Hi there! I'm the Apple II. I was designed by Steve Wozniak, with some help from Steve Jobs, constructed in a garage, then introduced to the world in 1977.

While I was being designed, Steve Wozniak had an unusual goal. He wanted me to be able to run a computer game he had worked on with Steve Jobs for Atari. This game was Breakout, an arcade game where you knock out bricks with a paddle and ball. What's unusual about the design is that he wasn't really thinking about the end user; he just wanted to "wow" his friends at the computer club he belonged to!

So Steve made sure that I could support color, since the original Breakout ran in color. Then some code had to be added to the BASIC language so I could actually run the game. A speaker was included for sound. Even a circuit that could handle paddle controls was added. And to top it all off, paddles were included as part of my package.

Unlike the other early personal computers available to the home market, I came with a keyboard and a simple way to connect to a monitor. What this meant was that users didn't have to shell out the big bucks for an expensive computer monitor -- a regular old TV would work fine.

The computer package, complete with 4K of RAM, sold for $1295.

After my introduction came a few peripherals: a relatively cheap disk drive and a printer.

And so, with my introduction, a revolution in computing was launched. A revolution in personal computing.



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