The Legendary Apple II Turns 35 Years Old
Apple's Apple II, widely considered to have been Apple's first significant product, is celebrating its 35th birthday today.
Apple originally launched the product at the West Coast Computer Faire on April 16, 1977, the computer was sold in various versions until 1993 with an estimated total production count landing somewhere between five and six million devices.
The Apple II was available for sale on June 5, 1977 and ran on a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor that was clocked at 1 MHz. For a suggested retail price of $1298, buyers also got 4 KB of RAM, a data-sette to store and load program code, NTSC composite video output that supported 40 columns by 24 lines of monochrome, upper-case-only as well as the Integer BASIC programming language. An estimated 40,000 Apple II units sold until its production end in 1981.
The run of the Apple II also included the IIc model, introduced in 1984, which was Apple's first portable computer. The fifth and most successful desktop iteration was the IIGS, which sold an estimated 1.25 million units. Introduced in 1986 for $1000, the IIGS had a 2.8 MHz processor, 8 MG of RAM as well as support for 4096 colors. The device also came standard with an Ensoniq ES5503 DOC wavetable sound chip.
Lo and behold, it didnt work(at first, some massaging of the drive fixed that)
This was the beginning of my long standing hatred for apple products......
Shakespeare was wrong about a name meaning nothing though. Apple, through their unfortunate choice of names, made an agreement with another Apple (think Beatles) so that despite the IIGS having hardware capable of stereo sound, it was mono due to their agreement. Sad, but true.
In all fairness to Apple, it has always sucked balls. A lot of youngsters have jumped on the band wagon of hating Apple lately, and that's nice and all, but keep in mind they have always sucked. The Apple II was always an overpriced, underpowered piece of crap. It lasted a long time because it got entrenched in education, but even by 1981 or so was completely obsolete, and later iterations did not change that. On top of that, they were very expensive, a nightmare to program video on, and had the miserable 6502. Their slots were bizarre in that they were not like a PC where (theoretically) any card could go into any slot. Their video was such that in some modes the color choice depended on your location on the screen. The memory mapping for video was convoluted as Hell. And did I mention it was expensive? For this crap.
To their even greater credit, they released the even more expensive, even more pathetic, Apple III. If you had problems with it, the solution from Apple technical support? Pick it up and drop it. I wish that were a lie. And it was obscenely expensive, and still had the remarkably poor 6502. Really, I'm not lying.
What is 8MG? At that time, I'm sure it couldn't have been 8MB, as we didn't see 8MB's until the mid 90's.
What is MG?? 8 milligram of RAM?? LOL. Yeah, i remember the IIGS, my school computer club brought it in as tech demo to us. And emphasize on the wavetable chip to play real instruments music...cool.
"Memory
1.125 MB RAM built-in (256 KB in original) (expandable to 8.125 MB)
256 KB ROM built-in (128 KB in original)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIGS
The IIgs was still an 8/16bit computer - it was a POS compared to the Amiga, Atari ST and of course MACs. Apple basicly add some16bit tech to 8bit hardware and sold it at the rip-off price of $1000, when the Amiga500 went for $700 MSRP.
Even my 25Mhz Amiga3000 (1989 release) came with 5MB of RAM and never needed to add more memory. An 8bit IIgs ran fine with 1-2mb.
The IIgs, even tho its a POS 8/16bit system - looked rather cool. But really, $1000 for just a box? By the time you added 2 floppy drives and the monitor, you'd be up to $1500~1700.
They sold upgrade kits for the IIe into the IIgs for $500+
Actually, it is possible...it support max 8MB memory...but definitely not MG....nobody sells RAM by milligram!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_IIGS#Memory