The Apple II was introduced on April 16th, 1977 at the West Coast Computer Faire. The Apple II was first sold on June 4th, 1977. Unlike the Apple I, it came fully assembled ready for consumers, not just hobbyists. Although we at History Of Apple think of the Apple II as the first successful personal computer, it is for sure among the first no matter who’s talking. The Apple II was the first to use color graphics, it was easy to use, had an integrated keyboard, had sound, a plastic case, 8 integral expansion slots, and 4K of memory to name a few of the technical advances from the original Apple I.
The Apple II Plus was introduced in June 1979 with 48K memory and an auto start ROM which meant easy start-up and screen editing. The Apple II Plus was introduced at a price of $1,195. By December of 1979, there were 350 Apple employees working in 4 buildings in Cupertino, CA.
With the introduction of VisiCalc in October of 1979, a spreadsheet software program similar to Excel, sales of the Apple II really took off as it gave people a practical reason to use the Apple II. In January of 1977 Apple moved from the famous Los Altos garage to Steven’s Creek Blvd in Cupertino, CA. It’s was just south of the DeAnza exit and although we moved buildings and took over buildings and built new buildings a lot over the years, Apple remains in the same general location today.
Developing a disk drive became a major goal of Apple, as the Apple II did not contain a disk drive. The Disk II was introduced in June of 1978 as developed by Woz. The DOS system was the lowest priced mini floppy disk drive but also the fastest and easiest to use.
The Apple II’s were also widely used internally at Apple. In February of 1979, the entire company switched to the Apple II as the mandate came down from the president that “no more typewriters” were to be used anywhere at Apple.
The Apple IIe, code named “Diana” was introduced in January 1983 with a retail price tag of $1400. Apple Computer was now making a billion dollars per year.
The Apple IIc was introduced in April of 1984. The “c” stood for compact.
When the Apple II was first sold in June of 1977, the price was $1298 and the operating system was ROM and integer basic. The last Apple II was manufactured in 1993. By the end of Apple II production in 1993 there had been 5-6 million Apple II’s sold, including all models of the Apple II. It was the bread and butter of the company for 16 years! That’s an extremely long time in the high tech market of Silicon Valley.