ter needed, and it came in a sleek-looking case. A keyboard, mainboard, processor, RAM, everything except the monitor was included with the Apple II. The Apple II also had a built-in BASIC interpreter and, most importantly, it supported color graphics. This meant games, games, and more games. And despite all these features the Apple II was fairly affordable. It had a base price of $1200, which was more than most other products at the time, but the excess price was well worth the added functionality. Plus the Apple II had an open architecture, which meant it could be added to and expanded upon (Freiberger and Swaine 202-204).Another thing that set the Apple II apart from all the other personal computers was its disk drive. Right away Wozniak and Jobs realized the problem of storage space on the Apple II. Cassette tapes were too slow and unreliable, as were most conventional storage devices at the time. Immediately Jobs and Wozniak turned to the floppy drive. It was fast, accurate, and convenient. Wozniak hadnt worked much with disk drives before, but he had some knowledge and he learned fast. He spent week after week refining his design, replacing multiple chips with one that could do the same thing (Triumph). The timing involved with such a precise device also proved difficult, but once again Wozniak overcame the obstacles. This lead to the smallest, fastest, cheapest, and most reliable disk drive controller that had ever been built (Freiberger and Swaine 225).The Apple II experienced great sales right from the start, but it needed something else to completely dominate the market. That something else was a "killer application" (Triumph). It needed some piece of software that would, in itself, justify buying an Apple II. That killer application turned out to be VisiCalc, short for Visible Calculator. VisiCalc was developed by a business student named Dan Bricklin. At the time he was studying, all tables of data had to be done by hand. Wh...
