rking in computer design for a while when, in 1976, he designed what would become the Apple 1. This was Wozniak’s first contribution to the personal computer. The Apple 1 was built in printed circuit board form when Jobs insisted it could be sold. In April of 1976 at the Homebrew Computer Club In Palo Alto, the Apple 1 made its debut, but few people took it very seriously. The Apple 1 was based on the MOStek 6502 chip, whereas most other kit computers were built from the Intel 8080 (Apple 1). The Apple 1 was not very successful in 1976. It was sold through small retailers and only included the circuit board. A tape-interface was sold separately, but you had to build your own case for the Apple 1. The circuit board itself initially cost $667. It wasn’t until 1977, when the Apple II debuted that Apple begun to take off. The Apple II was based on Wozniak’s Apple I design, but had several additions. The first improvement was a plastic case; this made the Apple II the first PC to come in any kind of casing. Secondly was the ability to display color graphics. Also it included a larger ROM, more expandable RAM and had integer basic hard-coded on the ROM for easier programming. With all this came two game paddles and a demo cassette for $1,298. The following year Apple released a disk drive compatible with for the Apple II. It was at this time that orders for Apple machines were multiplied largely. Of course after the Apple II came the Apple III although it had may improvements from the Apple II such as A Synertek 8 bit 6502a processor which ran up to the speed of 2MHZ, 128K of RAM, 4K of ROM, first Apple PC with built in 5.25” disk drive and hi-resolution graphics built into the motherboard. This machine did not sell as well as the Apple II and ended up being discontinued in 1985 (Apple III). It was after Jobs’ visit to Xerox PARC in 1979 that he and several other engineers began to work on the Lisa, which would r...
