History and specs of Apple II 8 bit computers
Originally called ‘Integer Basic’ this BASIC was written by Steve Wozniak himself to use on the Apple I & II computers. This is the first basic I actually trained on.
Specs are listed for the Apple II & //e (the one I used)
| manufacturer | Apple Computer |
| model numbers | Apple II, II+, IIe, IIc, IIgs |
| years on sale | 1977-1993 [all] , 1983-1993 [//e] |
| price (new) at launch | (US) $1,298 [II], $1,395 [//e] |
| price in today’s (2026) money | (US) $7,072, $4,624 [//e] |
| CPU / speed | 6502 / 1.023 MHz [II & IIe] |
| RAM / ROM | 64K/16K |
| sound | Built-in speaker; 1-bit toggling |
| colors | 16 |
| screen size (text) | 40 x 24 |
| graphics mode (hor x vert x colors) | 40x48x16, 280x192x6 |
| OS | Integer & Applesoft BASIC, Apple DOS, ProDOS |
When I started using an Apple //e in 1984, I had already been writing BASIC programs on the Commodore Vic-20. Moving to a 40 column display on a real monitor (even if it was green) was an amazing experience coming from the terrible 22×23 display of the Vic.
As I program on Apple BASIC now, I am starting to see some limitations. It is still very usable, but there are a few issues. One big issue is the old Apple 2’s only had uppercase letters. I wrote a subroutine to change upper to lower case, but that is an extra piece of code that is not needed on a more modern basic like QB64.
I have fond memories of coding on the Apple 2e in both BASIC & the 6502 assembler machine languages. But using an emulator is not quite a good experience nowadays. After I get my adventure game running I am going to move my code to a more modern BASIC language like Quick Basic which is more robust.
The Apple 2 computer was first sold in June of 1977 & was still in production in 1993. That’s right, a version of the Apple 2 was on sale for 16 years & was even on sale alongside of the Mac computers. Apple had a huge marketing push to get their computers into schools, by offering discounts for education use.
If you had a computer lab in your school in the late 70’s or early 80’s there was a pretty good chance that there were Apple 2’s in there. My computer lab at school had mainly TRS80 model III’s, but Vo-Tech (where I studied electronics) was all about the Apple //e.
Unlike the Apple 1, the 2 was sold ‘ready to go’. The Apple 1 was sold as the board only.
The Apple 2 was arguable the first ‘true’ home computer. You bought one, plugged in a monitor, a disk drive & you had a fully functional personal computer. It was also easy to expand with 8 expansion slots that let the tinkerers build lots of expansion cards. One of our Apple 2’s had a ROM burning card where we would write our programs onto a EEPROM to give the teacher to run on his computer.
Apple developed a loyal following of people that carried over into the Mac’s, MacBook’s, iPod’s & eventually the iPhone. Apple did more that just build a computer, they built an entire ecosystem of hardware & software, plus a community of people who were eager to see what they could do with these machines.
The Apple 2 was replaced with several different variants which improved on performance & took advantage of better technology & even cost savings of new components. Here is a list of the different versions.
The original Apple II computers went on sale on June 10, 1977 with a sale price of $1,298 (that is $7,000 in 2026 money)
Adjusting for inflation, the ][+ was almost half the price of the original model with ?? the ram.
The was the ‘portable’ version of the Apple 2 lineup. The form factor was about ?/? of the size of the Other Apple 2s. We managed to get one in our Electronics class my senior year & we were all stunned by how small it was. Apple really shrunk the size, but not the performance.
The ‘gs’ stood for graphics & sound & this Apple was a huge step up from the previous models.
