Selling for over 10 years, the Apple II line was very successful and
the II+ had a few new features over the standard II including:
new ROM holding the AppleSoft Basic (floating point version written by Microsoft)
new auto-start for easy start-up and screen editing
increased ram (to 48 KB)
Having sold between 5 and 6 million machines during its lifetime, the Apple II was certainly popular, especially in school systems in the United States (Commodore machines ruled in Canada). The Apple II was popular with business users as well as with families and schools, particularly after the release of the first-ever computer spreadsheet, VisiCalc, which initially ran only on the Apple II.
The Apple II had only BASIC built into the ROM. Apple DOS was added to support the diskette drive; the last version was "Apple DOS 3.3". Apple DOS was superseded by ProDOS to support a hierarchical filesystem and larger storage devices. Using a diskette or hard-disk, the Apple II could also load the UCSD Pascal operating system. UCSD binaries are compatible with a large number of other computers, including the IBM-PC. Using a Z80 interface the Apple II could run the popular Wordstar and dBase software under the CP/M operating system.
A 9-pin dot matrix printer that connected to either the Apple 8-bit line, or even the original Macintosh computers as well through AppleTalk.
User Comments
Stephen Young on Sunday, July 15, 2012 All I can remember was that, as a technician, I had to un-chip all the DIP's and using a pencil eraser, remove all the oxidation from the pins. Too much heat, already then!
To this day, every time I see an older pc board, I ground myself and re-seat all the chips...
TJ on Saturday, September 17, 2011 I bought an Apple II+ in New York for $1200 in the early 70's, took it back to where I was working in the Middle East, with a 5-day stop over in Spain. Spanish Customs wouldn't let me take it into the country, thinking it was some kind of super spy machine,so had to leave it (packed in a box full of plastic peanuts) at the Custom office. When I went back I opened the box to make sure everything was ok, and 7 thousand electonicaly charged plastic peanuts stuck to everyone in the airport. The Spanish officials gave me 15minutes to clean it all up, but when I approached one young female passenger, meaning only to help her brush her coat, they told me to get out and take the now boxless machine with me. When I got to Customs in my base country (where every foreigner was regarded with suspicion as a spy) I told the Custom official it was a typewriter,and I had no problem. I believe mine was the first Apple to be brought into the country.
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 "Apple Image Writer I")