Apple II

On 10 June 1977, Apple Computer launched Apple II. It was not the first personal computer — the Altair 8800 (1975), TRS-80 (August 1977, two months after Apple II), and Commodore PET (1977) all overlapped this window. But Apple II was the first that actually moved into homes, schools, and offices.

Designer Steve Wozniak fit the era’s full set of personal-computing breakthroughs into a USD $1,298 starting price: integrated keyboard (no external toggle switches like the Altair), NTSC color output (plug into a TV, no professional monitor required), 8 Apple Bus expansion slots (any third party could add hardware), integrated power supply (no separate AC adapter). Wozniak’s open-slot design was the foundation of Apple II’s third-party ecosystem boom — and the design philosophy Steve Jobs deliberately reversed when he later built the Macintosh.

The 1979 launch of VisiCalc changed everything. The world’s first spreadsheet shipped exclusively on Apple II. Accountants, small-business owners, and school administrators suddenly had a ‘I’d buy a computer for this one program’ reason to write the check. From 1980-1985 Apple II dominated U.S. K-12 classrooms — ‘computer literacy’ became a standard public-school subject, and Apple II became the first computer an entire generation of American children ever touched.

In 1983, the Apple IIe launched as the highest-selling model in the line (~3.5 million units alone). In 1986, Apple IIGS upgraded to 16-bit + 4,096 colors — technically the peak of the line, but Apple had moved its primary focus to Macintosh and IIGS never got first-tier support. The full Apple II series ran until 1993 — about 6 million units across a 16-year platform life, one of the longest-lived home computer product lines of the 1970s-1990s.

For game history, Apple II was the starting point of the ‘home computer game’ category itself. Karateka, Choplifter, Lode Runner, Wizardry, Ultima — these 1981-1985 Apple II titles were almost all later ported to IBM PC, C64, Famicom, and SFC, establishing the design vocabulary of 1980s computer RPGs and action games. Wizardry actually outperformed in Japan, leading directly to Megami Tensei and Octopath Traveler.

In the Chinese-speaking world, Apple II was mostly the 1980s ‘imported luxury computer’ badge — out of reach for most families, with most memory clustered around cram schools and university computer labs. Real home computer gaming memory in Taipei and Hong Kong only really began in the 1990s with IBM PC compatibles.