June 1, 1979: Apple Introduces Apple II+

by Chris Seibold Jun 01, 2011

The Apple II+ was Apple Computer's first blockbuster product. While the original Apple II sold reasonably well, the Apple II+ sold like crazy. Looking at the specs it is hard to say what the attraction was over the original incarnation of the Apple II. Sure, the graphics were a little better and Basic (a version developed by Microsoft) was built in but, all in all, the update wasn't that impressive.

The truth is that it wasn't the Apple II+ that had become compelling; it was what you could do with the machine. The first major improvement was a disk drive designed (very cleverly) by Woz that made storage much easier. Of course that is just more hardware; the real thing that got the Apple II+ going was a program called VisiCalc.

VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program, capable of running “what if” scenarios that would take hours manually, nearly instantaneously by comparison. The program quickly became a must-have for businesses and provided a strong impetus to buy an Apple II+ just to run the program. Apple's first smash hit, thanks to the help of VisiCalc and a disk drive, debuted this month in 1979 and sold for $1,195.00.

Comments

  • Ahh… the ][+... The first machine I ever learned to code basic on.  (sigh)

    vb_baysider had this to say on Jun 01, 2007 Posts: 243
  • “Looking at the specs it is hard to say what the attraction was over the original incarnation of the Apple II…a little better and Basic (a version developed by Microsoft)”

    Wasn’t the improvement being able to do floating-point calculations? Allowing users to do much bigger calculations. The first apple IIs could only handle numbers from -32,768 to 32,787.*1 The Microsoft basic could handle much bigger numbers.

    *1 Wosniak, S. “iWoz”, headline publications, 2006.

    Graham had this to say on Jun 01, 2007 Posts: 24
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