I am trying to research how software enabled users to interact with the hardware on the original Apple.
What operating system was installed on the original Apple 1?
What operating system was installed on the original Apple 1
hardwarehistory
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Their first product was the Apple I computer, hand-built by Steve Wozniak and first demonstrated in 1976.
You'll find plenty of details about Apple's early years in this section of the Apple, Inc Wikipedia entry.
No - it's not a good way to get that data.
I would have a look at some of the many MDM software packages to get your population data so you can plan. JAMF has a great reputation in that space for low cost of entry and high performing software.
Also - you could make a quick little app that simply reported in some basic stats. Your users will be clamoring for potential apps and those willing to run that app will feed you with the data needed.
You will find that making the app forces you to restrict many of the new features and in reality - you'll have to actively work to get 3.x support in a project you start today using the current Xcode 4. 4.0 will be easy and only the new 5.0 features will get you into having to test the levels and have two sets of code for different generations of device.
Your development will drive what devices people use and not the other way around. It's almost always cheaper to just upgrade devices than pay developers to keep the older code tested and running.
There are lots of great charts out showing what some devs are seeing for how fast people upgrade to the latest iOS versions.
Best Answer
I used to own an Apple ][. It had floating-point BASIC installed in the upper 16kb of memory. "Booting" took maybe 1 second - flip the switch -> Beep -> it's ready.
If you bought a disk drive, the boot loader was in a 256 byte (bytes, singles, no M or k) ROM on the interface card. Apple DOS was written onto every floppy disk and took up about 10kb of RAM.
Some trivia for your project:
The Apple ]['s documentation included a fold-out circuit diagram of the computer's electronics. Just in case you needed to repair it.
The documentation also included the complete source code (6502 Assembler) of the operating system. Maybe 30 pages. Assembler at the time was a 1:1 representation of the machine code.
I wrote Apple (on paper - no internet back then) asking for the Integer BASIC source code for comparison. They wrote back and said they would be happy to send it, but they don't have a copy. Wozniak apparently wrote Integer BASIC himself, compiled it with a pencil and the Motorola 6502 data sheet, and typed in the resulting hexadecimal opcodes by hand. All bow to the Greatness of The Woz.