Design
The Apple II was designed to look more like a home appliance than a piece of electronic equipment. The lid popped off the beige plastic case without the use of tools, allowing access to the computer's internals, including the motherboard with eight expansion slots, and an array of random access memory (RAM) sockets that could hold up to 48 kilobytes worth of memory chips.
The Apple II had color and high-resolution graphics modes, sound capabilities and one of two built-in BASIC programming languages (initially Integer BASIC, later Applesoft BASIC). The Apple II was targeted for the masses rather than just hobbyists and engineers; it also influenced most of the microcomputers that followed it. Unlike preceding home microcomputers, it was sold as a finished consumer appliance rather than as a kit (unassembled or preassembled). VanLOVEs Apple Handbook and The Apple Educators Guide by Gerald VanDiver and Rolland Love reviewed more than 1,500 software programs that the Apple II series could use. The Apple dealer network used this book to emphasize the growing software developer base in education and personal use.
The Apple II series had a keyboard built into the motherboard shell, with the exception of the Apple II which featured an external keyboard. An upgrade kit was sold later to house the motherboard of an Apple II in an Apple IIe case.
Read more about this topic: Apple II Family
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in providence, for the illumination of the ignorant and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.”
—John Adams (1735–1826)
“With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)