Based on a 6502 CPU the Apple II was the first successful computer for the company. Designed to be expandable and with peripherals such as disk drives, joysticks and plenty of software the machine was selling so quickly that the company was not able to fulfill the whole demand. The design was quite neat and simple; the top was easily removed for the installation of expansion cards and could support on top the disk drives and a monitor. The expansion cards have to be fitted in the correct expansion slot. The design of the expansion slots was so successful that IBM used this technique for its expansion peripherals. Since Apple II was released in different versions the Graphic and peripherals varied between version and version. Although it used a commercial tape cassette recorder most of the software was released on floppy disk. This mainly because the speed of the cassette was only 300bps. Apple produced a black case version of Apple II, this version was enhanced with special peripherals such as sound processors and special hard drives.
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| Apple ][ |
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US $1298 with 4K RAM
US $2638 with 48K RAM
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| IA2S2 – 674779 |
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| 1977 – 1981 |
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| 6502 8 bit Processor working at a frequency of 1.023 Mhz. |
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| 16 Kbytes ROM AppleSoft Basic. 64 Kbytes Ram. An expandable Ram Module was released to increase the memory with additional 16Kb. |
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Large, Light Grey, with top panel easy removable to access inside. The top also supports a monitor with two disk drives. The keyboard is standard US ASCII with 63 normal style keys. The reset key was replaced by a backslash but in basic the key is still the reset. The new version of reset key is away from the keyboard and has a very different shape. You need to press control-reset key for a warm reset and openapple-reset for a cold reset. The solidapple-reset was used for diagnostic mode.
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| Three internal modes: Text Mode 40×24 128 character ASCII set monochrome which reside in rom, Low Res 40×48 PEL, using all 16 colours or 40×40 with 4 lines of text with 16 colours, High Res 280×192 using 6 colours and 280×160 with 4 lines of text and 6 colours. Composite monitor colour scheme used only 6 colours due to colours are encoded as pixel patterns. Two other external modes could be added with 80 column card. |
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| Simple beeper generated sound thru CPU also it was possible to generate sound thru cassette tape output. |
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| 8 x Apple][ Expansion slots, 1 x Ear, and 1 x Mic. Expansion slots configuration are as follows: Slot0 Ram Card, Slot1 Printer card, Slot2 Serial or Modem, Slot3 left empty if slot0 is occupied, Slot4 CP/M Z80 coprocessor card, sound card or mouse card, Slot5 Second floppy disk, graphics tablet, SCSI, or hard drive card, Slot6 Primary floppy disk card, Slot7 Co-Processor card. Slot0 has reserved for 16KB ram as it has extra signals to implement this function. |
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| Internal power supply with +5v, -5v +12v, -12v output. |
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| Dimensions 380mm x 450mm x 150mm (W x L x H) Weight Approx 3Kg |
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40,000 machines
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