Apple IIe

The Apple II was the first production computer from Apple. As a kit, the Apple 1 was very much something for tinkerers, enthusiasts. The Apple II was their attempt to make a computer that was accessible to the everyday person, and helped turn a scrappy start-up into a giant. The Apple IIe (or stylised //e) was its most polished and enduring chapter. The "e" stood for "enhanced", and it brought more memory, proper lowercase text and a cleaner, more grown-up design to a platform that was already a roaring success.

It became a fixture in American schools and homes, the computer a whole cohort of students first sat down in front of. Crucially, it stayed faithful to the enormous library of Apple II software built up over the years, so buyers inherited a deep catalogue from day one rather than starting from scratch.

Remarkably, it stayed on sale for around a decade, an extraordinary innings in an industry that usually chewed machines up and spat them out in two or three years. That longevity cemented the Apple II's reputation as one of the most important computers of the personal-computing revolution, and the IIe was the model that carried it through its golden years.