Apple II is a series of microcomputers initially designed by Steve Wozniak, manufactured by Apple Computer, and launched in 1977 with the Apple II model that gave the series its name. It was followed by the Apple II Plus, Apple IIe, Apple IIc, and Apple IIc Plus, with the 1983 IIe being the most popular. The name is trademarked with square brackets as Apple ][, then, beginning with the IIe, as Apple //. The Apple II was a major advancement over its predecessor, the Apple I, in terms of ease of use, features, and expandability.
The Tandy 1000 was the first in a series of IBM PC compatible home computers produced by the Tandy Corporation, sold through its Radio Shack and Radio Shack Computer Center stores. Introduced in 1984, the Tandy 1000 line was designed to offer affordable yet capable systems for home computing and education. Tandy-specific features, such as enhanced graphics, sound, and a built-in joystick port, made the computers particularly attractive for home use.
The Apple IIe is the third model in the Apple II series of personal computers produced by Apple Computer. It was released in January 1983 as the successor to the Apple II Plus. The e in the name stands for enhanced. It is the first Apple II with built-in lowercase and 80-column text support, as well as 64K RAM, while reducing the total chip count from previous models by approximately 75%.
The Apple IIe Card is a compatibility card, which through hardware and software emulation, allows certain Macintosh computers to run software designed for the Apple II. Released in March 1991 for use with the LC family, Apple targeted the card at its widely dominated educational market to ease the transition from Apple II-based classrooms, with thousands of entrenched educational software titles, to Macintosh-based classrooms.
UAE is a computer emulator which emulates the hardware of Commodore International's Amiga range of computers. Released under the GNU General Public License, UAE is free software.
The Apple IIGS is a 16-bit personal computer produced by Apple Computer. It is the fifth and most powerful of the Apple II family. It is compatible with earlier Apple II models, but has a Macintosh look and feel, and resolution and color similar to the Amiga and Atari ST. The "GS" in the name stands for "Graphics and Sound", referring to its enhanced multimedia hardware, especially its state-of-the-art audio.
The X68000 is a home computer created by Sharp Corporation. It was first released in 1987 and sold only in Japan.
DOSBox is a free and open-source emulator which runs software for MS-DOS compatible disk operating systems—primarily video games. It was first released in 2002, when DOS technology was becoming obsolete. Its adoption for running DOS games is widespread, with it being used in commercial re-releases of those games as well.
vMac is a free and open-source Macintosh Plus emulator which is able to run versions of System 1.1 to 7.5.5. It is available for Windows, DOS, OS/2, Mac OS, NeXTSTEP, Linux, Unix, and other platforms. Although vMac has been abandoned, Mini vMac, an improved spinoff of vMac, is still actively developed.
QEMU is a free and open-source emulator. It emulates a computer's processor through dynamic binary translation and provides a set of different hardware and device models for the machine, enabling it to run a variety of guest operating systems. It can interoperate with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to run virtual machines at near-native speed. QEMU can also do emulation for user-level processes, allowing applications compiled for one processor architecture to run on another.
Applied Engineering, headquartered in Carrollton, Texas, was a leading third-party hardware vendor for Apple II computers from the early 1980s until the mid-1990s.
The Commodore 64 home computer used various external peripherals. Due to the backwards compatibility of the Commodore 128, most peripherals would also work on that system. There is also some compatibility with the VIC-20 and Commodore PET.
The Sun386i is a discontinued hybrid UNIX workstation/PC compatible computer system produced by Sun Microsystems, launched in 1988. It is based on the Intel 80386 microprocessor but shares many features with the contemporary Sun-3 series systems.
The Amiga computer can be used to emulate several other computer platforms, including legacy platforms such as the Commodore 64, and its contemporary rivals such as the IBM PC and the Macintosh.
The Disk II Floppy Disk Subsystem, often rendered as Disk ][, is a 5 +1⁄4-inch floppy disk drive designed by Steve Wozniak at the recommendation of Mike Markkula, and manufactured by Apple Computer It went on sale in June 1978 at a retail price of US$495 for pre-order; it was later sold for $595 including the controller card and cable. The Disk II was designed specifically for use with the 1977 Apple II personal computer to replace the slower cassette tape storage.
Apple II peripheral cards are expansion cards that work with the Apple II series of computers. They plug in to slots on the motherboard.
Apple II graphics debuted on the original Apple II in 1977 and were used throughout the computer series of the same name. The graphics consist of a 16 color low-resolution mode and a high-resolution mode where visuals are dependent on artifact color. The Apple IIe added "double" versions of each of these, most prominently "double high-resolution" with twice the horizontal resolution in 16 colors. Internally, Apple II graphics modes are idiosyncratic and do not use a linear frame buffer.
A compatibility card is an expansion card for computers that allows it to have hardware emulation with another device. While compatibility cards date back at least to the Apple II family, the majority of them were made for 16-bit computers, often to maintain compatibility with the IBM PC. The most popular of these were for Macintosh systems that allowed them to emulate Windows PCs via NuBus or PCI; Apple had released several such cards themselves.
The Macintosh External Disk Drive is the original model in a series of external 3+1⁄2-inch floppy disk drives manufactured and sold by Apple Computer exclusively for the Macintosh series of computers introduced in January 1984. Later, Apple unified their external drives to work cross-platform between the Macintosh and Apple II product lines, dropping the name "Macintosh" from the drives. Though Apple had been producing external floppy disk drives prior to 1984, they were exclusively developed for the Apple II, III and Lisa computers using the industry standard 5+1⁄4-inch flexible disk format. The Macintosh external drives were the first to widely introduce Sony's new 3+1⁄2-inch rigid disk standard commercially and throughout their product line. Apple produced only one external 3+1⁄2-inch drive exclusively for use with the Apple II series called the Apple UniDisk 3.5.
The Dimension 68000 is a microcomputer introduced by the Micro Craft Corporation in 1983 that sought to emulate the Apple II, the IBM PC, and various CP/M-centric computers through a family of coprocessor expansion cards and emulation software. The Dimension 68000 can also run as a standalone computer based on the Motorola 68000 from which it gets its namesake. The computer is mostly the brainchild of Mike Carpenter, a former executive of a scientific instrument manufacturer who incorporated Micro Craft in Dallas, Texas, to develop the Dimension 68000. It had a market lifespan of three years and received mixed, mostly positive, reception from the technology press. Criticism was leveled at the $6,250 price tag for the computer with the full deck of coprocessor cards, as well as the extent of the emulation power of those cards.
