30 years of Apple computers

I was an early Apple user.   I had both of these early Apple computers.   I got one of the first Macs available in St. Louis.   I’ve since converted to Windows PC’s.  I still have an old iMac, but I have trouble trying to figure out how to use it.  It used to seem so intuitive.   I guess, as with anything else, use it or lose it.   

1977 - Apple ][   While the Apple I may have been a great toy for computer hobbyists, the Apple ][ was something entirely different: it was the first successful mass-market personal computer. First released in 1977 with just 12K of ROM and a maximum 6-color screen resolution of 280 x 192, the Apple ][ took the computing world by storm. The computer remained a mainstay of Apple's product line even after the first Macs were released; the last version, the ||gs, was released in 1986, and looked a lot like the first Mac II (which was released the following year -- by then, Apple had also developed a Mac-like GUI for the earlier computer). With its bundled software, relatively affordable storage via cassettes and floppies, the original ][ and its offspring became popular with corporate users and students alike (you'll still find some of them deployed in schools around the country). By 1981, when IBM launched its first PC, Apple was the undisputed leader of the PC market, with an income of about $300 million, all fueled by the ][. Within a few years, of course, IBM (and, more importantly, cloners such as Compaq) dominated the market, and the ][ became known mainly as a tool for students. But the ][ proved that there could be a mass market for computers, and helped spur the entire computer revolution of the 1980s.

 1984 – Macintosh  The original Mac, hyped in the classic "1984" commercial and formally introduced by a bow-tied Steve Jobs at Apple's 1984 shareholders' meeting (where the computer quipped about how glad it was to be taken out of Steve's bag), really did change the world of personal computing. Though GUI-based computers had been available earlier (including on Apple's own Lisa), the first Mac brought the concept to the masses. And while the original Mac was underpowered (no hard drive, just 128K RAM) and overpriced ($2,500), it was cheaper than competing GUI-driven computers (uh, that would be Apple's Lisa, again) and more intuitive and user-friendly than most other PCs, which were still using MS-DOS. Though the Mac never garnered a level of market share comparable to DOS (and later Windows) based computers, its influence on the industry was indelible.

 I’m afraid to tell you how much I paid for my first hard drive fro my Mac.  It held a whopping 20 megabytes of data too.

More on 30 years of Apple products at engadget.com

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