In computer news this week, 05/31/2000

Classic microcomputers - the Apple II+

I saw my first Apple II+ computer in 1979, and it stood apart from all the other first generations computers of its time. The Apple II was a unique machine in the industry, with its sleek sexy design, its Apple logo, its open architecture - allowing anyone to design plugin cards for it, and its capability to hook up to a color tv set and give you sound, color, and graphics - things you just didn't get with the monochrome CP/M computers it competed against. My first computer was an Apple II+ and I wish I still had it as much as I'd like to have my Ford Model A from my high school days.

The first printer that came with it was a tiny thermal printer; paper 4" wide and on a continuous roll. A real printer, meaning a dot matrix printer for which an interface would have to be written, could set you back around $ 1000. One of the earliest was called the Paper Tiger.

To take advantage of the Apple's color, you'd actually hook it up to your tv set, and get blocky color graphics and 40 columns of text, really big letters, and on a tv screen - hard to read. But at the time, it was wonderful. The Apple II was first marketed heavily into education markets, and it had a wonderful simulation game called the Lemonade stand, which was supposed to let your children run their own lemonade stand, and face the problems that all businesses face. It had random events programmed into it, so if they spent all their money buying sugar and lemons for that big 4th of July weekend, a freak cold front might descend on your area, and drive you out of business. And it had sounds too, and it was easy to program in Apple Basic, which was the language that was built into it.

Then space invaders and other higher resolution graphics games came out for it, and it became one of the hottest early game machines too.

There were several early computers which played a key role in the microcomputer revolution, and the Apple II was one of the most important players. In addition to all its hardware features, it also came with what was known as the killer application; Visicalc - the first spreadsheet program, which allowed people to crunch numbers and do financial modeling. Even the big computers of the time couldn't do this. The Apple II with Visicalc enabled managers to buy their own computers to do these tasks themselves, without being dependent on their centralized data processing departments.

Word spread so quickly that people would walk into computer stores asking for a Visicalc system, as if it was all one thing.. And you could buy the whole thing for only around three thousand dollars - put it almost anywhere and learn it quickly - it was a small, portable, productivity system

The Apple II became the cash cow of Apple Corporation for several more years, during which they introduced the absolutely horrible Apple III and the overpriced Lisa, and lasted until the Macintosh finally took off.

The Apple II retailed base price for around $ 1500 with 16 K of Ram and a hookup to a tape cassette player . A serious business system, with 48 K of RAM, 2 floppy disk drives, a real printer, monitor, visicalc and other software would run $ 3 - 5,000 or more.

Last week I was at an auction and a guy had a truckload of Apple II's and II E's. I asked how much he wanted for a complete Apple II system with monitor, 2 disk drives, and a box of floppy disks. "How about five bucks. " he said, and I had another classic microcomputer for my museum.

For Raw Bytes, this is Frank Delaney

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(509) 245-3736

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