User`s guide

C.T.: What about peripherals like the printer interface, cassette, and disk? I
guess these were all coded using an assembler; right?
Woz: By the time the Printer card was done with it's 256 byte ROM I may still
have been coding by hand or we might have gotten our first assembler. It's
unusual to this day that you plugged in a printer and it attached itself to the
op-sys by means of a driver in ROM on the printer card. True plug'n play.
Possible to this day but rarely done (I've heard of some Newton exception).
The ROM op-sys of the Apple II could direct output and input to any of 7
slots. Mass media was read and write an entire cassette file at once.
The floppy brought a very tight hardware design, coupled very tightly to
the lowest level access subroutines which I wrote without an assembler. Randy
Wiggington wrote the "Read Write Tractor Sector" routines, a step higher. Randy
and I began a full op-sys but we farmed it out to Shepardson associates.
Needless to say, none of that was done by hand!
______________________________
From: Jason Aubrey Wells <[e-mail]>
004- What did the first Apple ads look like?
Below is the text of the Apple II advertisement which appeared in the September
1977 issue of Scientific American.
The home computer that's ready to work, play and grow with you.
Clear the kitchen table. Bring in the color T.V. Plug in your new Apple II*, and
connect any standard cassette recorder/player. Now you're ready for an evening
of discovery in the new world of personal computers.
Only Apple II makes it that easy. It's a complete, ready to use computer--not in
a kit. At $1298, it includes features you won't find on other personal computers
costing twice as much. Features such as video graphics in 15 colors. And a built
in memory capacity of 8K bytes ROM and 4K bytes RAM--with room for lots more.
But you don't even need to know a RAM from a ROM to use and enjoy Apple II. It's
the first personal computer with a fast version of BASIC--the English-like
programming language--permanently
built in. That means you can begin running your Apple II the first evening,
entering your own instructions and watching them work, even if you've had no
previous computer experience.
The familiar typewriter-style keyboard makes communication easy. And your
programs and data can be stored on (and retrieved from) audio cassettes, using
the built-in cassette interface, so you can swap with other Apple II users. This
and other peripherals--other equipment on most personal computers, at hundreds
of dollars extra cost--are built into Apple II. And it's designed to keep up
with changing technology, to expand easily whenever you need it to.