Apple II

At the end of 1976, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs — who had formed the very young Apple Computer Company on 1 April of that year in the garage of Jobs's parents in Los Altos — released the Apple I, a motherboard that buyers had to complete with a keyboard and a case. Wozniak, a self-taught engineer passionate about miniaturisation, then designed a far more ambitious successor conceived as a finished product for the general public. Jobs took charge of industrial design and communications and in 1977 secured a pivotal 250,000-dollar investment from Mike Markkula, a former Intel executive, who became the third pillar of the company officially incorporated on 3 January 1977. Unveiled on 16 April 1977 at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco, the Apple II differed radically from the assembly kits aimed at hobbyists. It offered a moulded beige plastic case, a built-in keyboard, a silent fanless power supply designed by Rod Holt, a colour video output — unheard of on a microcomputer at that price — and eight expansion slots allowing third-party cards. It was built around the MOS 6502 microprocessor clocked at 1 MHz, with 4 KB of extendable RAM, an integrated BASIC written by Wozniak and, from 1978, a Disk II floppy drive also designed by Wozniak whose architecture was a feat of hardware economy. The Apple II met with huge success when the VisiCalc spreadsheet by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston was released in 1979, making it the first truly useful machine for businesses. Sold in nearly six million units through 1993, it inspired the whole generation of home microcomputers, preceded the IBM PC of 1981 and the Macintosh of 1984, and funded Apple's future development. It established Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as founding figures of personal computing and marked the entry of the computer into homes and schools.