Want to play with a bit of geek history? Apple II OS now open to public

Retro tech lovers, you have our full permission to geek out after reading this: the operating system that ran the iconic Apple II is now available to the public.

For those of you too young to remember any piece of tech younger than the Sony Discman, the Apple II was one of the first successful, mass-produced home desktop computers.

Designed primarily by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, the Apple II was first produced in 1977 and featured a microprocessor running at 1 MHz, 4 kB of RAM and an audio cassette interface for loading programs and storing data.

The source code has been made available by the Computer History Museum after being donated to the institution by Paul Laughton, the guy Steve Jobs tasked with building the OS. Laughton managed to code it from scratch in just seven weeks and was rewarded for his efforts with a cheque for US$13 000.

The code is available via the museum’s website, along with a detailed history of the Apple II’s development.

Image: Neokrisys (via Flickr).