June 5, 1977: The primary Apple II, the non-public pc that can put Cupertino on the map, goes on sale.
Beforehand proven off to some thousand rabid followers on the West Coast Pc Faire, the Apple II’s arrival means the plenty can lastly get their arms on the breakthrough machine. A base unit prices $1,298 — the equal of almost $6,900 in the present day.
Apple II pc: A machine forward of its time
Though Apple beforehand made the Apple-1, the Apple II was the corporate’s first pc that mattered. The Apple-1 by no means offered broadly, or in massive portions. It was all the time meant extra as a enjoyable demo for Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak’s Homebrew Pc Membership buddies than a critical money-spinner.
The Apple II proved totally different. Though customers nonetheless wanted to supply their very own displays, the pc boasted many hallmarks of Apple’s later machines. That began with an attractively machined case designed by Jerry Manock, who later went on to provide the first Macintosh. (For individuals who simply couldn’t get out of the hacker mindset, Apple additionally made a circuit board-only version of the Apple II accessible.)
Coloration graphics, plus nice specs for that period
From a specs perspective, the Apple II pc was forward of its time. Most notably, this meant colour graphics. It additionally boasted a whopping 1MHz MOS Know-how 6502 processor, built-in keyboard, built-in BASIC programming setting, expandable reminiscence from 4K as much as 48K, eight enlargement slots and a sound card.
Clients additionally received an audio cassette interface for loading applications and storing knowledge. A 12 months later, Apple debuted its enormously profitable Disk II drive. This profitable accent let customers substitute their audio cassettes with a lot sooner floppy disks.
As Steve Wozniak wrote in Byte journal across the time of the Apple II’s debut: “To me, a private pc needs to be small, dependable, handy to make use of and cheap.”
Apple II turns into an enormous hit for Apple
Photograph: Apple
Quickly after its launch on this present day in 1977, the Apple II pc turned an enormous hit for Apple. The 12 months it debuted, it introduced in $770,000 in income. That determine elevated to $7.9 million the next 12 months, and a large $49 million the 12 months after that.
Regardless of efforts to interchange it with machines just like the ill-fated Apple III and (extra efficiently) the Macintosh, demand remained extremely robust for the Apple II for greater than a decade. In reality, Apple continued producing up to date variations till November 1993.
A particularly influential early private pc
The groundbreaking pc introduced a variety of vital gamers into the world of excessive tech, too. These included Mitch Kapor, founding father of Lotus Growth Company and co-founder of the Digital Frontier Basis, and John Carmack, the legendary coder behind smash-hit video games Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake.
The pc additionally earned Apple its first “killer app,” within the type of the important spreadsheet program VisiCalc.
As many superb computer systems as Cupertino has launched over time, it’s unlikely that any — with the attainable exception of the authentic Macintosh in 1984 — will ever present the identical capacity to reshape the pc business because the Apple II did.
