In Pictures: Highlights of the Best Tech Products

While the original Apple I computer was really just a hobbyist's diversion, the Apple II was a computer for Everyman. Beating the IBM PC 5150 to market by four years, the Apple II (and its cousins, the II+, IIe, and IIc) quickly became the computer for people who wanted a machine that actually did something (competitors like the Commodore 64 and TRS-80 Color Computer were mere toys by comparison). So what was so special about the Apple II? It offered plenty of productivity tools (including being the first PC to run the VisiCalc spreadsheet), it was good at gaming, and it was quite extendable (when's the last time you had a computer with eight expansion slots?). And the machine itself looked so much cooler than anything that preceded it, a philosophy that still lives on in the Apple computers of today.