legendary tech: the apple II
the apple II was a legendary home computer released by Apple in 1977; it was designed by Steve Wozniak in 1977 and is still heavily regarded as one of the most influential home computers as it revealed to the masses the appeal of software development and the PC interface in general. throughout its lifetime it underwent many redesigns notably in 1984.
over the years, the apple II namesake housed many processors which went, chronologically: the 8-bit 6502 microprocessor @ 1mhz to the more powerful and stable 8-bit 65c02 @1mhz - 4mhz and then to the most powerful entry in all of the 65 series microprocessors the 16-bit 65c816 @ 2.8mhz that could access up to around 16 mb of memory, which was a mind-blogging amount of ram in the 1980s. this processor also was housed in the SNES. however, unlike the contemporary NES and C64 the apple II did not have a dedicated graphics processing unit and all of the graphics was managed by the main microprocessor; depending on the microprocessor the output resolutions ranged from 280×192 (on hi res mode) to around 640×400.
the apple II operated on a proprietary version of DOS known as Apple DOS before it was superseded by ProDOS in 1983. these rudimentary operating systems provided a very basic TUI; this made it so that the users had to be a lot more mindful and familiar with technology just to be able to operate such a device.
this was an article providing a basic overview of the very complex and influential apple II computer, and in the future more articles will be released exploring in more technical detail, the computer and its microprocessors. these articles will elaborate upon the microarchitecture of these processors and also will showcase projects in C++ emulating the apple II and other devices with such processors.