The Apple^® IIGS is a direct descendant of the Apple I—the creation of an engineer who hated so much to leave his computer behind at the end of the workday that he made himself a home computer.

Steve Wozniak, the engineer, showed the machine to his friend Steve Jobs, and they showed it to other engineers and computer enthusiasts at the Homebrew Computer Club. It wasn't much to look at. It didn't have a case or a keyboard or a matching monitor, but no one saw what it wasn't. They saw what it could be, and they all wanted one.

So Wozniak and Jobs started building computers for their friends. And those friends started building cases for their naked circuit boards and writing programs that stretched the machine to its limits. Except that the limits kept expanding.

The first machine was built to grow, and it's still growing. The memory size, for example—which determines how elaborate a program can be and how big a document can be—has gone from 4k on the Apple I to 256k on the Apple IIGS. And when you need more memory, you can stretch that 256k beyond 8 megabytes.

Figure P-1
The naked circuit board

A program is a set of computer instructions that allows you to do something useful with you computer—like writing or budgeting. A Document is the body of information you create using a program—like a memo or a budget.

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