Washington Apple Pi

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Washington Apple Pi's Apple II Page


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The Apple II was the first truly important personal computer ever. Millions of them were made and millions are still in use, mostly in schools (but plenty in homes and businesses) around the world.

There are some who dispargingly call the Apple II the "Model T" of computers, yet, in a way, they are right. Apple IIs are sturdy workhorses that do word processing, number crunching, netsurfing and even colorful graphics and great sound right "out of the box." They are tough, long lasting machines that work cheaply. There is a massive collection of fantastic freeware and super shareware available for the Apple II owner (a good portion of it is available from Washington Apple Pi's Disketeria) as well as plenty of professionally designed commercial software still being marketed through catalogs to the educational market.

The Apple II does just about anything one could want a computer to do. You may never need to write a program for one, but if you want to, you'll find it easy enough for a child to do. In fact, many, many children first learn about computer programming on an Apple II!

Apple spent years supporting the Macintosh with Apple II sales. Even after halting development of the Apple II, raising prices and stopping advertising of it, the only way the company could stop people from buying them was to completely cease production. After that, for quite awhile, the best selling Macintosh computer on Apple's price list was the LC, equipped with an Apple II card! Apple IIc picture

While it is useless to speculate on the fate of the Apple II if development of a 32-bit compatible machine had proceeded, there is apparently lots of life in the old machine yet. Independent programmers have created Apple IIe emulators for PCs, Amigas, and the Macintosh. There are now two Apple IIgs emulators for the PowerMac. One is called GUS, and was developed by folks at Apple Computer in their spare time. It is a remarkable bit of engineering, but is not currently available to the general public. I do believe Educational institutions can get copies of the program by completing a non-disclosure agreement with Apple. More readily available is Bernie ][ the Rescue, a shareware IIgs emulator that has become wildy popular and works as well or better than the actual gs. You can get it by clicking here.


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