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The Apple II: The Machine That Started It All

Posted by Hemos on 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."

6 of 83 comments (clear)

  1. From TFA by yardbird · · Score: 3, Funny
    (Breakout did not need uppercase and lowercase characters, so Wozniak did not include them).

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

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  2. Well, I tell ya'll, kids by liangzai · · Score: 4, Funny

    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?

  3. Spellcheck by Fish+Heads · · Score: 2, Funny

    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...

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  4. To sort the men out from the boys.... by Angostura · · Score: 2, Funny

    What does

    3D0G mean to you, eh?

  5. Wow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny
    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*. ;)
  6. Re:Apple II innovations by sootman · · Score: 2, Funny

    And the 6502 is so great, it'll still be in use in the year 3000.

    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.

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