The Apple II At 30

turnitover sends us to eWEEK for an appreciation of the Apple II on the 30th anniversary of its shipping. An overview of the history of the Apple II puts it in context. A nice tidbit: how important the floppy drive was to sales. The article quotes Sellam Ismail, the proprietor of VintageTech, which maintains archives of computers, documents, and software: "You could think of the Apple II's importance on two levels — the Woz level and the Steve Jobs level." The former refers to its allure to hackers, and the latter to its appliance-like polish, a first for its time, There is also an interview with Woz, who says, "[A]t the start there were no computers in the home — we had to make the word computer compatible with homes."

Comments

I just wanted to take a break.

[hmccabe]

Why am I wasting time here? I should proofread my Physics term paper. I call for a moratorium on Apple fluff pieces during finals week.

Re:Again forgetting Commodore

[Erik K. Veland]

Surely you are joking. The Commodore PET with it's sub-par graphic system and unusable chiclet keyboard was released in September 1977:

The 2001 was announced in 1977 and started deliveries around September. However they remained back-ordered for months, and to ease deliveries they eventually cancelled the 4 KiB version early the next year.

The first Apple II computers went on sale on June 5, 1977.

I think you have been huffing too much of the Commodore propaganda!

I was a huge Commodore fan in the eighties, but that doesn't necessarily make me a history revisionist.

Re:Updated version.

[LKM]

It takes guts to publicly admit that you neither have a clue about Mac users, nor about Islam.