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Technology (Apple) Businesses Technology Apple

The Apple II: The Machine That Started It All 83

Posted by Hemos from the another-retrospective dept.
Thomas Hormby writes "The first Apple II was sold on June 5, 1977. It was outfitted with a 1 mhz processor, 4 KB of RAM, a keyboard and a cassette interface. Despite the seemingly paltry specs, the machine made Apple, and bankrolled the LISA, Macintosh and LaserWriter. Besides building Apple, the machine revolutionized the entire microcomputer business, pulling it way from the hobbyist kits and closer to todays PC. Read about it at MLAgazine."
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The Apple II: The Machine That Started It All More

The Apple II: The Machine That Started It All

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  • More background from PBS (Score:5, Informative)

    by amichalo ( 132545 ) on Monday May 09, 2005 @10:41AM (#12477246)
    The PBS Triumph of the Nerds [pbs.org] specials have additional information on the early years of the Personal Computer.

  • From TFA (Score:3, Funny)

    by yardbird ( 165009 ) * on Monday May 09, 2005 @10:46AM (#12477329) Homepage
    (Breakout did not need uppercase and lowercase characters, so Wozniak did not include them).

    I remember word processing at the time. Lots of punctuation.

  • Wrong picture (Score:4, Informative)

    by pauljlucas ( 529435 ) on Monday May 09, 2005 @11:05AM (#12477511) Homepage Journal
    TFA shows a picture of an Apple //e, not an Apple ][. To see the latter, look here [apple2history.org].
    • TFA shows a picture of an Apple IIe, not an Apple II.

      In another bit of weirdness with their pic, I don't know of anybody who ever kept a DuoDisk off to the side. It was designed so that you could sandwich it between the computer and the monitor.

  • wrong on at least some details on cassette storage (Score:5, Informative)

    by call -151 ( 230520 ) on Monday May 09, 2005 @11:07AM (#12477527) Homepage

    In order to make machine readable cassettes, the user had to use a very sensitive tape recorder. Besides the recorders, users also had to buy media, which was way more expensive than standard floppy disks.

    Sorry- that wasn't the case. Commodity standard cassette recorders worked really well for storing Integer BASIC and machine language code and they used ordinary cassette tapes that were way way cheaper than floppies, particularly at that time.

  • Well, I tell ya'll, kids (Score:4, Funny)

    by liangzai ( 837960 ) on Monday May 09, 2005 @11:09AM (#12477544) Homepage
    back in the days, we survived on virtually nuthin', just one megahertz and a far cry from those gatesy 256 kB everyone was dreamin' of.

    You kids of today 'ave it easy. You've got your gigahertz machines with gigabytes o' memory in RAM and on disk, splashee colors, many-button mice, DVD burnahs and tha intahweb, downloading more porn in one day than granpa has seen in his entire lifetime, ehhhehh.

    Sniff. Nevertheless... back in da good ole' days we play'd Breakout faster on our lo'ly Apples than you do today with your Penthsium class Linux box'n. How do ya figure this is?

  • Spellcheck (Score:2, Funny)

    by Fish Heads ( 642181 )
    And I remember getting a Spellcheck utility (I think it was from Beagle Bros.) for AppleWriter.

    Too bad the author of that webpage didn't use one. I hear they are quite good these days...

  • Apple II innovations (Score:5, Informative)

    by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Monday May 09, 2005 @11:11AM (#12477557)
    I worked in a computer shop selling computers at the time the apple II came on the scene. The brands around then were Imsai, cromenco, Sol, Northside, and even an altair if you wanted one. With the exception of the comodore pet, they all ran on 8080, 8085 or Z-80.

    All had traditional power gobbling transfomer-rectifier-capacitor power supplies. If they had a bus it was an enornmous S-100 bus. None had memory mapped I/O or could interleave graphics and text. If they had disks, they were hard sectored disks. And most important of all none used Dynamic memory natively. You could buy dynamic memory cards as S-100 plug ins but they were not reliable.

    Unlike the 8080/Z-80 the 6502 had a symmetric instruction clock cycle and all so there was a free cycle where memory woas gaurenteed not to be accessed every other cycle dependably. (not true of the 8080) This meant you could use that interval to refresh the dynamic ram. Thus one never had to insert wait states or have flaky thing happen when there was an irregular refresh rate. It simply worked.

    But Wozniak and co, were even more clever. Why waste that clock refresh? since the duration was the same as the regular memory fecth time, they made it a full fetch. But what fetch that had to increment repetiviely over the upper 8 bits of address space would be useful? The video memory! so they backsided the video memory fetch on that.

    Contrary to today having memory mapped video was better than having th e video memory on a graphics card. On most grpahic cards when the CPU was accessing the memory they video card could no and you saw glitches. thus video updates were usualy timed by the CPU to occur in thehorizonatal and veritcal re-trace blanking intervals. very clumsy and slow.

    Apple used a switching power supply. the first I had ever seen. it was small, and took up no room. the imsai, altair, cromenco and northside computer were huge and half of them were the power supply. some of the capacitors in those were 8 inches tall and 3 inches in diameter. The switching powersupply made this thing a lighe weight "desktop" freindly unit. you could pick it up and easily move it.

    It was partly the use of dynamic memory instead of static memory that made this possible. The power draw on static memory is enourmous. and the memory density on static memory was tiny. plus it was very expensive. it consumed most of the mother board. Today's computers would not be possible without it.

    I assumed the apple II was a toy when I saw it's teeny tiny plug-in buss cards. until I looked at it's design. svelt memory mapped cards. all the address space decoding was done by the mother board so you didn't have to waste repetative logic on each card decoding it's own address. same with the power regulation. The switich power supply also gave lower ripple so less regulation was needed.

    When apple came out with a disk it was the first reliable soft sectored floppy. I had sold lots of softsectored (8") floppies made by others and saw most of them come back too. Who wants an unrelaible storage system. The apple one worked. and soft secotring made it cheap since it had almost no added electorinics on board. It was all driven from software.

    Then of course there was the choice of the 6502. it was a breath fo freshair compared to the 8080. It piplined the next instruction. it used relative jump extensively (calucalting an offset based on a register value not the hardwired instruction). It only had an accumulator and three registers. All the rest were memory mapped to the first 256 bytes of memory. So effectively it had enough registers you could really do something. the 8080 was hamstrung and register bound. and because of the pipelining the 6502 didn't lose any speed for the memory fetch using memory mapped registers.

    However even then the MHZ myth was strong. people thought a 4Mhz intel must be faster than a 1Mhz 6502. It was not. nearly all the 8080 instructions were 3 to 5 clock cycles in length

    • Re:Apple II innovations (Score:5, Informative)

      by Dammital ( 220641 ) on Monday May 09, 2005 @11:55AM (#12477968)
      "Apple used a switching power supply. the first I had ever seen. it was small, and took up no room."
      The power switch for the Apple ][ was an integral part of that power supply, and it wasn't very rugged. If you broke that switch you were looking at a power supply replacement at (if I remember correctly) $150 or so.

      Enter Kensington, whose first product was the "System Saver", a combination muffin fan, external power switch, and surge suppressor. Many of my Apple ][ buds owned one. It kept that Apple power switch from being used all the time, and it helped keep the inside cool (if you had lots of cards then the ribbon cables and their retainers blocked the ventilation slots in back. I knew people that routinely ran their computers with the cover propped open.

      (Oh, the Kensington web site [kensington.com] brags that they "became the number-one-selling peripheral for the Apple II". This distinction has to go to the M&R Sup-R-Mod, the add-in RF modulator that sold with nearly every machine, thereby circumventing FCC emissions rules.)

    • And the 6502 is so great, it'll still be in use in the year 3000 [transbyte.org].

      All kidding aside, great post. I was only in 4th grade when the Apple ][ came out (but my elementary school had 3, w00t!) and missed a lot of this stuff.
    • Now that's a hoot.

      The apple used minimal circuitry for everything. Including floppy. Bit decode was done in software. Which meant that the drives had to be almost EXACTLY the same rotational speed, or they couldn't exchange disks.

      As to soft sector being more reliable -- sorry, that's also not true. Hard sector is actually more reliable. Simple put, if a sector is damaged, it is possible to skip over it, and read sectors after it on the same track. Not possible (with ANY reliability) using a soft-sector format. As to cost savings? The hole detector is in the drive anyway (for either 1 hole, or n holes).

      And, yes, my Apple ][ still works.

      Ratboy
      • Which meant that the drives had to be almost EXACTLY the same rotational speed, or they couldn't exchange disks.

        Not necessarily. Because of the use of self-sync bytes and a required set high-bit for any disk byte, the software decode was remarkably tolerant of speed variations on the drives. I saw Apple II drives whose speeds were 2-3% off from spec still operate perfectly, including exchanging disks with other systems.

        if a sector is damaged, it is possible to skip over it, and read sectors after it o
        • blue meanie:

          I stand by my comment: requiring 3 - 5% or better tolerance is not acceptable. We had to hand-match Apple ][ drives back in '77 to ensure that the two drives could exchange data. First and last time I've ever had to do this.

          As to "100%" reliable... it is possible to "accidentally" record a data pattern that duplicates the synchronization header. Just about the only system that this was possible on was the Apple ][.

          (Side note: 3270 format "soft sector" came first. Followed by "hard sector". Ap

          • Re:The Apple ][ Floppy - Reliable? (Score:4, Informative)

            by The Blue Meanie ( 223473 ) on Monday May 09, 2005 @04:24PM (#12480943)
            Seriously not trying to be flamebait here. We'll see if the mods disagree.

            requiring 3 - 5% or better tolerance is not acceptable. We had to hand-match Apple ][ drives back in '77 to ensure that the two drives could exchange data.

            These were drives that took 200ms (yes, that's .2 seconds) per revolution. They had a trim-pot for speed adjustment and you had to put several turns on it to get the drive far enough out of spec to misread disks.
            Hundreds of Disk II drives have passed through my possession, and I've never had to match their speeds to that level unless I was dealing specifically with a bitchy, temperamental nibble-count protected disk - and those were somewhat rare. Standard 16-sector format Apple II disks were phenomenally tolerant of speed variation. I respectfully submit that your memory likely exceeds your experience in this case.

            As to "100%" reliable... it is possible to "accidentally" record a data pattern that duplicates the synchronization header. Just about the only system that this was possible on was the Apple ][.

            The sector header (and there was one for EVERY sector, not one per track) consisted of 3-byte prologue (D5 AA 96) that used unique byte values that were not possible to generate using the standard 5&3 encoding scheme, followed by the track, sector and volume number 4&4 encoded into 6 bytes, followed by a checksum byte 4&4 encoded into two bytes, followed by a two-byte epilogue (DE AA) also using unique values not possible from the standard 5&3 encoding. If the checksum didn't validate those volume, track and sector values, the header was considered no good and ignored.

            Yes, it is possible to "accidentally" record a pattern that would duplicate such a header. It's also possible (and probably just as likely) to throw a Scrabble set in the air and get Shakespeare. :)

            However, saving the expense of (1) a proper floppy controller, (2) a proper video generator, (3) delegating everything to the 6502, did make the machine remarkably affordable.

            Now this, I can agree with 110%. As a bonus, it also made the machine remarkably FLEXIBLE as well. There was very little - if anything - that the hardware prevented you from doing. The Apple II was a true "hacker's" machine, in the spirit of the original meaning of the word.

            Just not remarkably dependable.

            For unusual values of dependable, maybe. :) I have dozens of Apple //e's, Super Serial Cards, Disk II drives & controllers, all of which are 20+ years old and all of which are still as functional as the day they were built. How many other systems from that era are anything but dumpster fodder right now?

            PS. U an looking for an Apple ][ DOS 3.3 boot disk. Email me if you can make me a copy.

            I use ProDOS for the most part, especially since I only have a IIgs set up active at the moment. Not to mention DOS 3.3 support for hard drives is dismal at best. I'd have to dig for a bit to get you a DOS 3.3 disk. However, I do know people that could readily provide you one, and I'd be happy to get you set up.
            Also, consider dropping by comp.sys.apple2 if talk of these older machines (and what they're still being actively used for today, like this [aol.com] incredibly cool project) is appealing to you.

  • My wife told me there was a bunch of computer gear they were throwing out at the university she attends, so I went rooting...
    Found an obviously early Apple motherboard. With $$$s in my eyes I was thinking it might be an Apple I. Alas, the motherboard is for an early Apple ][.
    I'm loath to throw it out, but I've got a bunch of computer junk, and don't need more.
    So, if you're interested, email me and I'll ship it to you COD. Or, if you're in the North SF Bay area (Sebastopol), I can maybe drop it by...

  • To sort the men out from the boys.... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Angostura ( 703910 ) on Monday May 09, 2005 @11:34AM (#12477785)
    What does

    3D0G mean to you, eh?

  • How I remember the blinking green monster of the Apple Eye-Eye monochrome screen so well...

    (Dissolve the picture, a la reminiscing mode, and cue the early 80s disco hits, if you please)

    I was working for a Roger-Cormanish Hollywood cheapo movie company with a boss that was into computer tech, and we were one of the first productions to use an accounting software that was, at the time, still being fine-tuned as the movie was shot. When we started out, there was no such thing as hard disk, and swapping

    • Re:Nostalgia (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Mikito ( 833242 )
      Ah yes, the Apple II. I had an Apple II once, but it was the later, smaller variant, the Apple IIc. I think one of the reasons why I chose to get it rather than an Atari 400, Commodore Vic-20 or TI-whatever, is that the Apple IIc was so small.

      Apple kept promising that they would release a small LCD screen that would attach to the back of the computer. Imagine the prospect of having a (semi)portable computer in the early '80s! The LCD screen as pictured in magazines must have been capable of showing just

  • Wow (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The first Apple II was sold on June 5, 1977. It was outfitted with a 1 mhz processor, 4 KB of RAM, a keyboard and a cassette interface.

    Imag *me ducks*

    whew, close call,

    gine a beo *whack*. ;)
    • wulf cluster [lazilong.com] (not the link I was looking for, but this guy generated fractals with a cluster of //c's) of Apple IIs?

      I was looking for a link where some guy took eight //e boards, stacked them up, created a network protocol via the gameport, and then wrote an Applesoft program to run the cluster. Anyone have a link?

  • The Apple II: The Machine That Started It All

    Not to nitpick, but wouldn't the computer with a "one" in the name be more usefully thought of as the one that started it all ?

    And that's not even getting into earlier computers that can be thought of as having started it all (EVIAC anyone?) or proto-computers (*ahem* Babbage's Difference and Analytical Engines) or proto-proto-computers (the Jacquard loom, the abacus, etc), or more broadly, the things that *really* started it all (the Big Bang, the orig

  • ah memories, lack of up down arrows../emulators (Score:3, Informative)

    by acomj ( 20611 ) on Monday May 09, 2005 @01:20PM (#12478925) Homepage
    I cut my computing teath on the apple //e. My friend
    had the ][+ with visicalc and 300 baud hayes modem.

    The visicalc spread sheet was interesting because the left-right arrows became up-down when you pressed the space bar.

    I remember
    Beagle Bros software. Apple basic. Nibble magazine. 7 color hi res graphics (2 white , 2 black, purple, blue and orange). Ultima /// one of the best games ever.

    The machine lives on in emulated form. How people got their 5.25 inch floppies into files I'll never now.

    You could set the whole screen on solid color will a call command
    if I remember correctly..

    10 hgr
    20 for i = 1 to 7
    30 hcolor =i
    40 hplot 0,0
    50 call 62454
    60 next i

    super effects!
  • I remember when I first got that machine of mine. I still kick myself for not keeping nor any of those precious programs I wrote. Nibble was the best (and still is the best) computer magazine ever. It gave you programs and taught you how to write programs and think.

    I remember when the MacIntosh came out...I was so jealous that I wrote a similiar desktop in assembly. How easy it was when Apple provided all the tech specs to extend your machine. I was 13 and I was and advid TV watcher of --- wait for it ---

  • first Apple II was sold on June 5, 1977

    I believe the date you mention is for the Apple that was sold as a kit. I received one of the first Apple ]['s, which came assembled and with a lot of upgrades over the kit version, through a Computerland store and was on the waiting list. It originally was to ship with 8kb or RAM but at the last minute Apple swithed them to 16kb. I believe I received mine in March/April 1978. Maybe May/June.

  • ... and has been now for -- what? -- almost 30 years!

    An early happy 28th birthday, Apple II.

  • You could do 2 DRAM accesses in the time it took for CPU clock cycle (1000 ns). Woz used this trick to do video DRAM access on one clock phase, and CPU DRAM access on the other ... oh how times have changed since 1977 in this regard.

  • Even more background at ITConversations (Score:3, Informative)

    by r7 ( 409657 ) on Tuesday May 10, 2005 @12:41AM (#12485251)
    Wozniak spoke extensively about this period at Apple in a great interview at Gnomedex. It's available in high quality streaming audio on ITConversations: http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail214.htm l [itconversations.com]
  • hey all my old kboards broke my son has snes, nes, gba et al emulation gone thru 8 or more he is using a GX keyboard from tip found 8 years ago only thing that takes his 1 key pounding on his 5500/225 on 9.2
  • Remember the Apricot or {Insert fruit name here} which was sued because they copied the apple roms. I believe they also had a Russian clone.

    I have an old Hong Kong made II+ that someone jury-rigged the power supply to let it work with 240V. Problem is it put the 110V on the ground if you plug it into 110V. Found that out the hard way. It's otherwise identical to the II+ I have.

    I'm not sure if this cloning had the effect of making the Apple more popular, mainly because they were illegally cloned until Lase
    • http://apple2clones.com/ [apple2clones.com] has a HUGE list of clones.

      Most were illegal, but some didn't even come with a ROM - you had to find a dead A2, and take it's ROM.

      Franklin's computers used their own ROM, but Apple figured out that they stole some of their code, and that's how they got sued.

      I actually had a Laser 128EX, and it was a NICE system. Some Apple software sniffed for the ROM, and if found, refused to run (Applesoft wasn't an exact copy in Laser's ROM, because then both Apple AND Microsoft would have prob

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