Apple II
The Apple II (stylized as ) is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products. It was designed primarily by Steve Wozniak; Jerry Manock developed the design of Apple II's foam-molded plastic case, Rod Holt developed the switching power supply, while Steve Jobs's role in the design of the computer was limited to overseeing Jerry Manock's work on the plastic case. It was introduced by Jobs and Wozniak at the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire, and marks Apple's first launch of a personal computer aimed at a consumer market—branded toward American households rather than businessmen or computer hobbyists. ''Byte'' magazine referred to the Apple II, Commodore PET 2001, and TRS-80 as the "1977 Trinity". As the Apple II had the defining feature of being able to display color graphics, the Apple logo was redesigned to have a spectrum of colors. The Apple II is the first model in the Apple II series, followed by App ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Apple Inc
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California, United States. Apple is the largest technology company by revenue (totaling in 2021) and, as of June 2022, is the world's biggest company by market capitalization, the fourth-largest personal computer vendor by unit sales and second-largest mobile phone manufacturer. It is one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft. Apple was founded as Apple Computer Company on April 1, 1976, by Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and Ronald Wayne to develop and sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. It was incorporated by Jobs and Wozniak as Apple Computer, Inc. in 1977 and the company's next computer, the Apple II, became a best seller and one of the first mass-produced microcomputers. Apple went public in 1980 to instant financial success. The company developed computers featuring innovative graphical user interface ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Apple II Series
The Apple II series (trademarked with square brackets as "Apple ] ''" and rendered on later models as "Apple //") is a family of home computers, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.), and launched in 1977 with the Apple II, original Apple II. In terms of ease of use, features, and expandability, the Apple II was a major advancement over its predecessor, the Apple I, a limited-production bare circuit board computer for electronics hobbyists. Through 1988, a number of models were introduced, with the most popular, the Apple IIe, remaining relatively unchanged into the 1990s. A model with more advanced graphics and sound and a 16-bit processor, the Apple IIGS, was added in 1986. It remained compatible with earlier Apple II models, but the IIGS had more in common with mid-1980s systems like the Atari ST, Amiga, and Acorn Archimedes. The Apple II w ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Integer BASIC
Integer BASIC is a BASIC interpreter written by Steve Wozniak for the Apple I and Apple II computers. Originally available on cassette for the Apple I in 1976, then included in ROM on the Apple II from its release in 1977, it was the first version of BASIC used by many early home computer owners. The only numeric data type was the integer; floating-point numbers were not supported. Using integers allowed numbers to be stored in a much more compact 16-bit format that could be more rapidly read and processed than the 32- or 40-bit floating-point formats found in most BASICs of the era. This made it so fast that Bill Gates complained when it outperformed Microsoft BASIC in benchmarks. However, this also limited its applicability as a general-purpose language. Another difference with other BASICs of the era is that Integer BASIC treated strings as arrays of characters, similar to the system in C or Fortran 77. Substrings were accessed using array slicing rather than string fun ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Parallel Port
In computing, a parallel port is a type of interface found on early computers (personal and otherwise) for connecting peripherals. The name refers to the way the data is sent; parallel ports send multiple bits of data at once (parallel communication), as opposed to serial communication, in which bits are sent one at a time. To do this, parallel ports require multiple data lines in their cables and port connectors and tend to be larger than contemporary serial ports, which only require one data line. There are many types of parallel ports, but the term has become most closely associated with the printer port or Centronics port found on most personal computers from the 1970s through the 2000s. It was an industry ''de facto'' standard for many years, and was finally standardized as IEEE 1284 in the late 1990s, which defined the Enhanced Parallel Port (EPP) and Extended Capability Port (ECP) bi-directional versions. Today, the parallel port interface is virtually non- ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Disk II
The Disk II Floppy Disk Subsystem, often rendered as Disk ] '', is a -inch floppy disk drive designed by controller card (which can control up to two drives) and cable. The Disk II was designed specifically for use with the Apple II">Disk controller">controller card (which can control up to two drives) and cable. The Disk II was designed specifically for use with the Apple II personal computer family to replace the slower Cassette tape#Data recording">cassette tape storage. These floppy drives cannot be used with any Macintosh without an Apple IIe Card as doing so will damage the drive or the controller. Apple produced at least six variants of the basic -inch Disk II concept over the course of the Apple II series' lifetime: The Disk II, the Disk III, the DuoDisk, the Disk IIc, the UniDisk 5.25" and the Apple 5.25 Drive. While all of these drives look different, and use four different connector types, they're all electronically extremely similar. They can all use the same low-lev ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Apple II Plus
The Apple II Plus (stylized as Apple ] or apple plus) is the second model of the Apple II series of personal computers produced by Apple Computer. It was sold from June 1979 to December 1982. Approximately 380,000 II Pluses were sold during its four years in production before being replaced by the IIe in 1983. Features Memory The Apple II Plus shipped with 16 KB, 32 KB or 48 KB of main RAM, expandable to 64 KB by means of the Language Card, an expansion card that could be installed in the computer's slot 0. The Apple's 6502 microprocessor could support a maximum of 64 KB of address space, and a machine with 48 KB RAM reached this limit because of the additional 12 KB of read-only memory and 4 KB of I/O addresses. For this reason, the extra RAM in the language card was bank-switched over the machine's built-in ROM, allowing code loaded into the additional memory to be used as if it actually were ROM. Users could thus load Integer BASIC into th ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Panasonic
formerly between 1935 and 2008 and the first incarnation of between 2008 and 2022, is a major Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation, headquartered in Kadoma, Osaka. It was founded by Kōnosuke Matsushita in 1918 as a lightbulb socket manufacturer. In addition to consumer electronics, of which it was the world's largest maker in the late 20th century, Panasonic offers a wide range of products and services, including rechargeable batteries, automotive and avionic systems, industrial systems, as well as home renovation and construction. Panasonic has a primary listing on the Tokyo Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the Nikkei 225 and TOPIX 100 indices. It has a secondary listing on the Nagoya Stock Exchange. Corporate name From 1935 to October 1, 2008, the company's corporate name was "Matsushita Electric Industrial Co." (MEI). On January 10, 2008, the company announced that it would change its name to "Panasonic Corporation", in effect on October 1, 2008 ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Rod Holt
Frederick Rodney Holt Moritz, Michael, '' The Little Kingdom,'' ebook (born 1934) is an American computer engineer and political activist. He is Apple employee #5, and developed the unique power supply for the 1977 Apple II. Actor Ron Eldard portrayed him in the 2013 film, '' Jobs.'' Background Holt was born in 1934 to a psychiatry resident father and artist and teacher mother. He became interested in electronics by the age of 14 and taught ham radio courses for Wellesley High School by the age of 16. In 1952, after graduating from high school, Holt married his high school girlfriend Joanne. He also joined Ohio State University as a math major. He and Joanne had two children, Christine and Cheryl, during this period. Holt later stated that while at OSU, he also "became entranced with motorcycles and opened up my own motorcycle shop. That adventure failed within a year, however, and I then worked in the electronics industry to support my family. I continued to race bikes int ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
8-bit Computing
In computer architecture, 8-bit integers or other data units are those that are 8 bits wide (1 octet). Also, 8-bit central processing unit (CPU) and arithmetic logic unit (ALU) architectures are those that are based on registers or data buses of that size. Memory addresses (and thus address buses) for 8-bit CPUs are generally larger than 8-bit, usually 16-bit. 8-bit microcomputers are microcomputers that use 8-bit microprocessors. The term '8-bit' is also applied to the character sets that could be used on computers with 8-bit bytes, the best known being various forms of extended ASCII, including the ISO/IEC 8859 series of national character sets especially Latin 1 for English and Western European languages. The IBM System/360 introduced byte-addressable memory with 8-bit bytes, as opposed to bit-addressable or decimal digit-addressable or word-addressable memory, although its general-purpose registers were 32 bits wide, and addresses were contained in the lower 24 bits of ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
Microcomputer
A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer having a central processing unit (CPU) made out of a microprocessor. The computer also includes memory and input/output (I/O) circuitry together mounted on a printed circuit board (PCB). Microcomputers became popular in the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of increasingly powerful microprocessors. The predecessors to these computers, mainframes and minicomputers, were comparatively much larger and more expensive (though indeed present-day mainframes such as the IBM System z machines use one or more custom microprocessors as their CPUs). Many microcomputers (when equipped with a keyboard and screen for input and output) are also personal computers (in the generic sense). An early use of the term ''personal computer'' in 1962 predates microprocessor-based designs. ''(See "Personal Computer: Computers at Companies" reference below)''. A ''microcomputer'' used as an embedded control system may have no human-readable i ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
|
West Coast Computer Faire
The West Coast Computer Faire was an annual computer industry conference and exposition most often associated with San Francisco, its first and most frequent venue. The first fair was held in 1977 and was organized by Jim Warren and Bob Reiling. At the time, it was the biggest computer show in the world, intended to popularize the personal computer in the home. The West Coast PC Faire was formed to provide a more specialized show. However, Apple Inc. stopped exhibiting at the West Coast Computer Faire, refusing to exhibit at any show other than COMDEX that also had PC-based exhibits. In 1983, Warren sold the rights to the Faire for US$3 million to Prentice Hall, who later sold it to Sheldon Adelson, the owner of Interface Group and COMDEX. In total, sixteen shows were held, with the last in 1991. After Warren sold the show, it had a few more good years, and then declined rapidly. History The first fair took place on April 16–17, 1977, in San Francisco Civic Auditorium, and ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |