Laughton developed
12120-508: Was available, after some user-specific voice training it would recognize simple commands (Hit, stand). Bob Bishop's "Music Kaleidoscope" was a simple program that monitored the cassette input port and based on zero-crossings created color patterns on the screen, a predecessor to current audio visualization plug-ins for media players. Music Kaleidoscope was especially popular on projection TV sets in dance halls. Apple and many third-party developers made software available on tape at first, but after
12240-431: Was configured as if it were a 48 KB Apple II Plus with a language card. The machine had no slot 0, but instead had an auxiliary slot that could accept a 1 KB memory card to enable the 80-column display. This card contained only RAM; the hardware and firmware for the 80-column display was built into the Apple IIe. An "extended 80-column card" with more memory increased the machine's RAM to 128 KB. The Apple IIe
12360-491: Was entitled "Simplicity" and the copy in both the ad and brochure pioneered "demystifying" language intended to make the new idea of a home computer more "personal." The Apple II introduction ad was later run in the September 1977 issue of Scientific American . Apple later aired eight television commercials for the Apple II GS , emphasizing its benefits to education and students, along with some print ads. The Apple II
12480-527: Was frequently cloned, both in the United States and abroad, in a similar way to the IBM PC. According to some sources (see below), more than 190 different models of Apple II clones were manufactured. Most could not be legally imported into the United States. Apple sued and sought criminal charges against clone makers in more than a dozen countries. Originally the Apple II used Compact Cassette tapes for program and data storage. A dedicated tape recorder along
12600-484: Was known as Revision 0, and the first 6,000 units shipped used it. Later revisions added a color killer circuit to prevent color fringing when the computer was in text mode, as well as modifications to improve the reliability of cassette I/O. Revision 0 Apple IIs powered up in an undefined mode and had garbage on-screen, requiring the user to press Reset. This was eliminated in later board revisions. Revision 0 Apple IIs could display only four colors in hi-res mode, but Wozniak
12720-411: Was less suitable to business software, and Apple soon received complaints from customers. Because Steve Wozniak was busy developing the Disk II hardware, he did not have time to modify Integer BASIC for floating point support. Apple instead licensed Microsoft's 6502 BASIC to create Applesoft BASIC . Disk users normally purchased a so-called Language Card, which had Applesoft in ROM, and was located below
12840-456: Was needed for color PAL graphics, since the simple tricks designer Steve Wozniak had used to generate a pseudo-NTSC signal with minimal hardware did not carry over to the more complex PAL system. In the Japanese version of the international Apple, the character ROM and the keyboard layout were changed to allow for Katakana writing (full Kanji support was clearly beyond the capabilities of
12960-410: Was one of the first successful mass-produced microcomputer products and is widely regarded as one of the most important personal computers of all time due to its role in popularizing home computing and influencing later software development. The Apple II was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak . The system is based around the 8-bit MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor. Jerry Manock designed
13080-473: Was possible for software developers to create a DOS 3.2 disk which would also boot on a system with DOS 3.3 firmware. Later, double-sided drives, with heads to read both sides of the disk, became available from third-party companies. (Apple only produced double-sided 5.25-inch disks for the Lisa 1 computer). On a DOS 3.x disk, tracks 0, 1, and most of track 2 were reserved to store the operating system. (It
13200-420: Was possible, with a special utility, to reclaim most of this space for data if a disk did not need to be bootable.) A short ROM program on the disk controller had the ability to seek to track zero – which it did without regard for the read/write head's current position, resulting in the characteristic "chattering" sound of a Disk II boot, which was the read/write head hitting the rubber stop block at
13320-453: Was previously available as an upgrade, supported floating-point arithmetic, and became the standard BASIC dialect on the Apple II series (though it ran at a noticeably slower speed than Steve Wozniak's Integer BASIC). Except for improved graphics and disk-booting support in the ROM, and the removal of the 2k 6502 assembler to make room for the floating point BASIC, the II+ was otherwise identical to
13440-417: Was released in 1978, a new operating system, Apple DOS , was commissioned from Shepardson Microsystems and developed by Paul Laughton, adding support for the disk drive. The final and most popular version of this software was Apple DOS 3.3. Apple DOS was superseded by ProDOS , which supported a hierarchical file-system and larger storage devices. With an optional third-party Z80 -based expansion card ,
13560-477: Was released. Essentially a miniaturized Apple IIe computer on a card (using the Mega II chip from the Apple II GS ), it allowed the Macintosh to run 8-bit Apple IIe software through hardware emulation , with an option to run at roughly double the speed of the original IIe (about 1.8 MHz). However, the video output was emulated in software, and, depending on how much of the screen the currently running program
13680-520: Was soon switched to machine molding. In addition, the initial case design had no vent openings, causing high heat buildup from the PCB and resulting in the plastic softening and sagging. Apple added vent holes to the case within three months of production; customers with the original case could have them replaced at no charge. The Apple II's printed circuit board (PCB) underwent several revisions, as Steve Wozniak made modifications to it. The earliest version
13800-491: Was the Apple IIc Plus introduced in 1988. It was the same size and shape as the IIc that came before it, but the 5.25-inch floppy drive had been replaced with a 3 + 1 ⁄ 2 -inch drive, the power supply was moved inside the case, and the processor was a fast 4 MHz 65C02 processor that actually ran 8-bit Apple II software faster than the II GS . The IIc Plus also featured a new keyboard layout that matched
13920-536: Was the basis for the Apple II Reference Manual, which became known as the Red Book for its red cover, published in January 1978. All existing customers who sent in their warranty cards were sent free copies of the Red Book. The Apple II Reference Manual contained the complete schematic of the entire computer's circuitry, and a complete source listing of the "Monitor" ROM firmware that served as
14040-486: Was the most popular machine in the Apple II series. It has the distinction of being the longest-lived Apple computer of all time—it was manufactured and sold with only minor changes for nearly 11 years. The IIe was the last Apple II model to be sold, and was discontinued in November 1993. During its lifespan two variations were introduced: the Apple IIe Enhanced (four replacement chips to give it some of
14160-669: Was the only black computer Apple would manufacture until the Macintosh TV in 1993. A TEMPEST -approved version of the Apple II Plus was created in 1980 by the Georgia Tech Research Institute for U.S. Army FORSCOM , and used as a component in the earliest versions of the Microfix system. Fielded in 1982, the Microfix system was the first tactical system using video disc ( LaserDisc ) map technology providing zoom and scroll over map imagery coupled with
14280-524: Was trying to update in a single frame, performance could be much slower compared to a real IIe. This is due to the fact that writes from the 65C02 on the IIe Card to video memory were caught by the additional hardware on the card, so the video emulation software running on the Macintosh side could process that write and update the video display. But, while the Macintosh was processing video updates, execution of Apple II code would be temporarily halted. With
14400-470: Was user-installable as two PROMs on older controllers.) After the release of DOS 3.3, the user community discontinued use of DOS 3.2 except for running legacy software. Programs that required DOS 3.2 were fairly rare; however, as DOS 3.3 was not a major architectural change aside from the number of sectors per track, a program called MUFFIN was provided with DOS 3.3 to allow users to copy files from DOS 3.2 disks to DOS 3.3 disks. It
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