The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal | Hacker News Reader

The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal

lainenooney.com

This is however US focused, on other regions it was "The C64 Age", "The ZX Spectrum Age", "The MSX Age".

Even as a US-focused history, it still doesn't focus on the hobbyist culture the Apple II formed out of:

> Instead, as historian Laine Nooney shows, what made the Apple II iconic was its software. In software, we discover the material reasons people bought computers. Not to hack, but to play. Not to code, but to calculate. Not to program, but to print.

Drawing a distinction between hacking and playing, and between playing and coding, is definitely a take, as the kids say, and means Nooney apparently wants to focus on the consumer-oriented aspects of that era of personal computing which lead more directly into the closed world of the Macintosh and Apple's current offerings.

An old grumble of mine is how these histories tend to ignore the distinction between business computers and gaming/infotainment computers or, in practical terms, S-100 based machines running CP/M and mostly 6502 based machines running a ROM BASIC. This book apparently takes that to the next level, downplaying even the technical side of the less-technical consumer-focused machines.

The Apple II and successors were popular--don't get me wrong. (And in modern times the Mac although less in numbers than its prominence would suggest.) But the Apple II is mostly so iconic compared to other systems of the general era because Apple as a whole became so iconic.

>or, in practical terms, S-100 based machines running CP/M and mostly 6502 based machines running a ROM BASIC

Although, in practical terms, pre-IBM PC there was very little overall use of personal computers in offices. Yes, some, I used an Apple II then Apple III for some light engineering and database work but it wasn't very commonplace.

>But the Apple II is mostly so iconic compared to other systems of the general era because Apple as a whole became so iconic.

I don't disagree that had Apple gone bankrupt in 1997, there wouldn't be as much Apple II nostalgia today. But it's not true that Apple's iconic status is a modern-day phenomenon. From the very beginning, Apple had the je ne sais quoi that its rivals didn't, and I say that one who did not own an Apple II. Read this 1984 BYTE piece <https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1984-12/1984_12_BYT...>, for instance.

Looking back, it's some combination of

* Jobs and Woz being the symbols of the company

* VisiCalc

* Disk II

* the slots

* color

* the focus on industrial design

That special something is what made Mac work. No other company in 1984 could have released a non IBM PC-compatible computer and had it go anywhere in the market, or inspire substantial third-party support from large vendors. Atari and Commodore followed only a year later, with superior hardware, and failed.

Most of the features you list are geek features. My favorite geek feature was that the hardware was proprietary but open - anyone could see how it worked and even buy schematics. Aside from geek features, Jobs and Woz only became better known later, after Apple was a success.

Apple IIs were in most schools. That was what stood out to most people - out of all the various and weird computers on the market at the time, and before IBM clones they were different, Apple was the one "endorsed" by the school system.

Macs and iPhones and whatnot aren't even part of the story. The pre-OSX Mac was part of the Star Wars prequel of Apple tech that tried to seem fancy and cool but was awful and no one liked it, so I suppose the iPhone was episodes 7-9.

> Apple IIs were in most schools. That was what stood out to most people - out of all the various and weird computers on the market at the time, and before IBM clones they were different, Apple was the one "endorsed" by the school system.

That's why I think, more than any specific feature of the hardware, the real driver of Apple II success in US was always the one-and-only Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium [1]. I don't think that Apple II would have had anything near as much as the same sort of US-wide reach without its "PBS of educational software" existing at that critical juncture point in history. "Every" school in the country needed an Apple II to run MECC software, because MECC software was easily approved to be parts of the curriculum.

The Macintosh was seen as the computer for education riding on the coat-tails of MECC products and the few produced for the early Macintosh. PCs became more common in education exactly as soon as MECC was destroyed by vultures and schools needed to start penny pinching because there were few other as easily approved pieces of software to replace MECC's brief central place in the US classroom.

(The fall of MECC was its own sad reminder of how privatization often leads to vultures and scavenging. It is interesting to wonder what might have happened had MECC better followed the "PBS" model, and possibly gotten more national arts and sciences resources behind it, instead of IPO then buyout by vultures.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MECC

I just presume the book is focusing on when the hobbyist machine became a consumer machine. I don't have a problem with a book choosing that slice of history to focus on.

Part of me wonders if we'd have so many people gushing over the Apple II and Woz if Apple didn't turn the corner back in the 90s. The idea of cashing in on an Apple's story story seems to have a revisionist affect on history. Particularly by minimising the influence of other innovations.

Per your comment I feel a great number of machines and individuals were equally and perhaps more instrumental in driving computers into homes. This also includes many of which that came far later - I think inexpensive yet capable machines that were internet ready (such as the gumdrop iMac) played a larger role in solidifying computing for the masses, something that was honed further with affordable laptops, and finally with highly capable smartphones. Without the later I think computers would still very much be like the 90s where a family owned a computer, rather than the universal device that everyone relies on today.

I say all this because Woz is often trotted out to give his opinion on subjects that he clearly has little idea about, seemingly just there as nerd-furniture and Woz appreciating the fame. When I hear him speak, it so often feels like this is the tail wagging the dog. He's not an oracle and crucially he so frequently "bets on the wrong horse" when it comes to what he thinks will make an impact.

I think you're right, there is a danger of a revisionist aspect due to the fact that so many people have iPhones in their pockets. We might end up with "Steve Jobs invented the personal computer" as the layman's opinion of computer history. There were dozens of other machines that could have easily been the Apple II and Apple had a great amount of luck. One anecdote I remember reading is the guys that wrote VisiCalc (which was a strong reason Apple became successful) were originally intending to write it for the Commodore PET. When they went to start coding for the first time all the PETs were in use but an Apple II was available. A butterfly flaps it's wings and all that.

See, for example, his appearance on "Squawk Box" two months ago: https://youtu.be/LqwmkIE66iY

I have wrestled with this as well — the revisionism as you call it. But I've come to believe that Woz fully deserves the credit for that slice of our computing history where he indeed made an outsized impact. And I even give Jobs credit for having the right smart friend at the right time and pushing his friend's hobby project into the mainstream at a time when apparently the public was ready to start dabbling in personal computers.

I give the U.S. education system credit for somehow seizing on the personal computer: recognizing that computing was going to be an important part of kid's future and going all in. (I'm not sure the degree to which it may have become a self-fulfilling prophecy though?)

I've seen Woz speak over the past decade or so and he does seem to be trying to get the spotlight on himself for his contributions. I don't hear Woz dabbling much in revisionism though. I don't blame him for trying to cement his own legacy in an age where it does seem Jobs is the one being given all the public credit for "inventing the personal computer".

Again though, if you are focusing on the very early 1980's, you would be remiss to ignore both Steve's role in moving the needle with regard to the introduction of the personal computer.

That's the self-selecting part I'm alluding to - let's say Apple et. al. went bankrupt. With Microsoft and Gates then being the well known early computer. Would we today instead credit Gates as the man who really drove computers into households. It's of course impossible to say, but it is something I wonder about - like who are we not crediting by focusing too tightly on Steve & Woz: especially when I think to the GUI.

I'm in the US and most people I know of was Commodore based.

I prefer "Fire in the Valley" and "the Home Computer Wars".

I was in the U.S. as well — but the Commodore wave came several years after the Apple II wave. So I suppose it depends on when you are talking about.

Before Commodore, when it Apple II ruled the roost, only the wealthier families I knew had computers at home. The 64 and Vic-20 is when my more working-class friend's families started getting a personal computer.

(I could afford neither, instead going in after school to use the Apple II's they had at my high school.)

I'm from New York City and the computers in the schools were TRS-80s. The idea that Apple was everything is not accurate. Remember you had PETs, S100, SS50 and other computers out there.

Personally I think the real transition to personal computing happened later when non wealthy families started to get them.

As an 1980's elementary school student, we had schools full of Apple II's.

Now, a lot of them were the older monochrome models, but we had some color models, and a handful of them were the IIGS models. We had all the standard games like Oregon Trail, Number Munchers, Carmen Sandiego, plus the typing tutors, Print Shop...

We had a couple PC's here and there. Almost all IBM. They were a different experience. You didn't just stick a disk in and it booted up into your game. You had to deal with DOS. We had the PC versions of a couple of those games, but the PC's were more for writing documents, using the early CD-ROM encyclopedias, that sort of stuff. We had a couple Macs as well, which were used for the same things.

Sure, we had Appleworks and all that, but the Apple II was for fun-and the IBM PC was for 'work'.

I didn't have a computer at home back then, but my dream was a IIGS of my own.

there's often a lot of misunderstandings about the Apple II

Apple II nostalgia is not due to modern Apple's success. The people keeping it alive actually are often hostile to modern Apple, never forgiving them for killing off the Apple II in lieu of the macintosh. (See "Apple II forever" or attend a Kansasfest sometime)

a lot of key early gaming milestones happened on the Apple II, for a variety of reasons. One was the extremely clever floppy drive controller made by Woz. You could have actual decent sized games that would load in seconds. I know there's a lot of weird nostalgia for waiting large fractions of an hour for screeching bits to load off of tape, but that wasn't great for complex games.

Don't overlook the education market, a large set of Gen-X used apple IIs at school, and there was an immense educational software market

Business was big too, especially Visi-calc. It was used in much more serious ways than later 8-bit machines. To the point if you look closely at the original IBM PC you can see its design closely matches the Apple II in many ways, as that's what IBM was worried about. The c64 didn't even exist yet when that was happening.

Expansion, having a machine with a case with room for 8 expansion boards of fully documented slots is so much fun for hacking compared to trying to shoe-horn things into a mass of wires and loose-connector cartridges hanging out the back of your machine.

Finally cost, the II has a reputation of a rich-kid machine. Which is true, but everyone gets all excited about DOS gaming and during the DOS/PC age most PCs were really expensive as well.

I am an Apple ][ fan. I started off with some big iron, then discovered the ][ and rarely looked back. I dabbled with the TRS80, VIC-20, & the C64s but I came back to the ][.

Apple started as open as one can expect at the time. The system was readily modifiable in all kinds of ways. I was able to build my first modem card without voiding warranty or breaking the system.

The arrival of Mac was the end of that era. A new, locked down, fully-out-of-my-control environment emerged. No more easy modifications. I am not disparaging the Mac, I derogate the lack of openness.

The Mac had plenty of models that had slots and it wasn’t until the MacBook Air in 2006 that the hard drives and RAM weren’t easily replaceable.

Yeah, VisiCalc + Apple ][ was the real revolution. It gave non-hobbyists a reason to buy a computer. VisiCalc sold Apple ][s and pushed most of the Apple ][s into businesses which surprised the Steves quite a bit. The next big moment for microcomputers was really the internet. There other things, but spreadsheets continued to be a big reason for computer sales until the net.

I wrote more about this here: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-killer-app

> Don't overlook the education market...

Overlook? I think the education market is why Apple succeeded so thoroughly.

>a lot of key early gaming milestones happened on the Apple II, for a variety of reasons. One was the extremely clever floppy drive controller made by Woz. You could have actual decent sized games that would load in seconds.

I disagree that the floppy drive was the reason for Apple II being so influential in early computer gaming. Being the only inexpensive, readily available early microcomputer with color support until the Atari 8-bit c. 1980 was why.

>I know there's a lot of weird nostalgia for waiting large fractions of an hour for screeching bits to load off of tape, but that wasn't great for complex games.

I don't disagree on the weirdness of the tape nostalgia among non-North America computer owners (and it's not even universal; the 1541 was widespread among German C64 owners, while Spectrum never got anywhere there). But even without the Disk II, I'm sure that the likes of Bill Budge and Dan Gorlin would have chosen the Apple II, if only because there was no better alternative.

Interesting choice for a cover image, in that no Apple II actually looks like that (is that supposed to be an Apple Lisa?)

That's the clip art for "computer" from Broderbund's The Print Shop. Fits well with the rest of the cover.

looks like a TRS-80 Model III or 4

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_TRS-80_and_Tandy-brand...

I was thinking the CoCo with the color-on-color font.

As an Apple ][ kid the cover kind of tells me that the author isn't as familiar with the computer.

That's completely wrong. As I said elsewhere, the clip art is very distinctively from The Print Shop. The book describes itself as recounting how people used the Apple II in daily life, and The Print Shop was a substantial part of that.

Ignore the clip art and look at the type on the cover page. That's not Apple ][ style text.

Yes, it is?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_character_set

Looks like 80-column aspect, but it's the right font

It came from Print Shop, an enormously popular Apple II program (esp. among kids).

The best computer, by far, was the DEC LSI-11 put out in kit form by Heathkit as the H11.

DEC missed an enormous opportunity.

Source: I had one. You can see a pic here: https://twitter.com/WalterBright

The RT-11 operating system will look very familiar to anyone who used DOS or Windows.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heathkit_H11

"...but it also requires at least a computer terminal and some form of storage to make it useful."

So what did you use for terminal and storage? Did you expand the memory beyond 4K?

The days of the kit-computer were on the way out when the triumvirate of Apple II/Commodore PET/TRS-80 Model I arrived in stores (unless you were handy with a soldering gun).

You can see in the picture! The terminal was a VT-52 clone from Heathkit, and the box on the left is a dual 8" floppy drive. I upgraded the memory to 64Kb.

A bit later I bought a 6Mb hard drive, and designed and built an interface card for it and wrote the driver.

I put the Heathkit terminal, floppy drive, and cpu box together from their kits. They all worked the first try. (I paid part of my way through college soldering boards. Being able to solder well has paid off for me a lot over the years.)

The H11 was a bit pricey, but I wanted one real bad.

In the mid/late 70's I was using LSI-11 systems (PDP-11/03's) in college to collect measurements in labs. I too wanted an H11 when I got out of school and started earning those big engineering bucks, but if I recall a usable system was about one-third of my gross salary at the time.

A couple of years later I put together a CP/M H89 but it never gave me that "real computer" feeling.

What made it great? Can you elaborate?

In short, it worked like the DEC-System PDP-10, although scaled down. The -11 instruction set was a marvel of simplicity, orthogonality, and cleverness. CPUs after the -11 usually claimed to be "11-like" but missed the boat by a mile.

The software was professional and bulletproof. You could get real compilers for it, like FORTRAN. Compilers for the x86 took maybe a decade to reach that level.

The 8 bit computers of the day were toys next to it.

Of course, I was an idiot to develop software for the -11, as there was little market for it. The market was for the Apple and the IBM PC, and I eventually capitulated and bought a PC and abandoned the -11. Sob.

Elektronika in the Soviet Union sold a number of LSI-11 home computers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronika_BK

Fun to ponder what would it be like if the PDP-11 (and descendents like VAX) architecture had become dominant instead of x86.

I grew up in a small town in Ontario with a Vic 20, then C64. A few years after I moved to Toronto, the Amiga seemed the next logical step, but then PC "clones" started getting all the attention.

I really never met any Apple people. My focus at that point became PC clones, as clunky as they were. There were lots of shops that tried to sell Apple II clones, but Apple wiped them out. The PC has an open design.

I dropped the attachment to a particular brand, but the appeal of openness and choice has never left me. I've tried the Apple ecosystem a few times and do involuntary tech support for it, I'm just glad the industry has this foundation of openness.

edit: put "clones" in quotes, because that's not a fair characterization (open by design), but it's the one people use.

The Apple II also had an open design years before the PC.

Not that open. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_clones

>I grew up in a small town in Ontario with a Vic 20, then C64. A few years after I moved to Toronto, the Amiga seemed the next logical step, but then PC "clones" started getting all the attention.

Commodore began as a Canadian company. I don't know if that made the difference, but for whatever reason it was a strong market for Commodore's early computers. Canadian and European sales kept the Commodore PET alive while Apple and Tandy dominated the US market. Jim Butterfield and the Toronto PET Users Group were enormously influential, and they maintained their influence even after the VIC-20 and C64 finally made Commodore as successful in the US as outside it.

It's good to see this; while histories of the Commodore 64, Amiga, ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, and even Color Computer exist, the extant Apple histories of the subject that I am aware of tend to focus on Steve Jobs, Macintosh, and/or iPhone. The one exception I am aware of is Michael Moritz's The Little Kingdom (1984), but I believe that also focuses more on Jobs and Apple the company than the Apple II (always more of a Woz machine than Jobs) per se, and of course would exclude the second half of the product line's history.

[Repost of a comment I have made in the past on the topic of early personal computers.]

It's well known that the Apple II was one of the first three prepackaged, preassembled personal computers on the market. It, the TRS-80 Model I, and the Commodore PET all appeared in late 1977.

It's not well known that the Apple was not the obvious winner of the three; the TRS-80 was. Every small town in America had Tandy's Radio Shack stores, and even if Radio Shack had a reputation for selling toys and gizmos as opposed to computers, it had a reputation. As a startup, Apple didn't. Commodore wasn't as well known as Tandy but was an established calculator and office-equipment company, with its own semiconductor fab that produced the 6502 CPU that Apple and other rivals used.

And, in fact, until about 1980, the TRS-80 dominated the market. What happened?

* The disk drive. All three computers only used tape storage in 1977, but their makers soon provided disk drives. Tandy's drive is a horrible, unreliable kludge. Commodore's PET disk drives are gigantic monstrosities that are fast and reliable[1] but far too expensive. Steve Wozniak's Disk II is a combination of a brilliantly simple and reliable disk controller, and inexpensive-to-make (and thus highly profitable) drive mechanism, that still run well today, five decades later.

* Third-party products. The TRS-80 came with a superb BASIC tutorial, but Tandy otherwise kept all software technical information secret,[2] hoping to monopolize third-party development.[3] Radio Shack stores were not allowed to sell non-Tandy products, and couldn't carry third-party publications like 80 Micro that by default became the major way companies sold TRS-80 products (since other retailers didn't want to compete with Radio Shack stores). Since corporate policy prevented Radio Shack clerks from admitting that third-party magazines or products existed (even while a Tandy executive wrote a regular column for 80 Micro, and the company regularly advertised in its pages), the only way a TRS-80 or Color Computer customer knew of this gigantic ecosystem's existence is if a friend told him, or he happened to walk by a newsstand with 80 Micro or Rainbow magazine.

Commodore's Jack Tramiel never ever understood the importance of software development, and the PET fell far behind Tandy and Apple in the US; until the VIC-20 in 1980 most of Commodore's computer sales were in Europe and Canada, where Apple and Tandy didn't compete.

Compare this to Apple, which published everything needed to create software and hardware for the II. Its slots invite engineers to design cards. A very important factor in the II's early popularity was school districts buying it to run educational software from MECC like Oregon Trail and Lemonade Stand. But this was not inevitable. A teacher or administrator in a rural school district in 1979 looking to purchase computers would naturally look to the Radio Shack in town, but would only have found incredibly crude Tandy-published software. Even with such handicaps Radio Shack had a substantial portion of the educational market, which after 1980 quickly eroded until 1985, when Tandy had an unexpected second computer boom driven by the PC-compatible Tandy 1000.

* VisiCalc. Because of the above, VisiCalc was written for the Apple when market share should have caused it to be written for TRS-80 (Dan Fylstra of Personal Software, VisiCalc's publisher, was one of the first owners of the TRS-80. <https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1978-04/1978_04_BYT...>). Being only available for Apple massively drove sales of the II; for the first time, people bought a computer to run a specific killer app, as opposed to the other way around. In turn, others chose the II to develop for.

Even after 1980, when Apple had clearly gained sales momentum, Tandy still had the bulk of the installed base. 80 Micro's December 1982 issue <https://archive.org/details/80-microcomputing-magazine-1982-...> has 484 pages. I'm pretty sure no Apple magazine ever came close to that thickness; the only other computer magazines in history to be that thick are 1) PC Magazine before it went bimonthly in 1984 after the December 1983 issue hit 800 pages, and 2) BYTE. Wayne Green, the publisher of 80 Micro, had by that time written editorials in almost every single issue pleading with Tandy to encourage third-party developers. Tandy didn't relent until the Model 16, introduced that year, had zero third-party software after six months. But by then it was too late.

As fat as they are, reading Tandy magazines like 80 Micro and Rainbow <https://archive.org/details/rainbowmagazine-1983-12/> from the early 1980s is like visiting a sad and barren alternate world; instead of Origin, Sierra, MicroProse, and SSI, there are much cruder-looking ads from tiny companies offering bad clones of popular arcade games.

... And yet, despite its many, many mistakes, Tandy got a second chance with the Tandy 1000! It was the best-selling low-cost PC compatible from 1985 onward. It was so popular that software boxes routinely stated that they were compatible with "IBM/Tandy". So popular that game developers routinely made sure that their products were "Tandy compatible"; that is, support Tandy's special graphics and sound features.[4] In the second half of the 1980s Tandy was arguably #2 in PC compatibles after Compaq, and clearly #1 among everyone, including IBM and Apple, in the home market. There was no reason whatsoever for Tandy and its gigantic distribution and retail network to lose out to Gateway and fellow Texan Dell ... But, of course, it did. So, yes, Tandy blew not one but two separate leads in the computer industry within a decade. That takes talent.

[1] Two virtues Commodore's later drives did not retain

[2] Read this BYTE article from two years after the TRS-80's release <https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1979-08/1979_08_BYT...>, which a) discusses how to implement machine language graphics and b) complains about the complete lack of Tandy documentation that motivated the author to write the article in the first place.

[3] It's clear in retrospect that TRS-80 was intentionally designed to not be compatible with the existing 8080/Z80 standards. ROM's location in the memory map broke CP/M compatibility, and the expansion bus is not S-100 compatible.

[4] Actually PCjr-compatible, which the original Tandy 1000 was designed to clone

Yeah, at that time, Tandy's retail network should have been an unfair advantage. There were fairly nascent computer-specific chains but they didn't have coverage anything like Radio Shack. And pretty much no one was mail ordering at that point. (I don't remember the deal with the Commodore 64. It may have been carried by more general retail or at least electronics stores.)

> ... reading Tandy magazines like 80 Micro and Rainbow [...] from the early 1980s is like visiting a sad and barren alternate world; instead of Origin, Sierra, MicroProse, and SSI, there are much cruder-looking ads from tiny companies offering bad clones of popular arcade games.

This is a nice post with a lot of detail and understanding of computers from that era, but I'd just like to point out that December 1983 was still early days for computer games on personal computers. Looking at the list of games for the IBM PC from 1981-1983 [0] there were only ~75 games total, many of them were text-based ones such as Zork, and while there was for example Ultima 2 by Origin Systems, it's not as if there were a ton of games from the above listed publishers available on the PC at that time and those that existed were also pretty crude.

[0] https://archive.org/details/TGODFloppyCollection?and%5B%5D=y...

The PC isn't what I had in mind as comparison; it did not become a meaningful gaming/non-business software platform until cheap clones c. 1985 gave it a substantial home presence.

I chose December 1983 because it was close to the peak of the Tandy 8-bit market. Compare the TRS-80 magazines I mentioned to Compute!'s Gazette's December 1983 issue <https://archive.org/details/1983-12-computegazette/mode/2up?...>. It's still early in the C64's lifespan, but Atarisoft, Epyx, Sierra, SubLOGIC, Avalon Hill, Infocom, and Access already have a presence. A year later <https://archive.org/details/1983-12-computegazette/mode/2up?...>, by which time the C64 has essentially seized the entire US 8-bit non-Apple market, Broderbund, EA, Sega, Weekly Reader, Davidson, SSI, and MicroProse are also present.

Each of these was built on a big enough shift from priors to be tectonic:

1. Apple ][

2. NCSA Mosaic

3. LLMs, productized as ChatGPT w/ GPT3.5+GPT4 in particular

Another history of the Apple II I enjoyed: https://juiced.gs/store/sophistication-simplicity/

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