System Description: The Apple II (1977) [pdf]

http://twimgs.com/informationweek/byte/archive/Apple-II-Description/The-Apple-II-by-Stephen-Wozniak.pdf

by ychw • 11 years ago

24 10 11 years ago

twimgs.com

taphangum• 11 years ago

I wonder if Jobs wrote the copy on the Ad. It's brilliant.

jhallenworld2• 11 years ago

How about this one? http://www.vintagecomputing.com/wp-content/images/retroscan/...

CamperBob22• 11 years ago

   The Apple-II cassette interface is simple,
   fast, and I think most reliable. The data
   transfer rate averages over 180 bytes per
   second, and the recording scheme is compatible
   with the interface used with the
   Apple- I.

Note that this is almost as fast as the floppy disk drive on the Commodore 64. This is why people remember Woz but not the anonymous engineer(s) behind the 1541 disk drive.

jhallenworld2• 11 years ago

To be fair, the C64 slowness was due to a mistake:

http://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=52439&sid=660bd...

CamperBob22• 11 years ago

Interesting! That's a great post. I knew they were using an IEEE-488 derived bus, but I wasn't aware of all the dirty laundry.

Woz's disk OS actually left a lot of low-hanging fruit on the tree as well, but at least the hardware wasn't burdened with so many legacy bottlenecks.

5052• 11 years ago

Wow, I used the 1541 for backups in one job. I never timed it, but I'm not surprised at your report.

aswanson• 11 years ago

This computer beats the one I programmed in high school. 12 years after this ad ran.

abecedarius• 11 years ago

Anyone have a Breakout in, say, Javascript that's as short and clear as the example in Basic?

jdsampayo• 11 years ago

woman on the kitchen 70's cliché propaganda

5052• 11 years ago

Great to see this again. The description at the time of the video hardware is important. My first computer, purchased around four years later, also had a 6502 and memory mapped video. Unlike the Apple, it did absolutely nothing to interleave the video memory access - if the CPU accessed the video RAM, there would be a momentary black horizontal line on the screen. Many of the Apple II's competitors were the same.

System Description: The Apple II (1977) [pdf]

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