Actually, it doesn't only go just downhill. It crashes into a dark, smelly pothole: "And learn more about the office relationship that can free you up for other affairs."

And there you were, thinking that Mad Men promoted bad stereotypes.

Name: Apple II
Year created: 1977
Creator: Apple Computer, Inc.
Cost: $1,298 with 4KB of RAM; $2,638 with 48KB of RAM
Memory: 4K semiconductor
Processor: MOS technology 6502

Spurred on by the small but encouraging success of the original Apple, the two Steves, Wozniak and Jobs, retreated to the garage (Jobs') to craft the personal computer that was the most convincing case yet that such an item could have a mass market. The Apple II started where the Apple I left of, namely, with a case. It didn't look like an object dropped from a starship or developed in a military lab. It had a familiar, prosaic form of an elongated beige typewriter, though additions like the television monitor and the cassette player used to store programs made it look a little like a college-dorm entertainment center.

If its appearance was familiar, the Apple II was also attractive to consumers in a way that pervious computers just weren't—even if their manufacturers tried. It shipped with high-resolution color graphics and sound, and it had a rainbow-colored apple logo that seemed both fresh and optimistic. Said Wozniak, "The Apple II, more than any other early machine, made computer a word that could be said in homes. It presented a computer concept that included fun and games—human-type things." The ability to have a business and a social side was an important sign of computing's growing relevance.

The price made the Apple II affordable for businesspeople, well-off families, and schools. It was in the education sector that its influence lasted longest—although it certainly made its mark on business as the first platform to run VisiCalc, the first consumer spreadsheet program. It was the programs that really hooked people, and the Apple II had a great roster of educational and entertainment software. By attracting developers, a snowball effect occurred, and a new generation of developers became attracted and then obsessed.

Core Memory is a photographic exploration of the Computer History Museum's collection, highlighting some of the most interesting pieces in the history of computers. These excerpts were used with permission of the publisher. Special thanks to Fiona!

The top photograph was taken by Mark Richards, whose work has appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Fortune, Smithsonian, Life and BusinessWeek. The eye-candy is accompanied by descriptions of each artifact to cover the characteristics and background of each object, written by John Alderman who has covered the culture of high-tech lifestyle since 1993, notably for Mondo 2000, HotWired and Wired News. A foreword is provided by the Computer History Museum's Senior Curator Dag Spicer.

Or go see the real things at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.

Gizmodo '79 is a week-long celebration of gadgets and geekdom 30 years ago, as the analog age gave way to the digital, and most of our favorite toys were just being born.

I was just reading about the development of the Disk II. Randy Wigginton and Woz worked on it for a few weeks, only finishing up the control software (which negated the need for fancy hardware controllers by using software to read and write the sectors in the right spot) hours before presenting it at CES in 1978. They stayed up all night after setting up the booth to get it done. When they finished, they tried to made a back up copy. And they accidentally overwrote the data disk with the blank. Less than a few hours before the show floor opened, they rewrote the entire control system.

[Flickr via Macrumors via Technobob, Apple2history.org]

It wasn't a Macintosh, but an Apple II with a monochrome screen and PC emulator hardware installed. The board was called the 88 Card, "the only fully functional 8088 processor for the Apple II personcal computer" and it had the stunning list price of $899. But don't fret, because this also included 64K of additional RAM and CP/M 86—if you wanted DOS and Windows you had to buy them separately.

[Digibarn via MAKE]

[Wiki, RetroThing and TUAW. Image of the Apple I adopted for use from The Joy of Tech]

Congrats to the lucky winner! I'm sure you can't wait to get that sucker set up so you can do… whatever it is you plan to do with it. Perhaps it's for your private dorkatorium, where you'll keep it in a hermetically sealed case next to the original latex scalp piece worn by Worf and a framed photo of you with Stan Lee. Power to you, brother. –Adam Frucci

eBay [via Digg]