The Apple II is an 8-bit home computer and one of the world's first highly successful mass-produced microcomputer products, designed primarily by Steve Wozniak. It was introduced by Jobs and Wozniak at the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire 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 toward American households rather than businessmen or computer hobbyists.
The Commodore 1541 is a floppy disk drive which was made by Commodore International for the Commodore 64 (C64), Commodore's most popular home computer. The best-known floppy disk drive for the C64, the 1541 is a single-sided 170-kilobyte drive for 5¼" disks. The 1541 directly followed the Commodore 1540.
The Commodore 64, also known as the C64 or the CBM 64, is an 8-bit home computer introduced in January 1982 by Commodore International. It has been listed in the Guinness World Records as the highest-selling single computer model of all time, with independent estimates placing the number sold between 10 and 17 million units. Volume production started in early 1982, marketing in August for US$595. Preceded by the Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore PET, the C64 took its name from its 64 kilobytes(65,536 bytes) of RAM. With support for multicolor sprites and a custom chip for waveform generation, the C64 could create superior visuals and audio compared to systems without such custom hardware.
The Commodore PET is a line of home/personal computers produced starting in 1977 by Commodore International. The system combined a MOS 6502 microprocessor, Commodore BASIC in read only memory (ROM), a keyboard, a computer monitor and a cassette deck for data and program storage in a single all-in-one case.
Alfonso John Romero is an American director, designer, programmer, and developer in the video game industry. He is best known as a co-founder of id Software and designer for many of their games, including Wolfenstein 3D, Dangerous Dave, Hexen, Doom, Doom II and Quake. His game designs and development tools, along with new programming techniques created and implemented by id Software's lead programmer John D. Carmack, led to a mass popularization of the first-person shooter, or FPS, in the 1990s. He is credited with coining the FPS multiplayer term "deathmatch".
Lode Runner is a 2D, fixed-screen platform game video game first published by Broderbund in 1983. Levels in Lode Runner are puzzle-oriented. The player controls one character who must collect all the gold pieces in a level and then get to the end while being chased by a number of enemies. It is one of the first games to include a level editor.
Questprobe is a trilogy of graphical adventure video games featuring Marvel Comics characters. The three games are Questprobe featuring Hulk, Questprobe featuring Spider-Man and Questprobe featuring Human Torch and Thing.
Dangerous Dave is a 1988 computer game by John Romero. It was developed for the Apple II and MS-DOS as an example game to accompany his article about his GraBASIC, an Applesoft BASIC add-on, for the UpTime disk magazine.
Temple of Apshai is a dungeon crawl role-playing video game developed and published by Automated Simulations in 1979. Originating on the TRS-80 and Commodore PET, it was followed by several updated versions for other computers between 1980 and 1986.
Compute!, often stylized as COMPUTE!, was an American home computer magazine that was published from 1979 to 1994. Its origins can be traced to 1978 in Len Lindsay's PET Gazette, one of the first magazines for the Commodore PET computer. In its 1980s heyday Compute! covered all major platforms, and several single-platform spinoffs of the magazine were launched. The most successful of these was Compute!'s Gazette, which catered to VIC-20 and Commodore 64 computer users.
Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress, released on August 24, 1982 for the Apple II, is the second role-playing video game in the Ultima series, and the second installment in Ultima's "Age of Darkness" trilogy.
Softdisk was a software and Internet company based in Shreveport, Louisiana. Founded in 1981, its original products were disk magazines. It was affiliated and partly owned by paper magazine Softalk at founding, but survived its demise.
Creative Computing was one of the earliest magazines covering the microcomputer revolution. Published from October 1974 until December 1985, the magazine covered the spectrum of hobbyist/home/personal computing in a more accessible format than the rather technically oriented BYTE.
A disk magazine, colloquially known as a diskmag or diskzine, is a magazine that is distributed in electronic form to be read using computers. These had some popularity in the 1980s and 1990s as periodicals distributed on floppy disk, hence their name. The rise of the Internet in the late 1990s caused them to be superseded almost entirely by online publications, which are sometimes still called "diskmags" despite the lack of physical disks.
Loadstar was a disk magazine for the Commodore 64 computer, published starting in 1984 and ceasing publication in 2007 with its unreleased 250th issue. It derived its name from the command commonly used to execute commercial software from a Commodore 1541 disk: LOAD "*",8,1, with inspiration from the word "lodestar".
SpeedScript is a word processor originally printed as a type-in machine language listing in 1984-85 issues of Compute! and Compute!'s Gazette magazines. Approximately 5 KB in length, it provided many of the same features as commercial word processing packages of the early 8-bit era, such as PaperClip and Bank Street Writer. Versions were published for the Apple II, Commodore 64 and 128, Atari 8-bit family, VIC-20, and for MS-DOS.
A fast loader is a software program for a home computer, such as the Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum, that accelerates the speed of file loading from floppy disk or compact cassette.
SoftSide is a defunct computer magazine, begun in October 1978 by Roger Robitaille and published by SoftSide Publications of Milford, New Hampshire.
Home computers were a class of microcomputers that entered the market in 1977 and became common during the 1980s. They were marketed to consumers as affordable and accessible computers that, for the first time, were intended for the use of a single nontechnical user. These computers were a distinct market segment that typically cost much less than business, scientific or engineering-oriented computers of the time such as the IBM PC, and were generally less powerful in terms of memory and expandability. However, a home computer often had better graphics and sound than contemporary business computers. Their most common uses were playing video games, but they were also regularly used for word processing, doing homework, and programming.