In an industry where technology plays such an important part of our day to day operations, I think it's good to take a look back at some of the original technologies that paved the way for the tools we all use in our lives today.

So I'm going to turn back the clock to April 20th, 1977. The day the Apple II was released to the public. Special thanks to oldcomputers.net for the details that have slipped my mind over the last 30 years.

Upon it's release, the Apple II quickly became one of the most popular computers ever sold in the United States. Although the performance specs(1mhz processor, and 4k RAM) remained the same, it's vast improvements over the Apple I included a keyboard, a color screen, more expansion slots (up to 48k RAM), and a built in operating system. For the base price of $1295, it was ready to go right out of the box making it truly the first "user friendly" computer system.

What made sales of the Apple II really begin to take of was the built in "spreadsheet" program called VisiCalc. Basically VisiCalc was a simple version of today's MS Excel spreadsheet program. Pretty much all it was good for was adding columns and rows of data, giving you the results of the calculation. At the time, this was an amazing feat. It could perform in seconds what it took accountants hours and sometimes days to calculate!


Then in 1978 (year I was born) Apple released the floppy disk expansion drives. You could actually store, copy and transport your data between computers. What a concept! You no longer had to worry about using up all 48k of the computers RAM, assuming you paid the premium price of $2,600 for the top end system.

From there Apple and other 3rd party programmers created new programs that enhanced the user experience and kept the Apple II alive for over 15 years. Of course various enhancements were made over the years, such as adding a 10-key keypad, and other expansion capabilities and programming languages. In the end, over 2 million Apple II's were sold before they were discontinued and Apple introduced the Macintosh to the world.


Thanks to Apple, we now have such devices as the iPod, which seems to be everywhere I look, and the upcoming iPhone, which I wrote about back in a January post titled: 2007 - The Year of the Apple. It will be interesting to see what they come up with next. I'm sure they're already working on it, whatever it may be.

Some of my clients tell me there's no way they could get through life as a mortgage broker or Realtor, without all their devices and I always think to myself, I wonder how people did it back in the 70's and 80's? For those of you that were around and practicing real estate or doing loans, share some stories with us. It's always good to take a trip down memory lane and visit the past every once in a while.