Leo Dai12/18/2017History FinalIntroduction of the Apple II In the history of America since the eighteen hundreds, there are many significant events that changed United States of America forever. These events, ranging from the launching of a spaceship to the passing of laws, all affected the people around America. Out of all of them, one stood out as the most significant event in the United States. The introduction of the Apple II, the first personal micro-computer, changed everyone in America since the day it launched. Apple II brought a machine that used to take rooms to operate into a small box that can be set on people’s desks. Today, desktop personal computer are used by people all over the nation. Apple II’s introduccion changed the way Americans lives, improved education and built a foundation for future technologies.Beginning in the early 1940s, a machine that can do calculations was need by the US army to calculate complex war time tables. The first computer came to life , the ENIAC. It was in development and built in the University of  Pennsylvania secretly. The ENIAC was operated by twenty thousand vacuum tubes, seventy two hundred crystal diodes and seventy thousand resistors. Not only was the ENIAC extreme heavy and took up eighteen hundred square feet to operate, it was also made out of many materials that was prone to failure. Everyday a few vacuum tubes will burn out, leaving the ENIAC nonfunctional until the tubes were replaced, it was tremendously inefficient, in fact, the longest the ENIAC ran without interruptions was only close to five days. As the years passed, people were figuring out a way to build a computer that is more reliable while being smaller and more affordable that it can sell to regular consumers. Soon, microcomputers, computer that is relatively small and used coprocessor instead of vacuum tubes. However, theses microcomputer were still builds for big corporate companies and was difficult for regular people to get their hand on. Soon, personal computer, commonly known today by PC, was introduced and Apple came into the computer world. Apple introduced the Apple II, the predecessor of the original Apple I.The Apple II was launched in April 1977 at the West Coast Computer Fair, this was the first time Apple introduced its product to the public:”With its new logo and fancy display, Apple looked far more professional than the other exhibitors. Apple’s display was close to the entrance of the hall, so all the visitors saw it as they entered” (Lowendmac). The Apple was a complete microcomputer system on a single PC board, it was built based on a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, it also has a built in video terminal and sockets for 8k bytes of RAM, powerful enough to run programs like BASIC and play games. One of the newest feature was a colored display, the colored display attracted games developers as well as everyday consumers. The Apple II was also an computer that centered around user friendliness, it came with a keyboard and a monitor that revolutionized personal computers as traditional computers comes in pieces, not a ready-to-use kit right out of the box. All of these feature quickly became the industry standard, without the introduction of the Apple II, colored display, incredible performance, eas to use and the small package would come much later and computers today would not be as good as it is. The introduction not only started a new generation of computers, it also helped to build a foundation of the first company that could worth a billion dollars.Apple generated so much profit from the Apple II, it established Apple as a company. The Apple II was so successful and game changing that it sold for seventeen years straight with only  minor changes. During the first five years of selling the Apple II, its revenues grew exponentially. The revenue doubled every year, : “Between September 1977 and September 1980 yearly sales grew from $775,000 to $118m, an average annual growth rate of 533%”(McCracken). The well sold Apple II showed the world that Apple is a good new company, and attractors customer from around the world. With such a strong launch, Apple rolled out with more computers improved upon the Apple II over the next few decades, including the famous Mac series. Today, emulators for several Apple II models are still available to run Apple II software on other softwares like macOS, Linux, Microsoft Windows, homebrew enabled Nintendo DS and other operating systems. Without the launch of the Apple II, new Apple innovations like the iPhone, the iPad and the MacBook wouldn’t exist, and considering how revolutionary these new products are from Apple, our life style could be very different: Imagine living a normal day life without your phone and laptops. Not only did the launch of the  Apple II created one of the greatest tech company ever existed, it also played an important role in education.In 1978, just two years after it was founded, Apple won a contract with the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium to supply 500 computers for schools in the state. MECC had developed a sizable catalog of educational software (including the iconic Oregon Trail) which it made freely available to Minnesota schools. Soon the MECC floppy disks and Apple II’s became popular elsewhere across the country. As Steve Jobs said in a 1995 oral history interview with The Computerworld Smithsonian Awards Program, “One of the things that built Apple II’s was schools buying Apple II’s.”So in turn, under its Kids Can’t Wait program, Apple donated a computer to each of the roughly 9000 eligible elementary and secondary schools in California. (Schools with fewer than 100 students did not qualify.)After this push into California schools and particularly after the launch of the Macintosh in 1984, Apple soon came to dominate the education PC market (for a while at least), helped no doubt by other marketing initiatives like the Apple Distinguished Educator program and research projects like Apple Classroom of Tomorrow.Once computers in the classroom became more common however, and particularly once they also required networking, the responsibility for computers at school shifted from individual teachers, excited to do innovative things with computers, to IT, to “the central office” if you will. The purpose often shifted as well – from creative computing to “productivity” and keyboarding. Cheaper computers, those associated with office (versus educational) software, were the domain of a different group of hardware and software companies – companies, of course, like Microsoft.