14.003 4 How did Woz invent the Apple computer? C.T.: How did BASIC come to be part of the first Apple computer?
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This article is from the Apple II Csa2 FAQ, by Jeff Hurlburt with numerous contributions by others.
14.003 4 How did Woz invent the Apple computer? C.T.: How did BASIC come to be part of the first Apple computer?
Woz: The book "101 BASIC Games" made me think that the right higher level
language for these low cost computers was BASIC, even though I'd never used it.
I referred to an HP BASIC manual to develop my syntax diagrams. Hoping to be
noted as the first with a 6502 BASIC, I left out floating point. But what I
wanted was games, logic simulations, puzzle solving, etc. and integers are
fine. Most of my college programming was numerics done with integer only
operations for large accuracy.
I wrote the entire BASIC by hand with no assembler. I kept thousands of
pages of my hand-done work from day 1. The final Apple II Rom code was entirely
done by hand and is in a notebook. The Apple II was the first product to ship
with 2K Roms from Synertek. 4K total of code. I built in a disassembler and
wrote a mini-assembler (no symbols, only absolute hex or decimal addresses and
constants) which shipped either in the Apple II or in a later Rom addition.
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