Technology | Nostalgia | Computers

A Brief Overview of the Apple II Series

A quick look at the six different models in the Apple II series

Collage created by the author using the photos listed and credited below

This article is a factual companion for Remembering the Apple II Series. I originally wrote it a few years ago for some of my now-defunct blogs.

1977: Apple II

Apple II and disk drives — photo by Rama licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 FR

The Apple II superseded the Apple I, just over a year after its release. Improvements included colour, sound, and a plastic case. Being such an early machine meant the specification was still quite basic.

The display resolution was 280 x 192 with 6 colours or 40 x 24 for text with 16 colours. It had 4–48 KB of RAM, and its 6502 processor ran at 1 MHz. Sound was 1-bit, which was very limited compared to slightly later machines with dedicated sound chips, such as the Atari 800 and Commodore 64.

The built-in Integer BASIC, as the name implied, did not have support for floating point numbers. Lowercase letters were also absent. The keyboard was of good quality but lacked auto-repeat — instead, it had a REPT key.