Color Without Color: Apple II Computer Graphics

Released in 1977, the Apple II was one of the first personal computers marketed towards households rather than businesses. It was a complete computer – it had a keyboard for data entry and the ability to connect to a CRT monitor or a television set. However, unlike its competitors, the TRS-80 Model I and the Commodore PET 2001, the Apple II was able to display color – but remarkably, it accomplished this without a dedicated color video chip. The Apple II’s video hardware is actually monochrome! So how does it display colors? The Apple II’s designer, Apple co-founder and chief engineer Steve Wozniak, discovered that if he repeated portions of the outgoing digital luminance signal (black or white) and injected it into the “colorburst” or NTSC color signal, various patterns of pixels produced lines of different colors… read more >