June 1, 1979: Apple Introduces Apple II+

The Apple II+ was Apple Computer's first blockbuster product. While the original Apple II sold reasonably well, the Apple II+ sold like crazy. Looking at the specs it is hard to say what the attraction was over the original incarnation of the Apple II. Sure, the graphics were a little better and Basic (a version developed by Microsoft) was built in but, all in all, the update wasn't that impressive.

The truth is that it wasn't the Apple II+ that had become compelling; it was what you could do with the machine. The first major improvement was a disk drive designed (very cleverly) by Woz that made storage much easier. Of course that is just more hardware; the real thing that got the Apple II+ going was a program called VisiCalc.

VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program, capable of running “what if” scenarios that would take hours manually, nearly instantaneously by comparison. The program quickly became a must-have for businesses and provided a strong impetus to buy an Apple II+ just to run the program. Apple's first smash hit, thanks to the help of VisiCalc and a disk drive, debuted this month in 1979 and sold for $1,195.00.