Apple II Computer Launch

The Apple II arrived at a moment when computers were still room-sized industrial equipment or hobbyist kits soldered together by enthusiasts in garages. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had formed Apple Computer Company in 1976 after Wozniak designed the original Apple I, a bare-circuit-board machine that Jobs convinced a local electronics retailer to stock. The Apple II, unveiled April 16, 1977, at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco, changed the calculus entirely. It came in a beige plastic case that looked like a typewriter, plugged into a standard wall outlet and television set, and sold for $1,298-expensive by today's standards but a revelation compared to the $20,000-plus price tags on competing systems.

Wozniak's engineering made this possible. His design used fewer chips than competitors' machines, ran cooler, and included color graphics capability at a time when most computers output only text. The machine shipped with 4 kilobytes of RAM, expandable to 48 KB., and ran at 1 megahertz. More crucially, it came with Applesoft BASIC already built in-meaning buyers could start programming immediately, no additional purchases required. That combination of accessibility, color output, and built-in software made the Apple II genuinely different from machines like the Commodore PET and Tandy TRS-80, which hit shelves around the same time.

The Apple II's real power emerged over the next few years, not at launch. VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet application, arrived in 1979 and ran only on the Apple II initially-that single piece of software justified the purchase price for thousands of small-business owners who had never thought of computers as business tools. The machine stayed in production, with incremental improvements, for sixteen years. By 1981, Apple had shipped 25,000 units; by 1983, that number topped 1 million. The Apple II established the template for personal computing: a closed, integrated system with a friendly interface, priced for individuals rather than institutions.

Steve Jobs understood something his competitors didn't: computers weren't just faster calculators for engineers. They were tools that ordinary people might actually want. The Apple II's industrial design-the work of Jerry Manock and others at Apple-signaled that. So did its price point, which positioned it as attainable technology rather than laboratory equipment. The machine never dominated the market in raw numbers; IBM's PC, launched in 1981, eventually outsold it many times over. But the Apple II proved the personal computer market existed and was worth building for, which made everything that followed-the Macintosh, the iPod, the iPhone-possible.