Apple II (1977)

The venerable Apple II (nearing 45 years old) went on sale on June 10th in 1977.  Bundled with a set of paddles and a cassette tape with demos (including a version of Breakout written in Steve Wozniak’s Integer Basic), Apple included a full set of manuals, some would argue, the best set of manuals to have been included with a new computer, ever.  All the user needed was a composite monitor and optionally, a cassette player to load and save programs.

Wozniak and Jobs started several trends which were adopted by competitors and made their way into successor machines.  One in particular kickstarted the personal computer peripheral industry before anybody knew what a “PC” was.

The Apple II had slots.  Lots of slots.  8, to be precise.  Each 50 pin slot offered an opportunity to interface with the outside world or to improve computing capabilities (memory expansion for example). 

One of the most successful 3rd part adapter cards was an alternative operating system which leveraged a different (dissimilar) CPU; CP/M and its Zilog Z80 CPU became a popular Microsoft product before too many people knew who Microsoft was.  It opened the door not only for a more performant (by clock speed) CPU, but a library of software titles for those fortunate enough to have purchased an Apple Floppy drive and controller.

The Apple Language Card was also very popular since it added 16K to bring the total to 64K which gave the computer the additional headroom required to develop in Pascal.

At launch, there were precisely zero expansion cards on offer.  But the most popular accessory did not occupy a slot at all, and was not an official Apple product.  It was the Sup’R’Mod (included in the upper right of this display).  Connected to a set of video output pins on the Apple II mother board, the Sup’R’Mod was an RF modulator that allowed the Apple to connect to a standard television.

Apple, after failing to gain FCC approval on their RF modular, arranged to have a local Silicon Valley based electronics firm named “M&R Enterprises” create the “peripheral” which could be affixed inside the Apple II case.  Marty Spergel, who ran M&R was led to believe (by Steve Jobs) that he might sell as many as 50 units per month.  Spergel later estimated that he sold about 400,000 units.  At $29.95 each, this was quite a success story.

Other features, innovative at the time, included bitmapped graphics and color.  In a day when the TRS-80 and Commodore Pet were both monochrome and offered only rudimentary low-res block or key graphics, this was a game changer,   And of course, once serial adapters arrived on the scene, 3rd party companies began offering modems (such as this 300 baud Novation J-Cat you see here).

Byte magazine, Nibble, A+ and other publications quickly grew in subscribers and content, and built a marketplace of software and hardware add-ons. Prior to the Apple II release, this joy was only available to kit-builders and electronics buffs with access and know-how.

---

This display includes a reproduction of the Rev. 0 motherboard.  At the bottom right, you’ll notice a ‘prototyping’ area; something Wozniak thought would be a good idea.

Other callouts include the white DIP ‘gaming’ socket, RCA type composite video output, and left/right cursor keys (but notably, no cursor up/down). Apple users would have to wait for the Apple IIe before getting dedicated keys for vertical cursor movement.

At launch, the Apple II sold for $1,298 USD; or about $5,543 in 2020 dollars.

---

---