The Apple II

The Apple II was launched in 1979 and over the following years there were several revisions.

One major difference between Apple and other manufacturers of the time was the total openness to the machine design, with a very high standard of documentation made available by Apple, this lead to a wide variety of extras from many different manufacturers.

The Apple II is said to have started the computer revolution of the 70/80s, as a result of this machines superior specification and expandability options with as many as Eight expansion slots, each of these slots were seen as two sections of memory by the CPU, consequently peripheral cards could have 2k of controlling software on board eliminating the need to link special driver programs ( Plug and Play in 1979 ?) the expansion cards available were very wide ranging including disk controllers, light pens printer ports and memory cards capable of taking the RAM in to Megabytes.

These machines were used in many different applications and were also very popular in education. Back in the early eighties there were more that 11 operating systems 27 languages and more than a dozen text editor available for the Apple II, this was more than any other machine of the time.

The machine used the 6502 processor with a clock speed of 1 MHz and on the IIe had a 16kb ROM with 64kb of RAM expandable to 128kb or more with bank switching, the graphics were capable of 24 line 40 characters monochrome and low resolution graphics of 48x40 in 16 colours or high resolution of 192x280 in 6 colours.