Tuesday Morning

It's all about AAPL today ...

This is a picture of the Apple 1 on display at the Museum of American History in Washington, D.C.  It had a whopping 8KB of random access memory (RAM) that was spread across 16 chips.   That was for the top of the line machine.  The standard model only had 4KB RAM and cost $666.66.

You did not get all of the gear in the picture for your $666.66.  You had to supply a keyboard and video monitor.

How much memory does it take?

To store a book (text):

1 page -> 70 characters per line x 40 lines per page (you must include spaces and marks)
2800 characters (bytes per page) -> 2.8 KB ~ 3 KB per page
a book with 500 pages -> 3KB x 500 = 1500KB = 1.5 MB

Bottom line: With no compression technology available yet the original Apple 1 standard model could store less than a page and a half of text in its memory.