TAG | Apple never did bare bones |
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| by Stephen Withers | |
| Thursday, 24 April 2008 | |
Related storiesThat's an interesting kind of revisionism. The Apple I might have been "bare bones" in the sense that it didn't include a case (that didn't arrive until the Apple II), but by the standards of the day it was unusually well featured - a trend that the company has continued. Apple generally doesn't offer minimal specifications with the primary purpose of advertising them at low prices as a starting point for optioning-up to more realistic, more expensive and also more profitable configurations. At a time when most personal computers needed an external terminal or came with a hex keypad and seven-segment display, the Apple I featured built-in text and graphics support with a composite video interface, plus a connector allowing a full ASCII keyboard to be plugged in. So it might have been "bare bones" by today's standards, but compared with other popular models of the day such as the KIM-1, it was quite impressive. Of course, the Apple II, Commodore PET and Radio Shack TRS-80 soon brought in a new era of ready-to-go computing at prices that were still far from reaching a mass market but were within reach of many people that hankered for their own computers but lacked the skills needed to build them from kits.
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