Apple II Computer History and Review

Oh either I was just putting together this Apple 2 puzzle one of the many items you could get in the Apple gift catalog back in the day you can also buy Apple branded kites clothes belt buckles and even cigarette lighters but it's a more significant item that I want to look at today a computer that led to early success at Apple and made Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak young multi millionaires that computer was the Apple 2 and here it is in its original glory truly a work of art this particular unit has a serial number of 55 71 this meant at the time it was sold there were less than six thousand Apple users in the world considering there's been about half a billion i phone sold that's pretty crazy to think about now the computer was groundbreaking it was what Apple described as a complete ready to use computer at a time when most were still sold in kits it was one of the first computers to be in a plastic case to come with standard video support and to display low and high res color graphics part of the brilliance of its design was in its openness no screws held the lid in place you could simply pop it right off and access the motherboard and expandability slots this led to endless possibilities and as a result thousands of add-on cards were built and are still being built and this helped keep the Apple 2 series in production for 16 years now before I talk more about this machine let's put things in context let's go back for a moment to 1976 this was an important time in vintage computer and gaming history this was also an important time in the disco scene but I'll let someone else cover that topic now by 76 the Altair 8800 had been on the market for about a year the altar is considered by many to be the first successful personal computer although technically speaking there were others around before it such as the MCM 70 developed in 1973 it was also during this time that a small fledgling company called Microsoft had written basic interpreters for the altar terminals became available for it and for the first time there was a widely available personal computer that could actually be made to do useful things soon other companies joined the personal computer revolution by releasing their own computers like the Maus Kim Won the first computer to use the legendary 6502 microprocessor this computer also gave birth to micro Jets the first software title to sell over 10,000 copies for home computers and best of all it only required one kilobyte of memory now that's what I call optimized code there was also southwest technical products corporation who released an early competitor to the Altair called the 6800 this is a 1609 model released a couple years later but it has a similar appearance you can see unlike the altar that did away with all those intimidating switches and lights and opted for two big buttons and this thing was built tough the case feels like it's made out of sheet metal very durable it's meant to survive a war but will really distinguish this computer from others is the fact that it had a monitor program called Nick bug so when you booted it up with a terminal you had immediate access to several functions a very early example of a plug-and-play computer but it still didn't have a wide appeal in part because of a so limit kick and you didn't have fully assembled computers like the polymorphic system eight eight one three but a computer like that with three districts cost over four grand and this was in 1977 enter in Steve Wozniak an engineer at Hewlett Packard who on the side had recently developed the prototype for Ataris breakout Steve Jobs was commissioned by Nolan Bushnell to create it and got the help of woz to complete it soon after joining the homebrew Computer Club he made his first personal computer something that he could play with and share with other club members that computer was the Apple one it was actually just a modified terminal that he had built earlier but with a few tweaks including the addition of the new low-cost lost 6502 now the Apple one was very simple it produced only black and white text and printed at only 60 characters a second but that wasn't unexpected since the terminal was only meant to communicate over a modem and the modems could only process 30 characters a second the Steve's tried selling the computer to HP as hary and Commodore but nobody wanted it and they ended up producing about 200 Apple ones in total soon woz was already planning the Apple 2 and he had a gamers mindset when designing it he wanted a computer that could display color graphics produce sound effects and that programmers could write games for in software this was a huge departure from having to build them using hardware like he did with breakout one of his goals was to actually replicate the game breakout using software well it worked he wrote breakout in about 30 minutes using the machines integer basic language now the fact that basic was stored in ROM was a huge deal this meant that users could immediately start to write and save their own programs in a user-friendly language there was also a mini assembler stored in memory for users to develop and debug assembly language programs but for larger programs the use of third-party assemblers like Merlin would be needed Merlin was extremely popular and had several versions released throughout the years incidentally the original terminator used apple to assembly code when we see the world through the terminators eyes the code was actually borrowed from an article in nipple magazine now the Apple 2 was one of the so-called 1977 Trinity of computers the others being the Commodore pet and the trs-80 Apple 2 sales were actually slow to start selling under 1,000 units in 77 and under 10,000 by the end of 78 however three key events soon occurred that would lead to big sales one of those was when Steve Jobs helped when a bidding war with MEK to secure the Apple twos place in state schools computers soon became a vital classroom tool and the Apple 2 dominated the North American education sector for much of the 80s and even part of the 90s another event was Apple's disk drive support originally the only storage option you had were cassette tapes but they were slow and unreliable so woz created the applicants Riband controller card in 78 now at the time controllers usually had around 50 chips woz his design has a fraction of that and it runs incredibly fast now this is an early production drive the 1050 ahthe one made created by shoe guard associates but Apple soon outsourced the drives for cost savings and would go on to sell over a million of them the last event was the release of the world's first electronic spreadsheet VisiCalc it was created and released in 79 by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston many businesses bought Apple twos just to use this software VisiCalc soon became the first ever killer app it was subsequently ported to many other platforms and inspired the likes of Lotus 1-2-3 and Excel which even to this day looks remarkably similar to the visit calc interface one limitation of the Apple 2 was its sound capabilities the computer had no dedicated sound chip the speaker could be clicked at different lengths and speeds to produce sound effects but they were very basic and it took tremendous effort to make a program have motion and sound seemingly occur at the same time in games like moon patrol various sound cards soon emerged like the mocking board which could support six audio voices and speech synthesis here's an example of a game using that technology the ALF music car could support even more voices and some beautiful arrangements were made for it like this one by Bach the Apple two gs model supported this automatically however arguably the best quality sound would be produced courtesy of the passport MIDI card as demonstrated by Ultima 5 heard here most people wouldn't spend $10,000 for example to have your dishes washed aside from sound cards there were all kinds of interesting add-ons being developed some practical ones like the accelerator cards and scuzzy controllers and some curious ones like the topo robot released by Andrew BA in 1983 which was under the direction of dr. wily and dr. light oh wait no that's the plot for Mega Man I mean Nolan Bushnell these things were destined for a life of servitude to the humans but luckily for them not too many soul who's going to pay $1600 for a home computer on wheels now people like me children of the 80s and early 90s probably weren't playing with expensive computer-controlled robots but we were playing with lots of games and the Apple 2 had thousands of them many whose franchises still exist today some notable companies who got their start on the system include Ciara Naughty Dog Electronic Arts sir Tech Origin the founders of Ede software like John Carmack John Romero and Tom Hall even Will Wright creator of The Sims and SimCity all these folks cut their teeth on this machine here's some notable Apple 2 games many of which debuted or were exclusive to the platform - yeah Hey even to this day games are still being produced and new hardware is still being made here's a Western RPG called lawless legends that's still in development but in the meantime you can play recently made games like flappy bird genius or try one of my games like lamb chops or retro fever which I co-wrote with another vintage computer enthusiast great companies like Beagle brothers released programming utilities and aids which many folks including myself still used to this day which is a real testament to the quality of their software Iko Brothers was actually headquartered right here in San Diego my hometown and one of the office buildings just behind me now in a somewhat recent revelation I learned that my dad back in the 80s had renovated their office and he'd also done some work in Burke Hersey's home the founder of the company when I messaged Burt about this he confirmed it and he said that he still uses the desk that my dad built him all those years ago pretty cool stuff to examine the complete history of the Apple 2 and all of its accomplishments but take too long with video so I'll leave it here but I hope you enjoyed this look back at some awesome retro technology thanks for watching

Channel: TanRu Nomad

Views: 85,987

Keywords: review, retrospective, overview, original, apple ii, apple 2, apple, iie, iic, iigs, ii plus, integer basic, applesoft basic, assembly, mockingboard, alf music, midi, music, sound, 1970s, 1980s, retro, vintage, computer, steve, wozniak, jobs, Apple II Series, Classic, Collection, legendary, top, games, prince of persia, karateka, lode runner, ceiling zero, muse, castle wolfenstein, first, personal, 1977, 1978, 1979, phasor, greatest

Id: Mjd7pN57nU4

Length: 12min 49sec (769 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 16 2015