NuBus
NuBus is a 32-bit parallel computer bus developed at MIT and standardized in 1987 as a part of the NuMachine workstation project. The first complete implementation of the NuBus was done by Western Digital for their NuMachine, for the Lisp Machines Inc. LMI Lambda; the NuBus was incorporated in Lisp products by Texas Instruments, used as the main expansion bus by Apple Computer and NeXT. It is no longer used outside the embedded market. Early microcomputer buses like S-100 were just connections to the pins of the microprocessor and to the power rails; this meant that a change in the computer's architecture led to a new bus as well. Looking to avoid such problems in the future, NuBus was designed to be independent of the processor, its general architecture and any details of its I/O handling. Among its many advanced features for the era, NuBus used a 32-bit backplane when 8- or 16-bit busses were common; this was seen as making the bus "future-proof", as it was believed that 32-bit systems would arrive in the near future while 64-bit buses and beyond would remain impractical and excessive.
In addition, NuBus was agnostic about the processor itself. Most buses up to this point conformed to the signalling and data standards of the machine they were plugged into. NuBus made no such assumptions, which meant that any NuBus card could be plugged into any NuBus machine, as long as there was an appropriate device driver. In order to select the proper device driver, NuBus included an ID scheme that allowed the cards to identify themselves to the host computer during startup; this meant that the user didn't have to configure the system, the bane of bus systems up to that point. For instance, with ISA the driver had to be configured not only for the card, but for any memory it required, the interrupts it used, so on. NuBus required no such configuration, making it one of the first examples of plug-and-play architecture. On the downside, while this flexibility made NuBus much simpler for the user and device driver authors, it made things more difficult for the designers of the cards themselves.
Whereas most "simple" bus systems were supported with a handful of input/output chips designed to be used with that CPU in mind, with NuBus every card and computer had to convert everything to a platform-agnostic "NuBus world". This meant adding a NuBus controller chip between the bus and any I/O chips on the card, increasing costs. While this is a trivial exercise today, one that all newer buses require, in the 1980s NuBus was considered complex and expensive; the NuBus became a standard in 1987 as IEEE 1196. This version used a standard 96-pin three-row connector, running the system on a 10 MHz clock for a maximum burst throughput of 40 MB/s and average speeds of 10 to 20 MB/s. A addition, NuBus 90, increased the clock rate to 20 MHz for better throughput, burst increasing to about 70 MB/s, average to about 30 MB/s; the NuBus was first developed commercially in the Western Digital NuMachine, first used in a production product by their licensee, Lisp Machines, Inc. in the LMI-Lambda, a Lisp Machine.
The project and the development group was sold by Western Digital to Texas Instruments in 1984. The technology was incorporated into their TI Explorer a Lisp Machine. In 1986, Texas Instruments used the NuBus in the S1500 multiprocessor UNIX system. Both Texas Instruments and Symbolics developed Lisp Machine NuBus boards based on their Lisp supporting microprocessors; these NuBus boards were co-processor Lisp Machines for the Apple Macintosh line. NuBus was selected by Apple Computer for use in their Macintosh II project, where its plug-n-play nature fit well with the Mac philosophy of ease-of-use, it was used in most of the Macintosh II series that made up the professional-level Mac lineup from the late 1980s. It was used into the mid-1990s. Early Quadras only supported the 20 MHz rate when two cards were talking to each other, since the motherboard controller was not upgraded; this was addressed in the NuBus implementation on the 660AV and 840AV models. This improved NuBus controller was used in the first generation Power Macintosh 6100, 7100 and 8100 models.
Power Mac models adopted Intel's PCI bus. Apple's NuBus implementation used pin and socket connectors on the back of the card rather than edge connectors with Phillips screws inside the case that most cards use, making it much easier to install cards. Apple's computers supplied an always-on +5 V "trickle" power supply for tasks such as watching the phone line while the computer was turned off; this was part of an unapproved NuBus standard. NuBus was selected by NeXT Computer for their line of machines, but used a different physical PCB layout. NuBus appears to have seen little use outside these roles, when Apple switched to PCI in the mid 1990s, NuBus disappeared. Amiga Zorro II Industry Standard Architecture Extended Industry Standard Architecture Micro Channel architecture VESA Local Bus Peripheral Component Interconnect Accelerated Graphics Port PCI Express List of device bandwidths NuBus specs Developing for the Macintosh NuBus Pictures of several NuBus cards at applefritter
Apple II
The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer, one of the first successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed by Steve Wozniak. It was introduced in 1977 at the West Coast Computer Faire by Jobs and was the first consumer product sold by Apple Computer, Inc, it is the first model in a series of computers which were produced until Apple IIe production ceased in November 1993. The Apple II marks Apple's first launch of a personal computer aimed at a consumer market – branded towards American households rather than businessmen or computer hobbyists. Byte magazine referred to the Apple II, Commodore PET 2001 and the TRS-80 as the "1977 Trinity." The Apple II had the defining feature of being able to display color graphics, this capability was the reason why the Apple logo was redesigned to have a spectrum of colors. By 1976, Steve Jobs had convinced the product designer Jerry Manock to create the "shell" for the Apple II – a smooth case inspired by kitchen appliances that would conceal the internal mechanics.
The earliest Apple IIs were assembled in Silicon Valley, in Texas. The first computers went on sale on June 10, 1977 with a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor running at 1.023 MHz, two game paddles, 4 KB of RAM, an audio cassette interface for loading programs and storing data, the Integer BASIC programming language built into the ROMs. The video controller displays 24 lines by 40 columns of monochrome, uppercase-only text on the screen, with NTSC composite video output suitable for display on a TV monitor, or on a regular TV set by way of a separate RF modulator; the original retail price of the computer was $1,298 and $2,638. To reflect the computer's color graphics capability, the Apple logo on the casing has rainbow stripes, which remained a part of Apple's corporate logo until early 1998. Most the Apple II was a catalyst for personal computers across many industries. In the May 1977 issue of Byte, Steve Wozniak published a detailed description of his design; this arrangement eliminated the need for a separate refresh circuit for the DRAM chips, as the video transfer accessed each row of the dynamic memory within the timeout period.
In addition, it did not require separate RAM chips for the video RAM, while the PET and TRS-80 had SRAMs for the video. Rather than use a complex analog-to-digital circuit to read the outputs of the game controller, Wozniak used a simple timer circuit whose period is proportional to the resistance of the game controller, used a software loop to measure the timer. A single 14.31818 MHz master oscillator was divided by various ratios to produce all other required frequencies, including the microprocessor clock signals, the video transfer counters, the color-burst samples. The text and graphics screens have a complex arrangement. For instance, the scanlines were not stored in sequential areas of memory; this complexity was due to Wozniak's realization that the method would allow for the refresh of the dynamic RAM as a side effect. This method had no cost overhead to have software calculate or look up the address of the required scanline and avoided the need for significant extra hardware. In the high-resolution graphics mode, color is determined by pixel position and thus can be implemented in software, saving Wozniak the chips needed to convert bit patterns to colors.
This allowed for subpixel font rendering, since orange and blue pixels appear half a pixel-width farther to the right on the screen than green and purple pixels. The Apple II at first used data cassette storage like most other microcomputers of the time. In 1978, the company introduced an external 5 1⁄4-inch floppy disk drive, the Disk II, attached via a controller card that plugs into one of the computer's expansion slots; the Disk II interface, created by Wozniak, is regarded as an engineering masterpiece for its economy of electronic components. The approach taken in the Disk II controller is typical of Wozniak's designs. With a few small-scale logic chips and a cheap PROM, he created a functional floppy disk interface at a fraction of the component cost of standard circuit configurations. Steve Jobs extensively pushed to give the Apple II a case that looked visually appealing and sellable to people outside of electronics hobbyists, rather than the generic wood and metal boxes typical of early microcomputers.
The result was a futuristic-looking molded white plastic case. Jobs paid close attention to the keyboard design and decided to use dark brown keycaps as it contrasted well with the case; the first production Apple IIs had hand-molded cases. In addition, the initial case design ha
Power Macintosh
The Power Macintosh Power Mac, is a family of personal computers that were designed and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. as part of its Macintosh brand from March 1994 until August 2006. Described by MacWorld Magazine as "The most important technical evolution of the Macintosh since the Mac II debuted in 1987," the Power Macintosh was Apple's first computer to use a PowerPC processor. Software written for the Motorola 68030 and 68040 processors that were used in Macintoshes up to that point would not run on the PowerPC natively, so a Mac 68k emulator was included with System 7.1.2. While the emulator provided good compatibility with existing Macintosh software, performance was about one-third slower than comparable Macintosh Quadra machines; the Power Macintosh replaced the Quadra in Apple's lineup, were sold in the same enclosures. Over the next twelve years, the Power Macintosh evolved through a succession of enclosure designs, a rename to "Power Mac", five major generations of PowerPC chips, a great deal of press coverage, design accolades, controversy about performance claims.
The Power Mac was discontinued as part of Apple's transition to Intel processors, making way for its replacement, the Mac Pro. The first Power Macintosh models were released in March 1994, but the development of Power Macintosh technology dates back to mid-1988. Jean-Louis Gassée, president of Apple's product division, started the "Jaguar" project with the goal of creating a computer that would not only be the fastest desktop computer on the market, but would accept commands by talking to the computer; this was envisioned to be a new computer line altogether, not a Macintosh, the Jaguar team was kept independent of the Macintosh team. This separation included operating system development, with the newly-conceived "Pink" being the platform for the new computer. Jaguar was not intended to be a high-volume, mainstream system. Gassée's preference, as it was with the upcoming Macintosh IIfx, was to create a product that would compete in the high-end workstation market not an area of strength for Apple.
The decision to use RISC architecture was representative of a shift in the computer industry in 1987 and 1988, where RISC-based systems from Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard and IBM were outpacing the performance offered by systems based on Motorola's 68020 and 68030 processors and Intel's 80386 and 80486 CPUs. Apple invested considerable time and effort in an attempt to create their own RISC CPU in a project code-named "Aquarius" to a point where a Cray-1 supercomputer was purchased to assist with designing the chip; the company lacked the financial and manufacturing resources to produce a working product and the project was cancelled in 1989. By early 1990, Apple was in contact with a number of RISC vendors to find a suitable hardware partner; the team that had created the IIfx independently started experimenting with creating a new Macintosh product that would combine a Motorola 68030 processor with an AMD Am29000 RISC chip. Apple had released a product built on the 29k called "Macintosh Display Card 8•24 GC", a so-called "Macintosh Toolbox accelerator" NuBus card that provided faster drawing routines than those included on the Macintosh ROM.
The team's experiments resulted in a 68020 emulator implemented in RISC, but the 29k project was dropped in mid-1990 due to financial infeasibility. Apple had looked at processors such as those from MIPS Technologies and Acorn Computers, as well as the Intel i860. Negotiations with Sun included the condition that Sun would use the Macintosh interface for its SPARC workstation computers in exchange for Apple using Sun's SPARC processors in Macintosh workstations. Negotiations with MIPS to use the R4000 processor included the condition that the Macintosh interface would be available as an alternative to Advanced Computing Environment; this deal fell through due to Microsoft being a major partner in the ACE Consortium, as well as concerns about manufacturing capability. The Intel i860 was eliminated from consideration due to its high complexity. Apple did not consider IBM's POWER1 processor as an option, believing that IBM would not be willing to license it to third parties. In mid-1990, Apple chose the Motorola 88110, an as yet unfinished chip that combined the 88100 CPU and 88200 FPU into a single package.:7 For the rest of the year, Apple's engineers developed a 68k emulator that would work with this future chip.
This project became known as "RLC", short form "RISC LC", a play on the name of Apple's upcoming Macintosh LC computer. By January 1991, the engineering team had produced a prototype of a Macintosh LC with its 68020 CPU being swapped out for an 88100 and a 68020 emulator; this prototype was able to use an unmodified Macintosh Toolbox ROM and could boot into System 7. A few months a second prototype was created, utilizing a Macintosh IIsi case with the now-completed Motorola 88100 chip.:10-11Jaguar wasn't intended to be a high-volume mainstream system. Instead, mass-market RISC systems would follow sometime later. After Gassée left Apple in early 1990, the goal of the Jaguar project was refocused to be a mainstream Macintosh system instead of a new platform; the Jaguar project was folded into the Macintosh team in early 1991.:10 While the Jaguar project itself never came to fruition, Taligent never resulted in a functional operating system, many of the elements developed by the Jaguar hardware and software teams were brought to market in mid-1993 with the Cen
Apple I
Apple Computer 1 known as the Apple I, or Apple-1, is a desktop computer released by the Apple Computer Company in 1976. It was hand-built by Steve Wozniak. Wozniak's friend Steve Jobs had the idea of selling the computer; the Apple I was Apple's first product, to finance its creation, Jobs sold his only motorized means of transportation, a VW Microbus, for a few hundred dollars, Steve Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator for $500. It was demonstrated in July 1976 at the Homebrew Computer Club in California. Production was discontinued on September 30, 1977, after the June 10, 1977 introduction of its successor, the Apple II, which Byte magazine referred to as part of the "1977 Trinity" of personal computing. On March 5, 1975, Steve Wozniak attended the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in Gordon French's garage, he was so inspired that he set to work on what would become the Apple I computer. After building it for himself and showing it at the Club, he and Steve Jobs gave out schematics for the computer to interested club members and helped some of them build and test out copies.
Steve Jobs suggested that they design and sell a single etched and silkscreened circuit board—just the bare board, with no electronic parts—that people could use to build the computers. Wozniak calculated that having the board design laid out would cost $1,000 and manufacturing would cost another $20 per board. To fund this small venture—their first company—Jobs sold his van and Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator. Soon after, Steve Jobs arranged to sell "something like 50" built computers to the Byte Shop at $500 each. To fulfill the $25,000 order, they obtained $20,000 in parts at 30 days net and delivered the finished product in 10 days; the Apple I went on sale in July 1976 at a price of US$666.66, because Wozniak "liked repeating digits" and because of a one-third markup on the $500 wholesale price. The first unit produced was used in a high school math class, donated to Liza Loop's public-access computer center. About 200 units were produced, all but 25 were sold within nine or ten months.
The Apple I's built-in computer terminal circuitry was distinctive. All one needed was a television set. Competing machines such as the Altair 8800 were programmed with front-mounted toggle switches and used indicator lights for output, had to be extended with separate hardware to allow connection to a computer terminal or a teletypewriter machine; this made the Apple I an innovative machine for its day. In April 1977, the price was dropped to $475, it continued to be sold through August 1977, despite the introduction of the Apple II in April 1977, which began shipping in June of that year. In October 1977, the Apple I was discontinued and removed from Apple's price list; as Wozniak was the only person who could answer most customer support questions about the computer, the company offered Apple I owners discounts and trade-ins for Apple IIs to persuade them to return their computers. These recovered boards were destroyed by Apple, contributing to their rarity today; as of 2013, sixty-three Apple I computers have been confirmed to exist.
Only six have been verified to be in working condition. The Apple-1 Registry lists every known Apple I computer; this registry serves an additional purpose by including a list of all auctions since 2000. An Apple I sold for US$50,000 at auction in 1999. In 2008, the website Vintage Computing and Gaming reported that Apple I owner Rick Conte was looking to sell his unit and was "expecting a price in excess of $15,000 U. S." The site reported Conte had donated the unit to the Maine Personal Computer Museum in 2009. A unit was sold in September 2009 for $17,480 on eBay. A unit belonging to early Apple Computer engineers Dick and Cliff Huston was sold on March 23, 2010, for $42,766 on eBay. In November 2010, an Apple I sold for £133,250 at Christie's auction house in London; the high price was due to the rare documents and packaging offered in the sale in addition to the computer, including the original packaging, a typed and signed letter from Jobs, the original invoice showing "Steven" as the salesman.
The computer was brought to Polytechnic University of Turin where it was fixed and used to run the BASIC programming language. On June 15, 2012, a working Apple I was sold at auction by Sotheby's for a then-record $374,500, more than double the expected price; this unit is on display at the Nexon Computer Museum in South Korea. In October 2012, a non-working Apple I from the estate of former Apple Computer employee Joe Copson was put up for auction by Christie's, but found no bidder, willing to pay the starting price of US$80,000. Copson's board had been listed on eBay in December 2011, with a starting bid of $170,000 and failed to sell. Following the Christie's auction, the board was restored to working condition by computer historian Corey Cohen. Copson's Apple I was once again listed on eBay, where it sold for US$236,100.03 on April 23, 2015. On November 24, 2012, a working Apple I was sold at auction by Auction Team Breker for €400,000. On May 25, 2013, a functioning 1976 model was sold for a then-record €516,000 in Cologne.
Auction Team Breker said "an unnamed Asian
Compact Macintosh
A Compact Macintosh is an all-in-one Apple Mac computer with a display integrated in the computer case, beginning with the original Macintosh 128K. Compact Macs include the original Macintosh through to the Color Classic sold between 1984 and the mid-1990s; the larger Macintosh LC 500 series, Power Macintosh 5000 series and iMac are not described as a "Compact Mac." Apple divides these models into five form factors: The Macintosh 128K, Macintosh SE, Macintosh Classic, the modernized Macintosh Color Classic with a 10 in color screen, the different Macintosh XL. *220 V international models are appended with the letter "P" All-in-one desktop computer List of Apple Macintosh models by case type Compact Macs Index and Compact Macs Guide at lowendmac.com Early Compact "Classic" Macs at EveryMac The Vintage Mac Museum: Compact Mac -9inch/mono Display 68000-
Apple II series
The Apple II series is a family of home computers, one of the first successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer, launched in 1977 with the original Apple II. In terms of ease of use and expandability, the Apple II was a major advancement over its predecessor, the Apple I, a limited-production bare circuit board computer for electronics hobbyists. Through 1988, a number of models were introduced, with the most popular, the Apple IIe, remaining changed little into the 1990s. A 16-bit model with much more advanced graphics and sound, the Apple IIGS, was added in 1986. While compatible with earlier Apple II systems, the IIGS was in closer competition with the Atari ST and Amiga; the Apple II was first sold on June 10, 1977. By the end of production in 1993, somewhere between five and six million Apple II series computers had been produced; the Apple II was one of the longest running mass-produced home computer series, with models in production for just under 17 years.
The Apple II became one of several recognizable and successful computers during the 1980s and early 1990s, although this was limited to the USA. It was aggressively marketed through volume discounts and manufacturing arrangements to educational institutions, which made it the first computer in widespread use in American secondary schools, displacing the early leader Commodore PET; the effort to develop educational and business software for the Apple II, including the 1979 release of the popular VisiCalc spreadsheet, made the computer popular with business users and families. The original Apple II operating system was in ROM along with Integer BASIC. Programs were entered saved and loaded on cassette tape; when the Disk II was implemented in 1978 by Steve Wozniak, a Disk Operating System or DOS was commissioned from the company Shepardson Microsystems where its development was done by Paul Laughton. The final and most popular version of this software was Apple DOS 3.3. Some commercial Apple II software did not use standard DOS formats.
This discouraged the modifying of the software on the disks and improved loading speed. Apple DOS was superseded by ProDOS, which supported a hierarchical filesystem and larger storage devices. With an optional third-party Z80-based expansion card, the Apple II could boot into the CP/M operating system and run WordStar, dBase II, other CP/M software. With the release of MousePaint in 1984 and the Apple IIGS in 1986, the platform took on the look of the Macintosh user interface, including a mouse. Despite the introduction of the Motorola 68000-based Macintosh in 1984, the Apple II series still accounted for 85% of the company's hardware sales in the first quarter of fiscal 1985. Apple continued to sell Apple II systems alongside the Macintosh until terminating the IIGS in December 1992 and the IIe in November 1993; the last II-series Apple in production, the IIe card for Macintoshes, was discontinued on October 15, 1993. The total Apple II sales of all of its models during its 16-year production run were about 6 million units, with the peak occurring in 1983 when 1 million were sold.
The Apple II was designed to look more like a home appliance than a piece of electronic equipment. The lid popped off the beige plastic case without the use of tools, allowing access to the computer's internals, including the motherboard with eight expansion slots, an array of random access memory sockets that could hold up to 48 kilobytes worth of memory chips; the Apple II had color and high-resolution graphics modes, sound capabilities and one of two built-in BASIC programming languages. The Apple II was targeted for the masses rather than just engineers. Unlike preceding home microcomputers, it was sold as a finished consumer appliance rather than as a kit. VanLOVEs Apple Handbook and The Apple Educators Guide by Gerald VanDiver and Rolland Love reviewed more than 1,500 software programs that the Apple II series could use; the Apple dealer network used this book to emphasize the growing software developer base in education and personal use. The Apple II series had a keyboard built into the motherboard shell, with the exception of the Apple IIGS which featured an external keyboard.
The Apple II case was durable enough, according to a 1981 Apple ad, to protect an Apple II from a fire started when a cat belonging to one early user knocked over a lamp. Early II-series models were designated "Apple ]["; the first Apple II computers went on sale on June 10, 1977 with a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor running at 1.023 MHz, 4 KB of RAM, an audio cassette interface for loading programs and storing data, the Integer BASIC programming language built into the ROMs. The video controller displayed 40 columns by 24 lines of monochrome, upper-case-only text on the screen, with NTSC composite video output suitable for display on a TV monitor, or on a regular TV set by way of a separate RF modulator; the original retail price of the computer was US$1298 and US$2638. To reflect the computer's color graphics capability, the Apple logo on the casing was represented using rainbow stripes, which remained a part of Apple's corporate logo until early 1998; the earliest Apple IIs were assembled in Silicon Valley, in Texas.
Macintosh II family
The Macintosh II is a family of personal computers, designed and sold by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1987 to 1993. The Macintosh II was the initial model, representing the high-end of the Macintosh line for the time. Over the course of the next six years, seven more models were produced, culminating with the short-lived Macintosh IIvi and Macintosh IIvx models. Apple retired the Macintosh II name. Unlike prior Macintosh models, which are "all-in-one" designs, the Macintosh II models are "modular" systems which do not include built-in monitors and are expandable. Beginning with the Macintosh II and culminating in the Macintosh IIfx, the Macintosh II family was Apple's high-end line from 1987 until the introduction of the Motorola 68040-based Macintosh Quadra computers in 1991. Expansion was provided by way of NuBus, which become the standard expansion bus for the entire Macintosh line for a decade; the Macintosh II was the first to support color displays and the first to support a screen resolution larger than 512x384.
The Macintosh II is the first to use a Motorola 68000 series processor other than the Motorola 68000. Except for the original Macintosh II which launched the line with a Motorola 68020 clocked at 16 MHz, they used the Motorola 68030 microprocessor after the Motorola 68040 was introduced. Apple would adopt the'040 with the introduction of the Quadra 700 and 900, positioning these models as high-end workstation-class machines for graphics and scientific computing, while positioning the Macintosh II family as a mainstream desktop computer. During the Macintosh II series' lifespan, they rose to become among the most powerful personal computers available. While the Macintosh II series itself was replaced by the Macintosh Centris and Quadra, the Macintosh LC and Performa families continued to use the II's 68030 technology long after the 68040 was introduced and the PowerBook continued to use the'030 into the Power Macintosh era. List of Macintosh models grouped by CPU type List of Macintosh models by case type Mac II Series Index, Low End Mac
