The study of a comfortable house in the hills of California on a sunny afternoon, on a broad walnut desk a flat wedge-shaped home computer of beige-cream plastic about thirty-eight centimetres wide with ribbed ventilation slots on both sides and a smooth removable lid, a recessed keyboard of brown-grey keys with one single white key at the lower left, every key plain, smooth and unmarked, a sun-tanned hand in a white tennis shirt sleeve on the keys, beside it a colour television set showing soft blocks of orange, green, violet and blue, a cassette recorder and a cut-glass tumbler, a glass door onto a turquoise swimming pool.
What it was used for
A fully assembled computer for home and office, shown at the West Coast Computer Faire in April 1977 and on sale from June 1977. Stephen Wozniak described it himself in BYTE in May 1977: a 6502 with a 1 microsecond cycle, 4 to 48 KB of dynamic memory, 8 KB of ROM with BASIC always present, 24 rows of 40 characters, a cassette interface averaging over 180 bytes per second, 4 analogue game inputs, a speaker and an 8-slot I/O motherboard. The Victoria and Albert Museum gives 1,298 dollars and about 5 million units sold before it was discontinued in 1993.
What was new
The IEEE Milestone citation stresses three points: the display data sat in main memory, so the processor could write the screen without a slow serial path; a switching power supply reliably ran up to 8 expansion cards; and because the decoding logic was on the motherboard, cards needed only a few chips. The price of this is in Wozniak's own text: at the fine resolution of 280 by 192 dots only black, white, violet and green were available, and the built-in BASIC used 16-bit fixed-point arithmetic only, so it had no decimal fractions.
What the sources leave open: Wozniak's article contradicts itself: the body text gives 15 colours in a 40 by 48 cell grid, while a caption speaks of 75 shades of hue. The colour count is therefore left out of the text. The V&A dates the object to 1977, while the gallery label of the same collection says 1976 (manufactured 1977). Price and units sold come from the V&A alone.