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· Announcement

Apple II EuroPlus, Apple Silentype, Bell & Howell and Bell & Howell Disk II

Apple announced four products in June 1979: Apple II EuroPlus, Apple Silentype, Bell & Howell and Bell & Howell Disk II. The day spanned Early computers, Printers and Storage.

It is the only dated moment the archive holds for 1979, 365 days after the previous one, 1 June 1978.

Apple II EuroPlus product photograph

Bilby · CC BY 3.0

What Apple announced

Apple II EuroPlus

Early computers · Apple II · discontinued 1 December 1982

The Apple II Plus (stylized as Apple ][+ or apple ][ plus) is the second model of the Apple II series of personal computers produced by Apple Computer. It was sold from June 1979 to December 1982. Approximately 380,000 II Pluses were sold during its four years in production before being replaced by the Apple IIe in January 1983.

Apple Silentype

Printers · Printers · discontinued 1 October 1982

The Apple Silentype is Apple Computer, Inc.'s first printer, announced in 1979 and released in March 1980 for US$599, shortly after the Apple II Plus. The Silentype's firmware was written by Andy Hertzfeld, who later worked on the Apple Macintosh. The Silentype is a thermal printer, which uses a special paper and provides 80-column output. It was also compatible with the Apple III.

The Silentype's many dramatic advantages over other printers at the time, including silent operation, very small size, print speed and reliability, were especially well-suited for its use in the nascent point-of-sale and hospitality industries. The Silentype was the first printer to be used in any restaurant as a point-of-sale remote requisition printer to speed service. The broadening use of printers in the hospitality industry subsequently played a key role in the advancement of efficiency throughout the hospitality industry worldwide. The typical point-of-sale hospitality printer in use today, forty years later, is a thermal printer that still mimics the way the Silentype was used when it was introduced in 1980.

Bell & Howell

Early computers · Apple II · discontinued 1 December 1982

The Apple II Plus (stylized as Apple ][+ or apple ][ plus) is the second model of the Apple II series of personal computers produced by Apple Computer. It was sold from June 1979 to December 1982. Approximately 380,000 II Pluses were sold during its four years in production before being replaced by the Apple IIe in January 1983.

Bell & Howell Disk II

Storage · Drives · discontinued 1 December 1982

The Disk II Floppy Disk Subsystem, often rendered as Disk ][, is a 5 +1⁄4-inch floppy disk drive designed by Steve Wozniak at the recommendation of Mike Markkula, and manufactured by Apple Computer. It went on sale in June 1978 at a retail price of US$495 for pre-order; it was later sold for $595 (equivalent to $2,940 in 2025) including the controller card (which can control up to two drives) and cable. The Disk II was designed specifically for use with the 1977 Apple II personal computer to replace the slower cassette tape storage.

Apple produced at least six variants of the basic 5 +1⁄4-inch Disk II concept over the course of the Apple II series' lifetime: The Disk II, the Disk III, the DuoDisk, the Disk IIc, the UniDisk 5.25" and the Apple 5.25 Drive. While all of these drives look different, and use four different connector types, they're all electronically extremely similar. They can all use the same low-level disk format, and are all interchangeable with the use of simple adapters, consisting of no more than two plugs and wires between them. Most DuoDisk drives, the Disk IIc, the UniDisk 5.25" and the AppleDisk 5.25" even use the same 19-pin D-Sub connector, so they are directly interchangeable. The only 5 +1⁄4" drive Apple sold aside from the Disk II family was a 360k MFM unit made to allow Mac IIs and SEs to read PC floppy disks.

Read the full record →
Apple II EuroPlus product photograph
Apple II EuroPlus

Bilby · CC BY 3.0

Apple Silentype product photograph
Apple Silentype

CC BY-SA 3.0

Bell & Howell product photograph
Bell & Howell

Bilby · CC BY 3.0

Bell & Howell Disk II product photograph
Bell & Howell Disk II

CC BY-SA 3.0

Sources

  1. Apple II EuroPlus · Wikipedia
  2. Apple Silentype · Wikipedia
  3. Bell & Howell Disk II · Wikipedia

Dates on this page are announcement dates, not shipping dates. Product summaries are drawn from the linked articles, and specification claims in them are the publisher’s, not independent testing. Photograph credits and licences are listed in full on the image credits page.