Apple II

The Apple II (stylized as apple ][) is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak (Steve Jobs oversaw the development of the Apple II's unusual case and Rod Holt developed the unique power supply). It was introduced in 1977 at the West Coast Computer Faire by Jobs and was the first consumer product sold by Apple Computer. It is the first model in a series of computers which were produced until Apple IIe production ceased in November 1993.

History

The earliest Apple IIs 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 a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor running at 1.023 MHz, two game paddles,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 displays 24 lines by 40 columns of monochrome, upper-case-only (the original character set matches ASCII characters 20_h to 5F_h) text on 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 $1,298 USD (with 4 kB of RAM) and $2,638 USD (with the maximum 48 kB of RAM). To reflect the computer's color graphics capability, the Apple logo on the casing has rainbow stripes, which remained a part of Apple's corporate logo until early 1998.