Conflicting birthdays for the Apple II
| Filed under History; 3 comments. |
Some important dates to observe this month:
- • June 5, 1977: Apple ships the first Apple II. (Wired)
- • June 10, 1977: Apple ships the first Apple II. (Geekazine.com)
- • June 11, 1977: Apple ships the first Apple II. (Juiced.GS)
- • June 20, 1977: Apple ships the first Apple II. (Berkeley Heights Patch)
The Juiced.GS date I know to be false; it was given on a wall calendar that came with an insert indicating some dates were marked as estimates, accurate to the year and month but not the day. The sources for the other three dates are a mystery to me.
On the most recent episode of the Retro Computing Roundtable, Carrington Vanston observed how strange it is to see history disappearing within our own lifetimes. We have enough living history that this shouldn’t be happening. Who can confirm when the first Apple II shipped?
This page:
http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/misc_cmds/misc_cmds-6/calendar/calendars/calendar.computer
lists June 10, 1977 as the official date. Straight from the horse’s mouth.
Actually that code is part of an open source calendar included with BSD. It’s entirely possible that date wasn’t checked by anyone at Apple. Never mind.
I have been working on technology history for about 4-5 years now. The Day in Tech History does have some mistakes on it, but I try to make corrections when I find out real dates.
I remember this question coming up before. I found multiple instances that verified June 10th for the launch date. Even though it’s still not 100%, I believe 6-10-77 was the day.
The June 5th date comes from Wired.com, which was found on Apple2history.com. When I went to the site, I never saw mention of June 5th or June 10th. HOWEVER, the first Apple II BOARDS shipped on May 10th, 1977. It was only the board, not the computer.