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What was the defining feature of the Apple II?
Along with the PET 2001 and the TRS-80, Byte magazine referred to these as the “1977 Trinity” of personal computing. The Apple II had the defining feature of being able to display color graphics, and this capability was the reason why the Apple logo was redesigned to have a spectrum of colors.
What was the graphics system on the Apple II?
The Apple II graphics were composed of idiosyncratic modes and settings that could be exploited. This graphics system debuted on the original Apple II, continued with the Apple II Plus and was carried forward and expanded with the Apple IIe, Enhanced IIe, IIc, IIc Plus and IIGS .
What are the interleave factors for Apple II graphics?
Apple’s text and graphics modes are based on two different interleave factors of 8:1 and 64:1. A second peculiarity of Apple II graphics—the so-called “color fringes”—is yet another by-product of Wozniak’s design.
What kind of video output does an Apple II have?
All Apple II machines featured an RCA jack providing a rough NTSC, PAL, or SECAM composite video output (on non-NTSC machines before the Apple IIe this output is black-and-white only). This enabled the computer to be connected to any composite video monitor conforming to the same standard for which the machine was configured.
What was the machine code monitor on the Apple 2?
As shipped, Apple II incorporated a machine code monitor with commands for displaying and altering the computer’s RAM, either one byte at a time, or in blocks of 256 bytes at once. This enabled programmers to write and debug machine code programs without further development software.
When did Apple come out with the Apple II?
It was introduced by Jobs and Wozniak at the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire, and marks Apple’s first launch of a personal computer aimed at a consumer market—branded toward American households rather than businessmen or computer hobbyists. Byte magazine referred to the Apple II, Commodore PET 2001, and TRS-80 as the “1977 Trinity.”
What kind of memory did the Apple II have?
Original Apple IIs had jumper switches to adjust RAM size, and RAM configurations could be 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 32, 36, or 48 KiB. The three smallest memory configurations used 4kx1 DRAMs, with larger ones using 16kx1 DRAMs, or mix of 4-kilobyte and 16-kilobyte banks (the chips in any one bank have to be the same size).