A midrange model of Apple’s new iMac Pro comes with a massive 11 times as many bytes of electronic memory as the Apple II, the company’s first breakthrough computer.
Doesn’t sound all that impressive? We’re not just talking about a single Apple II unit. Instead, that figure refers to the sum total of all electronic memory ever installed on all 6 million Apple II computers ever built!
If you want to give your Hackintosh a genuine Apple feel, you have to checkout this awesome PC case. Raadition is designed to look exactly like the iconic Apple II, but it has space for the latest PC components, including an ATX motherboard and a full-size graphics card.
For a company that insists it doesn’t like to look to the past, Apple’s new Face ID logo will certainly feel familiar to longtime Mac users.
Apple debuted the new logo during its iPhone X keynote yesterday to show off the phones facial scanning features. It features a simple smiling face that looks three dimensional, but it’s actually just a repurposed version of the classic Happy Mac icon originally created by Susan Kare for the original Macintosh.
Check out the similarities:
Jason Scott is an archivist and the enthusiasm for what he curates is the kind ascribed to 15th-century manuscripts or Jamestown colony artifacts – not software on obsolete floppy disks written for a 40-year-old computer system.
Scott is out to collect any original or copied software disks for the Apple II as if a language is in danger of dying with the people who speak it or possess some record of its existence.
Cult of Mac’s David Pierini traveled to KansasFest to meet Apple fans intensely devoted to the Apple II computer line. The machine turns 40 next year.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — It’s rare we hear the term personal computer anymore. Yet personal is the only word to begin to understand KansasFest and a small but feisty community of preservationists who love the Apple II line of computers.
The 28th fest concluded Saturday and within the event’s first hour, attendees were already making plans to attend next year, the 40th birthday of the Apple II.
Cult of Mac’s David Pierini traveled to KansasFest to meet Apple fans intensely devoted to the Apple II computer line. The machine turns 40 next year.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – They say they travel to KansasFest to feel like kids again. Fest attendees stay up all night laughing, arguing and eating pizza. They program and play games on their Apple II machines and call each other nerd or geek.
Bullied and closeted as a boy, Martin Haye describes KansasFest as the childhood he wished he’d had.
“If I had this when I was 13, I would’ve been fine,” says Haye, 48, a programmer for the California Digital Library who lives in Santa Cruz. “I didn’t try to fit in but I was little, I carried a briefcase to school, I was a target. I have a good life now, but this week is the most intense, sustained, predictable happiness I’ve ever had.”
Cult of Mac’s David Pierini is at KansasFest this week to write about the community of people who celebrate the foundational Apple II computer.
KANSAS CITY, Mo – If you’re going to carry a torch for the Apple II computer, you better know how to control its heat and melt a little solder.
The Apple II will turn 40 next year. Many of these seminal machines will light up like new thanks to a community of people who have to be their own Genius Bar. So KansasFest is not just about love, but the labor of keeping that love alive.
Cult of Mac’s David Pierini traveled seven hours and (39 years) this week to Missouri to witness the annual celebration of the Apple II computer known as KansasFest, which runs through Saturday.
KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Yellowed keyboards, monitors and disk drives sat in orderly piles. It certainly wasn’t pretty to look at, not when you compare these ancient artifacts of personal computing to a shiny new MacBook Pro.
But 80 infatuated campers could only see their first crush and they were ready to pounce. In a matter of minutes the gear would be claimed, and this dash and grab Wednesday was the kickoff the 28th annual KansasFest. If you don’t know KansasFest, the short answer is found in a cheer shouted to officially open the event: Apple II forever!
Now that all the excitement we had for WWDC has died down, it’s probably time we took a break from iOS 10, macOS Sierra, and all the other things you haven’t been able to avoid over the past couple of weeks. So for this week’s Friday Night Fight, we’re looking at Apple’s history.
We’re focusing on which product has been Apple’s most important throughout the years. Was it the Macintosh that changed personal computing? The iPod that put thousands of songs in your pocket? The iPhone that revolutionized mobile devices?
Join us as we battle it out over Apple’s best ever releases — and which one was most significant!
Under Tim Cook’s leadership, Apple has been upping its focus on teaching kids to program — thanks to events such as its free “Hour of Code” classes at Apple Stores around the world.
But Apple’s been helping introduce young people to coding for far longer than that. In fact, years before Apple ushered in its Swift Playgrounds app as it did this week at WWDC, it helped popularize home programming thanks to Apple Logo, a basic coding language which found success on the Apple II.
Phil Schiller says Apple is too busy “inventing the future” to “celebrate the past” by building a museum.
So if you are in search of history on the 40th anniversary of Apple’s founding, you might want to travel to Georgia. There, a guy named Lonnie Mimms has taken over an old CompUSA building and meticulously crafted a tangible timeline that would make Apple’s futurists — perhaps even Schiller — pause with nostalgia and pride.
Before Steve Wozniak co-founded Apple Computers, he was just a super-nerdy kid who loved to operate HAM radios. In a new video interview detailing the most formative moments in his totally geeky life, Woz explains how he went from tinkering with electronics to teaching himself binary by 5th grade, and then made a machine that played tic-tac-toe in 6th grade.
Woz eventually got so good with machines that he could design a mini-computer in two days. Those skills led to his creation of the Apple II computer, which put his and Steve Jobs’ fledgling company on the map.
Watch as Woz recounts his childhood obsession with computers, during the humble beginnings of Silicon Valley, below:
Everyone associates the Mac’s creation with Steve Jobs (with very good reason), but there is another person without whom we wouldn’t have Apple’s iconic home computers: user interface guru Jef Raskin, who passed away on February 26, 2005 — exactly 11 years ago today.
Raskin not only named the Macintosh — after his favorite type of apple, the McIntosh (even though that spelling was already being used by an audio company) — he also gave the lovable computer some of its lasting personality traits.
Apple rolls out new products next week at the annual fall reveal, but you can’t stop thinking about the Apple IIc from 1984.
Self-taught hardware hacker and 3D printer Charles Mangin feels you. So much so that Mangin, of Raleigh, NC., creates tiny versions of classic Apple computers that encase the Raspberry Pi computers. He has even made a classic Mac that serves as a working charging dock for the iPod Nano and an SD card reader that looks an old Apple disk drive.
When Apple takes the stage at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco for the fall media reveal, company execs will walk knowing they are in a sacred space.
Sure the building is 100 years old this year and is part of the city’s renaissance following the devastating 1906 earthquake. But the ground at the auditorium really shook in 1977, when Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak brought the Apple II computer to the West Coast Computer Faire.
Apple still hasn’t made an announcement as to where next month’s iPhone 6s event will take place. However, according to a new report it may be set to rock San Francisco’s 7,000-seat Bill Graham Civic Auditorium — the same venue where Steve Jobs and Wozniak first unveiled the Apple II.
What vaulted Apple from its humble Silicon Valley origins to the absolute top of the business world? From its first desktop computer in 1976 to today’s category-crushing Apple Watch, the company is intensely focused on creating technology that will delight the masses.
That vision is best exemplified by Apple’s five most important products, which I’ve rounded up in this week’s edition of Kahney’s Korner. Some made the list for reasons that might surprise you.
It’s festival season and there’s a festival for everything – even one for Apple II users.
It’s called KansasFest and it has been going since 1989. It’s one of the longest-running computer festivals out there and the amazing thing is the Apple II was discontinued in 1992.
The endurance of this machine is the subject of this week’s Kahney’s Korner.
When we have a big giveaway, we like to go really big. Like 14.7 million pixels big. Yep, we’re giving away the 27-inch 5K Retina iMac at Cult of Mac Deals.
If you grew up in the 80’s one of your earliest video gaming memories was probably playing Oregon Trail on an old Apple II or Macintosh, but you haven’t experienced Oregon Trail until you’ve played it on a 27-inch Apple Cinema Display. In color.
When you’re one of the closest things the programming world has to a rock star, you might assume that — when the time comes to pass your godly coding powers onto the next generation — you’d hand your offspring a brand new iPad and a crash course in the likes of Swift: the insanely popular state-of-the-art iOS language unveiled at last year’s WWDC.
Try telling that to John Carmack! The legendary coder behind the smash hit games Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake (today working at Oculus VR) recently shared a picture of his young son’s home computer lessons. Carmack’s choice for suitable hardware and software? BASIC on the 1984-era Apple IIc.
He’s kicking it old-school!
Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak revolutionized the computer world with the invention of the Apple II, but back in 1977 when they created the unbelievably simple home PC, few people realized the enormous impact it would have on the “small computer field.”
Case in point, look at this article from the Homestead High School newspaper talking about its alumnus’ new company Apple Computers, in a ‘aww isn’t that cute, they sold 200 computers’ sort of way. The article above was published in the The Epitaph on May 20th, 1977, just a few weeks before the first Apple II units went on sale, and went on to become the first computer to sell 1 million units.
At the time of publication Apple had just moved out of the garage and into an office in Cupertino with eight total employees. One of Apple’s first employees, Chris Espinosa was still in high school at the time and was interviewed by the paper for the article on Jobs and Woz’s new company. Along with revealing that you used to be able to get Apple’s top software engineer to build you a custom app to do whatever you want, the high school junior presaged the idea of a Genius Bar, decades before the first Apple Store opened.
You can read the full article below:
With today’s tech devices becoming obsolete so quickly, it’s easy to think older models are forgotten by their creators the moment a follow-up rolls off the factory floor.
While this may be true in some instances, it’s apparently not the case for Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. In a recent email exchange with a vintage computer expert, Woz revealed that almost 40 years after the Apple II shipped he still agonizes about ways it could have been improved.
1974's MITS Altair 8800 was the personal computer that started it all for a generation of techies. It was hardly the most accessible machine to ever come out of a garage, however.
Photo: classiccmp.org
No one can fill a big white box quite like Apple. We can imagine the iDevice of our dreams jumping out of this one: Will it be the iPhone 6? Or how about the long-awaited iWatch? Perhaps it will be something totally new that the rumor mill hasn't even dreamed up yet.
All photos: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac. Additional reporting by Nicole Martinelli.
