Pro Audio Design Forum

June 5th 2017 marks the 40th anniversary of the introduction of the Apple II.

The first Apple II, an 8-bit home computer and one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, went on sale on June 5, 1977, after being introduced by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak at West Coast Computer Faire the April before.

EDN Article "Apple II Goes On Sale June 5, 1977." http://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/ed ... ne-5--1977

My brother Byron's "KA Computer Store" was one of the first Apple dealers. I remember seeing an "Apple I" in the small computer store he had setup at 1220 Majesty in Dallas. 1220 Majesty was an "entrepreneurial" address having housed not only one of Texas' first computer stores but was the headquarters of previous tenant Mary Kay cosmetics. I remember seeing Mary's name stenciled on her parking space when I was a shipping clerk at KA and it remained, though weathered, for decades.

Related reading: "When We Invented the Personal Computer" Steve Jobs, Vice Chairman, Apple Computer, Inc., Computers and People, July-August, 1981. viewtopic.php?f=11&t=460

The magic for them happened when the first spreadsheet software (Tate?) was developed making the computers a small business tool instead of just a game platform.

Back around then I went in another direction buying the H-11 (heathkit version of LSI-11/2). I had to write all my own software, but managed.

JR

PS: Coincidentally (probably not) apple just had their developers conference and announced AR (augmented reality) programming kits. Interesting times for smart phone control.

VisiCalc from Software Arts was the breakthrough spreadsheet.
Ashton-Tate did dBASE which was also a breakthrough.

I owned an Apple IIe for years and used Appleworks almost exclusively which combined Word Processor, Spreadsheet and Database.
I don't think I ported my data over to MS-DOS until about 1992.

I ran my mail order business from inventory to customer contacts, for almost 10 years and even wrote a filter design program using BASIC.

In the '80s while writing a magazine article using the crude code editor in the H-11, I fat fingered an incorrect control instruction and deleted the entire article that was nearly finished. After that I decided to buy a PC clone (Compaq IIRC) with proper word processing software, to prevent that ever happening again.

JR