Apple II (original)

This article is about the first mass-produced Apple computer. For an overview of the series of computers based on it, see Apple II series.

Apple-II computer on display at the private Musée Bolo from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Lausanne.

An Apple II computer with an external modem

The Apple II (styled as apple ][) is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and introduced in 1977. It is the first model in a series of computers which were produced until Apple IIe production ceased in November 1993.

In 2013, after more than 35 years of Apple II released, the original DOS source code can be seen at the Computer History Museum and its website. Paul Laughton, the creator of the code has donated it.

History

The earliest Apple IIs were assembled in Silicon Valley, and later in Texas; printed circuit boards were manufactured in Ireland and Singapore. The first computers went on sale on June 10, 1977 with a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor running at 1 MHz, two game paddles, 4 kB of RAM, an audio cassette interface for loading programs and storing data, and the Integer BASIC programming language built into the ROMs. The video controller displayed 24 lines by 40 columns of monochrome, upper-case-only (the original character set matches ASCII characters 20_h to 5F_h) text on the screen, with NTSC composite video output suitable for display on a TV monitor, or on a regular TV set by way of a separate RF modulator. The original retail price of the computer was $1,298 USD (with 4 kB of RAM) and $2,638 USD (with the maximum 48 kB of RAM). To reflect the computer's color graphics capability, the Apple logo on the casing was represented using rainbow stripes, which remained a part of Apple's corporate logo until early 1998.

Overview

The original Apple II used data cassette storage like other microcomputers of the time. In 1978 they introduced an external 5¼-inch floppy disk drive, the Disk II, attached via a controller card that plugged into one of the computer's expansion slots (usually slot 6), which was used for data storage and retrieval to replace cassettes. The Disk II interface, created by Steve Wozniak, was regarded as an engineering masterpiece for its economy of electronic components.

The approach taken in the Disk II controller was typical of Wozniak's designs. The Apple II used several engineering shortcuts to save hardware and reduce costs. For example, taking advantage of the way that 6502 instructions only access memory every other clock cycle, the video generation circuitry's memory access on the otherwise unused cycles avoided memory contention issues and also eliminated the need for a separate refresh circuit for the DRAM chips. Rather than use a complex analog-to-digital circuit to read the outputs of the game controller, Wozniak used a simple timer circuit whose period was proportional to the resistance of the game controller, and used a software loop to measure the timer.

The text and graphics screens had a complex arrangement (the scanlines were not stored in sequential areas of memory) which was reputedly due to Wozniak's realization that doing it that way would save a chip; it was less expensive to have software calculate or look up the address of the required scanline than to include the extra hardware. Similarly, in the high-resolution graphics mode, color was determined by pixel position and could thus be implemented in software, saving Wozniak the chips needed to convert bit patterns to colors. This also allowed for sub-pixel font rendering since orange and blue pixels appeared half a pixel-width further to the right on the screen than green and purple pixels.

Display and graphics

Color on the Apple II series took advantage of a quirk of the NTSC television signal standard, which made color display relatively easy and inexpensive to implement. The original NTSC television signal specification was black-and-white. Color was tacked on later by adding a 3.58-MHz subcarrier signal that was partially ignored by B&W TV sets. Color is encoded based on the phase of this signal in relation to a reference color burst signal. The result is that the position, size, and intensity of a series of pulses define color information. These pulses can translate into pixels on the computer screen.

The Apple II display provided two pixels per subcarrier cycle. When the color burst reference signal was turned on and the computer attached to a color display, it could display green by showing one alternating pattern of pixels, magenta with an opposite pattern of alternating pixels, and white by placing two pixels next to each other. Later, blue and orange became available by tweaking the offset of the pixels by half a pixel-width in relation to the color-burst signal. The high-resolution display offered more colors simply by compressing more, narrower pixels into each subcarrier cycle.

The coarse, low-resolution graphics display mode worked differently, as it could output a pattern of dots per pixel to offer more color options. These patterns were stored in the character generator ROM and replaced the text character bit patterns when the computer was switched to low-res graphics mode. The text mode and low-res graphics mode used the same memory region and the same circuitry was used for both.

Sound

The epitome of the Apple II design philosophy was the Apple II sound circuitry. Rather than having a dedicated sound-synthesis chip, the Apple II had a toggle circuit that could only emit a click through a built-in speaker or a line out jack; all other sounds (including two, three and, eventually, four-voice music and playback of audio samples and speech synthesis) were generated entirely by software that clicked the speaker at just the right times. It was nearly a decade before an Apple II was released with a dedicated sound chip (though with six expansion slots, users could add sound functionality with various sound cards). Similar techniques were used for cassette storage: the cassette output worked the same as the speaker, and the input was a simple zero-crossing detector that served as a relatively crude (1-bit) audio digitizer. Routines in the ROM were used to encode and decode data in frequency-shift keying for the cassette.

Third-party devices and applications

Wozniak's open design and the Apple II's multiple expansion slots permitted a wide variety of third-party devices, including Apple II peripheral cards such as serial controllers, display controllers, memory boards, hard disks, networking components, and realtime clocks. There were plug-in expansion cards – such as the Z80-card – that permitted the Apple to use the Z80 processor and run a multitude of programs developed under the CP/M operating system, including the dBase II database and the WordStar word processor. There was also a third-party 6809 card that would allow OS-9 Level One to be run. Third-party sound cards greatly improved audio capabilities, allowing simple music synthesis and text-to-speech functions. Eventually, Apple II accelerator cards were created to double or quadruple the computer's speed.

Power source

Wozniak, whose passion was circuitry, didn't concern himself with the issue of heat. But the power source necessary to keep all those circuits functioning can make a lot of heat, requiring a fan for cooling. Steve Jobs thought fans an inelegant, low-tech contraption and looked for someone who could come up with a better one.

Rod Holt is credited (for example in the Walter Isaacson biography of Jobs) with the solution. Holt employed a Switched-mode power supply design. This generated far less unwanted heat than a linear power supply, which most other home computers of the time used.

Isaacson quotes Wozniak saying that this was not something he could have done. "I only knew vaguely what a switching power supply was."

Reception

After seeing a crude, wire-wrapped prototype demonstrated by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in November 1976, BYTE predicted in April 1977 that the Apple II "may be the first product to fully qualify as the 'appliance computer' ... a completed system which is purchased off the retail shelf, taken home, plugged in and used". The computer's color graphics capability especially impressed the magazine. In the following issue, BYTE published a detailed description by Wozniak of his design; the article began, "To me, a personal computer should be small, reliable, convenient to use and inexpensive". The magazine published a favorable review of the computer in March 1978, concluding that "For the user that wants color graphics, the Apple II is the only practical choice available in the 'appliance' computer class".

See also

• Apple II series
• Apple I
• Apple III
• OpenEmulator, an emulator of the Apple II