Naturally there was a payoff, and pushing it to such limits meant you had to content yourself with just six colours, but dropping to a more reasonable 40 rows by 48 columns would let you enjoy as many as 16 tones at a time. Memory ran to 64K in the top-end models and the image it sent to the NTSC display stretched to a truly impressive 280 x 192, which was then considered high resolution. It was a truly groundbreaking machine, just like the Apple computer before it, with colour graphics and tape-based storage (later upgraded to 5.25in floppies). The Apple II debuted at the West Coast Computer Faire of April 1977, going head to head with big-name rivals like the Commodore PET. Once a keyboard had been hooked to the machine it still couldn’t be programmed without somebody laboriously typing in the code for BASIC since Wozniak and Jobs hadn’t provided the language on a cassette tape or in a ROM chip… finally the computer was naked. Terrell couldn’t even test the board without buying two transformers… Since the Apple I didn’t have a keyboard or a television, no data could be funnelled in or out of the computer. Return to the Little Kingdom, “Some energetic intervention was required before the boards could be made to do anything. When he unpacked them, Terrell, who had ordered finished computers, was surprised by what he found. Was I reachable? Yes.”įamily and friends were roped in to sit at a kitchen table and help solder the parts, and once they’d been tested Jobs drove them over to Byte Shop. “If this thing blew up, how was that… going to be repaid? Did they have the money? No. “Jobs and Woz didn’t have two nickels to rub together,” The risk involved was too great for Ronald Wayne, and it’s ultimately this that saw him duck out. Jobs was banking on producing enough working computers within that time to settle the bill out of the proceeds from selling completed units to Byte Shop. Atari, where Jobs worked, wanted cash for any components it sold him, a bank turned him down for a loan, and although he had an offer of $5,000 from a friend’s father, it wasn’t enough. This meant that once the store had taken its cut, the Apple I sold for $666.66 – the legend is that Wozniak liked repeating numbers and was unaware of the ‘number of the beast’ conection.īyte Shop was going out on a limb: the Apple I didn’t exist in any great numbers, and the nascent Apple Computer Inc didn’t have the resources to fulfil the order. Jobs inked a deal with the Byte Shop in Mountain View to supply it with 50 computers at $500 each. Woz built each computer by hand, and although he’d wanted to sell them for little more than the cost of their parts – at a price at that would recoup their outlay as long as they shipped 50 units – Jobs had bigger ideas. The idea being that the Apple represents knowledge. Equally the bite taken out of the Apple could represent the story of Adam and Eve from the Old Testament.
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