The Apple II wasn’t the first personal computer but it did help to begin the PC boom when it launched on June 10, 1977. Today, the Apple Vision Pro is trying to begin the VR/AR boom.
A few days ago, on June 5, Apple officially announced the Vision Pro mixed reality headset. Apple certainly wasn’t the first to introduce an AR/VR hardware product. However, the company does have the tendency to launch new devices that can later become the best-selling product in specific categories.
That’s certainly the case for one of Apple’s first hardware launches, the Apple II. The personal computer started shipping on June 10, 1977, or 46 years ago today.
Yes, there was an Apple I „PC“ that launched two years earlier in 1975. However, the PC, created by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, was really just a circuit board that was sold to tech enthusiasts for $666.66. Owners had to create their own cases and connect keyboards and monitors to it. Only about 200 of them were actually made, so if you manage to find one today, it’s worth a lot of money.
In 1976, Wozniak and late Steve Jobs officially founded Apple Computer. The goal for this new company was to make a PC not for tech heads, but for anyone at home, in school, or at the office. That meant Apple had to create a case around its circuit board. Inside that board was a MOS Technology 6502 CPU running at 1.023 MHz. The PC had 4K of RAM, which could be expanded to as much as 48K.
Wozniak decided to put in the BASIC computer language directly into the PC’s ROM. In an interview with Byte Magazine in 1984, Wozniak talked about how he created a version of the game Breakout in BASIC (a game he originally designed for Atari).
