A blast from the past - Apple ][
From
Byte Magazine -- May 1977:
System Description: The Apple-II by Stephen Wozniak
The Apple-I, my first video oriented single board computer, was designed late in 1975 and sold by word of mouth throughout California and later nationwide through retail computer stores. I think that the Apple-I computer was the first microprocessor system product on the market to completely integrate the display generation circuitry, microprocessor, memory and power supply on the same board. This meant that its owner could run the Apple BASIC interpreter with no additional electronics other than a keyboard and video monitor. The Apple-I video computer board was originally intended as a television terminal product which could also operate in a stand alone mode with out much in the way of memory, although it did have a processor, space for 8 K bytes of 4 K dynamic memory chips, and its shared video generation and dynamic memory refresh logic. Apple- I was sold as a completely assembled and tested processor board with a price under $700 at the retail level.
The latest result of my design activities is the Apple-II which is the main subject of this system description article. The Apple-II builds upon this idea by providing a computer with more memory capability, a read only memory (ROM) BASIC interpreter, color video graphics as well as point graphics and character graphics, and extended systems software.
Five pages of goodness complete with diagrams. A couple very neat software hacks to simplify the hardware design and make it cheaper. Very open system too -- lots of people made money building plug-in cards and writing software.
Posted by DaveH at May 18, 2012 4:06 PM