The 1979 Apple II— How Does It Look Today?
Nowadays everybody knows Apple. But how did it start and can we run Apple ][ apps today? Let’s figure it out.
It’s interesting to know the computer's history. To know, how the UI evolved from big mainframes to modern tablets, to know when the first mouse was made, was it easy or not to use the text-only interface, and so on. It was also interesting for me to know, how people were using computers before I was born. And the last but not least, I was also working 5 years as an iPhone developer, so “digging” to the very beginning of Apple’s era is also a challenge for me. And the easiest way to do it is to try it on my own.
Let’s get started.
Hardware
Before we begin, let’s figure out what hardware can a customer obtain when buying an Apple computer in 1980th.
Apple II Plus, displayed on the picture, had 16, 32 or 64 KB of RAM. The computer had no hard disk drive by default, and the OS could be loaded from the internal ROM (BASIC programming language) or from the 5¼-floppy disk, that had a 140 KB capacity. The best available video mode was the so-called “high-resolution” 280x160. The computer’s price…
