Re: MessApple, Or, The Return Of Apple2E For the VIP!
A bit of history: Back in 1977 came the Apple I, the first computer ever built by Apple. Only about 200 of them were ever built, although there are several replica Apple I projects out there now. It was a very simple computer, with 4K of RAM, expandable to 48K. It had a single expansion slot, and when it first came out, there was nothing to go in this slot. It had absolutely no means of storing anything beyond the memory, which was erased when it was powered off. Eventually Apple released a cassette interface that plugged into the expansion slot. There was no BASIC in the ROM, that had to be loaded from cassette if you had the cassette interface. From this description, I would imagine there was little that could be done to make this computer usable by a totally blind person, since it had so few expansion options. Remember, back in those days, those computers didn't come with built-in serial or parallel ports, and USB was many years away from being invented.
Then came th e Apple II. It had eight expansion slots, a built-in cassette interface, a speaker for playing sound, and other improvements. But one big thing it had was BASIC in ROM, available as soon as the power was turned on... well, almost. Now, if you just got your brand new Apple II system, which still didn't support disk drives, after some reading of the various manuals, you could start creating your own programs and saving them to cassettes, or load programs others had saved to cassette. This BASIC was more limited than the BASIC we're familiar with, and is what would mater come to be called Integer BASIC. Soon, the Disk II card was released, along with the disk drives. Now things were really getting interesting.
And then along came the Apple II+. This one had some improvements over the II, and had a new BASIC called Applesoft, which is the BASIC we all know and love from our childhood days playing with Apples.
And then came the Apple IIe, with more memory, and other improvements. The next version of the IIe, the Enhanced IIe, is the system this emulator emulates.
The Macintosh was a completely different project done by the same company, Apple Computer. So yes, the Apple II series is totally different from the Mac, except that when they did the final Apple II, the IIgs, they created a GUI for the main operating system, GS/OS.
And yes, the very first Apple I with 4K of RAM was made by the same company that makes our Macs, iPods, and iPhones today.
URL: http://forum.audiogames.net/viewtopic.php?pid=146899#p146899
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