“The Apple II wasn’t the first personal computer, or the most advanced one, or even the best-selling model of its age. But, in many ways, it was The Machine That Changed Everything. On all four of our criteria–innovation, impact, industrial design and intangibles–it was such a huge winner that it ended up as our Greatest PC of All Time,” PC World reports.
“Born out of the Home Brew Computer Club by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs’s tiny Apple Computer in 1977, the Apple II was the company’s second PC, but it boasted more than its share of firsts: it was the first colour PC (you could even use it with a television), the first to be easily expandable by users and the first to run the VisiCalc spreadsheet–proving that these new boxes had a place in business,” PC World reports.
PC World reports., “But, perhaps its greatest innovation was its design. Jobs wanted the machine to look at home on people’s desktops, so he insisted that the Apple II have a sleek look, as opposed to the sheet-metal-and-exposed-wire appearance of most other early PCs. The machine’s coolness factor–an Apple trademark to this day–was as important to its long-term success as Wozniak’s inventive engineering was.”
Full article here.
This is still true today. Love Apple!
I remember hours and hours playing Lode Runner on my friend’s Apple II in the early 80’s. We also had 1 (ONE!) in our high school computer classroom that many of us would crowd around – ignoring the room full of Commodore PET computers we used in class to learn BASIC. God I’m gettin old!
Wow, I remember how much I drooled over my friend’s Apple II when I was back in high school. I was relegated to “merely” having a programmable HP 41C calculator. He was indeed the king of the geek crew, having that computer, and we did some amazing stuff programming that beastie in BASIC and assembler. Great memories…. I can’t believe I’m so old that I remember a day when the Apple II ruled the roost!
Rob, right there with you! How did we ever get so darned old, huh?
And btw, my first 2 big purchases in my life were a Nakamichi tape deck/NAD amplifier set, and a 128k Mac. I knew the good stuff even when I was a kid
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My elementary school had an Apple ][+ in the library (4th or 5th grade) and we could sign up for 15 or 30 minute time slots. We mostly spent time playing Oregon Trail. I even have a book from then called “Basic Apple Basic.” Never did learn it but it’s on my bookshelf.
I read this article months ago. What gives?
What about now? Whats the worlds greatest PC of this time?
The 24inch intel iMac. All in one simple sleek yet powerful.
Apple started in 1977? There were computers back then? I thought Apple started in the late 1990’s with the advent of the iMac…
There were no iPods in 1977?
MAN you guys are old.
Very old… Very very old…
i remember going from a network based terminal (actually, a teletype machine with a cradle-style modem) to an apple ii in junior high. it was the coolest thing ever. i remember trying to write graphics programs in basic to create weird spyrograph-type patterns.
good times!
The Apple II also paid all the bills while Apple was developing the Mac.
Man, I loved the ][e! I did learn AppleSoft BASIC, and I programmed a couple of games, as well as a primitive word processor. I’m a school librarian, and the card catalog program and the overdue fine program I wrote were used by the schools in my county until the entire state automated.
The computer market sure has expanded. According to the article, over 2 million Apple ][‘s were produced during its nearly 20-year lifespan. Doesn’t Apple sell nearly that many Macs in one year? And they have a 3% market share…
Yes, us old guys use Macs too. I never got to use an Apple II. My first computer (in ’83) was an Altos (8″ floppies!) running 8 bit CP-M, but I swapped to a Mac 512 in ’85 (I still have it in the cupboard). Since then, I’ve watched PC’s slowly catching up but never closing the gap. IMHO, nothing in the PC world touches my Intel iMac.
Bring it BACK!
Nibble
Beagle Brothers
Fantavision
Ultima I, II, & III
Locksmith
Superscribe
Man, those programs bring back memories. There was a game I used to play the most called Carmaggedon (I think) that involved building a car and racing across terrain while trying to avoid damaging your car. You earned money to buy better parts. It was a black and white game but it was hours of fun.
I was the consummate pirate and with a program like Locksmith and the many wonderful programs published by Beagle Brothers, I amassed an obscene collection of software. In fact, the 5 1/4 floppies used to fit neatly inside those government-issue green ammunition canisters and managed to fill up two and a half cans.
Using the word processor Superscribe, with its impressive collection of fonts, allowed me to create some incredibly impressive documents. Never mind that my Epson FX-80 cost almost as much what I paid for my Apple ][+.
I had beautiful used Princeton 14″ color monitor that had a cable that had to be twisted and pinched in a certain way before it would work properly and man it was awesome with 16 colors!
It was the Macintosh rumor-mill that brought me into the local IBM store in the Fall of 1983, which also sold Apple computers, that made me think I should upgrade my Apple ][. I flipped a coin that day and opted for the Apple ][e instead of holding out for the Mac.
It was a no-brainer because all of my existing software would be compatible. My new ][e came with the 80-column card and an extra whopping 64k of RAM! I added the new Duo-Disk and I was in hog heaven. Two disk drives on one computer? No way… Also I got a modest speed increase with the ][e, going from 1 MHz to 1.02 MHz. I swear I could feel the difference!
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The Mac couldn’t touch those features! The Mac was black and white (how inferior) and had a tiny 9″ screen and only one floppy.
It wouldn’t be until the summer of ’87 that I bought the Macintosh SE whose total purchase price would set me back 4200 dollars! Almost three-times what I paid for my original Apple ][+.
But this Mac was a screamin’ demon at 8 MHz with 1 MB of RAM and a 20 MB hard drive. It was a god-like experience when I finally learned the magic of point and click, cut & paste, and dragging items around the screen.
And WORDSTAR! Command B – word – Command B and my 9 pin dot matrix would bold the word. Luxury! Pity we had to eat cold gravel and live in a septic tank (sorry, septic tunk).
The Apple ][ was the best computer evar.
The best Apple II game? Microsoft Olympic Decathlon. It was awesome.
An FFT card for speaker measurement and design, an awesome app/hardware config… Ah, VisiCalc to experiment with dimensions and speaker parameters…
and, yes… Lode Runner
I miss that lil’guy with the two honkin’ floppies on top.
Micro Me….womnder how peole got hte reference to the four Yorkshire men? Sonsidering how old some of us are here, perhaps quite a few.
I used to play parashute for hours on the Apple II.
The review is flawed.
While I don’t dispute the Apple ][ being the greatest PC of all time, I do dispute the rest of the top 4.
The Mac itself is at #4, behind the Xerox Star (at it’s base price $16,500 in 1981 dollars) at #3, and the Compaq Deskpro 386 at #2.
It’s #3 which I think which is wrong and doesn’t belong under the category of “personal”. Who, besides the newly minted Silicon Valley millionaires could rightly say that a $16.5K+ machine was a personal computer??? Just who had that kind of money?
The Apple ][ was my first computer. Pascal, turtle graphics, great stuff. Got me into programing and Apple. Turned me into a life long Apple fanatic
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Ok, let’s not forget that the flawed review also left out the NeXT Cube from the to 25. It’s a “near greatest”, up there with the original Mac, HPs first laptop and a few forgettable others.
Funnily enough, I think one of those Cube’s is in a museum somewhere… something about making that little thing called the Internet much more useful to the general population. I think someone might also have been Knighted for his contributions to humanity.
Well, I guess he could have used a TRS-80 which made the cut.
And I also guess the myriad of long forgotten laptops deserved their place in the top 25 list, deserving to bump out the sexy NeXT box.
Damn straight!
I learned how to program on an Apple ][e running AppleBASIC.
Karateka REWLS!
LOAD RUNNER REWLS!
CASTLE WOLFENSTEIN REWLS!
LOL, Micro Me: Monty Python and WordStar. Ah, those were the days. Quite a few of us old farts here Buster.