The Apple II Turns 35 Today 173
harrymcc writes "35 years ago this week, at San Francisco's first West Coast Computer Faire, a tiny startup named Apple demonstrated its new personal computer, the Apple II. It was the company's first blockbuster product — the most important PC of its time, and, just maybe, the most important PC ever released, period."
Most important PC released? Please (Score:0, Interesting)
More RDS in action.
Commodore, Atari, Coleco, Tandy, IBM - all were there to eat Apples lunch. There were other kit-based machines before the Apple. If they hadn't marketted it as a consumer durable, someone else soon would have. It's not like it really took visionary insight to know that people would want to buy a computer, if it was affordable.
So go wank off to your stickybear games, or whatever you do. Imma fire up my C64 and play some jumpman.
Re:I started on one of those (Score:3, Interesting)
My 48K Apple ][ was my first major purchase (in 1981); it cost more than the nonrunning car I bought in 1980, and more than the total of the car and the repair costs to get it running. Saved every penny, used a used color TV for a monitor, hacked a gameport print driver cable, and with later purchases played marathon sessions of Wizardry 1 and 2. It took a year to save up enough for the floppy drive (a Lobo, not an Apple Disk ][ which I could not afford for another year) and a better monitor.
I still have my ][, it gets pulled out every few months and hooked to the TV to play old games on, annoy the nieces and nephews with 8 bit graphics and raspy sound effects, and totally make my day. Dunno about yours, but my Apple ][ is forever ;)
(I still have the car too but its back to not running...)
One Of The Most Expensive As Well (Score:5, Interesting)
Although not strictly the Apple II, the IIe was the first real computer brought into my house growing up. Now that I'm a professional working adult, looking back on that box with the green monitor, the one floppy drive, and other details I wondered how in the world my parents were able to justify and afford the thing! As the article correctly points out, at $1200~ 1980 dollars that is around $5000 today! That was probably the most expensive piece of technology in the house at the time and I never realized it at the time where instead I was simply happy to mess around with Applesoft Basic and various games.
Re:I started on one of those (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>sixteen colors
You poor souls. My PC had 4096 colors, near-CD-quality sound, and true multitasking (preemptive). In 1985. My PC was a Commodore. ;-)
Re:Most important PC released? Please (Score:4, Interesting)
Commodore, Atari, Coleco, Tandy, IBM - all were there to eat Apples lunch.
And every one of them is out of the PC business today.
Re:I started on one of those (Score:5, Interesting)
OTOH, I had little to no interest whatsoever in the internet at first, I couldn't see what was so fasinating about 'diplaying a formatted document on a remote computer'.
Re:I started on one of those (Score:1, Interesting)
Nah. Sinclair were much more important in this space. http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/computers/computers.htm We were using them in robotics development at uni in Australia by the 80's and their instruction set was pretty much what the world is based around today. The Mk 14 hit the market in 1977.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I started on one of those (Score:5, Interesting)
I was able to get a standing pass out of art class as a sophomore in high school to go work on art projects in the Apple II lab for a couple of months. Our art teacher was on maternity leave. I decided I did not like the substitute teacher, and luckily for me she had been given the explicit instruction to let me do whatever the heck I wanted to. So I elected to spend my time elsewhere.
The graphics available from BASIC on the Apple ][+ were crude, but better IMHO than the programmable-character "graphics" available on the early Commodore and TI machines. I wrote code for all of them -- including a program that let you use a joystick or paddle for an on-screen "Etch-A-Sketch" style drawing program that would let you save and restore your drawings. Doing that by re-defining characters on the fly in BASIC was not much fun. It did have an advantage over the "real" Etch-A-Sketch in that you had to hold down a joystick button in order to draw, otherwise the single-pixel cursor would just be moved around. I wrote that same program in Commodore Basic for my best friend's PET (at his house while he spent the time playing Intellivision), TI-Basic, and AppleSoft Basic.
That was the level I was at when I started trying to do "art" on the computer. While playing with things and reading magazines from the stack in the corner of the lab, I learned about how the Apple colors were actually pulled off, and realized that White 1/White 2 and Black 1/Black 2 were a half-pixel offset from each other. This allowed you to draw a white line and then draw a pixel-shifted black line on top of it to get thinner lines, which worked great for crosshatching and other fill effects. That got me interested in the fact that the fonts exploited this feature to get smoother curves on-screen, and I began exploring writing my own fonts and doing graphics from inside the assembler/monitor. As a result, I taught myself 6502 assembler and wrote fast "vector" graphics routines that I could call from BASIC, as well as routines that let me draw my own text on-screen as well, not constrained to the rectangular grid of normal characters.
I had to demo how I had been spending my time to my real art teacher when she returned. She appreciated what I had accomplished artistically (including various "vector" animations), but understood little of it. Her eyes glazed over when I began explaining assembly language routines. I got an "A" for my self-directed art study though, which consisted mostly of learning 6502 assembler :-)