The Apple II: The Machine That Started It All

Thomas Hormby writes "The first Apple II was sold on June 5, 1977. It was outfitted with a 1 mhz processor, 4 KB of RAM, a keyboard and a cassette interface. Despite the seemingly paltry specs, the machine made Apple, and bankrolled the LISA, Macintosh and LaserWriter. Besides building Apple, the machine revolutionized the entire microcomputer business, pulling it way from the hobbyist kits and closer to todays PC. Read about it at MLAgazine."

Comments

Re:It's tragic and bad they weren't more open.

[Pope]

IBM saw nothing. They were too stupid worrying that their little "home" computer, the PCjr, was going to take sales away from their lacklustre desktop that they crippled the jr, loading it with non-standard I/O ports and connectors, when in truth it outshone the IBM PC in many ways. The jr died a year later.

Compaq reversed engineered the BIOS, and it was all over for IBM's attempted dominance of the PC industry.

As for "lack of open standards" what do you mean? PCI? AGP? FireWire? USB 1 and 2? DVI? tcsh? bash?

Re:It's tragic and bad they weren't more open.

[rekleov]

Saying that Apple "blew it" due to not using open standards is to miss a sizable section of the picture. Large businesses held off from buying computers until they had received the Stamp of Approval from IBM. Apple was picked up by many early adopters (schools, small businesses using VisiCalc, etc.), but there was no way that large corporations would rely on such a small company when IBM could deliver on a much greater scale (at least in the minds of those contemplating computer purchases for said companies). Open standards were barely dreamed of by the time the war was over --- they appeared mainly because the war was over.

That Apple survived when the vast majority of their contemporaries failed shows that they hardly "blew it"; that they are making a healthy profit today says that their guerrilla action won't be ending any time soon.

Re:It's tragic and bad they weren't more open.

[LWATCDR]

"It's really a shame when you consider the influence they could have had. Personally, I'm just glad that IBM was smart enough to see an industry instead of a market."
That is funny. Really.
IBM did not support open standards. The open standard at that time was the Z-80 or 8085 running CP/M. IBM did document everything in the PC and used commodity parts but they also tried to sue the early clone makers. The first legal clones had to reverse engineer the BIOS and even then it was not 100 compatible. IBM was tricky and had Basic in ROM and the BASICA that you loaded with PC-DOS used part of the ROM. It would only run on a 100% IBM. Eventually programmers learned how to write compatible code so programs would run on most of the clones. If you read computer mags from the time the "standard" test was to run Microsoft Flight Simulator and Lotus 123. If a machine could run those two programs it was good enough.
The IBM PS/2 line was an attempt to STOP the clones. The reason the PS/2 line failed was that the clones offered a cheaper alternative. The PS/2 was technically a better machine than the clones but the lack of add on cards make the clones the better choice. BTW the ps/2 keyboard port, ps/2 mouse port, VGA, and 1.44 Floppy all started with the IBM PS/2.

The Apple ][ Floppy - Reliable?

[ratboy666]

Now that's a hoot.

The apple used minimal circuitry for everything. Including floppy. Bit decode was done in software. Which meant that the drives had to be almost EXACTLY the same rotational speed, or they couldn't exchange disks.

As to soft sector being more reliable -- sorry, that's also not true. Hard sector is actually more reliable. Simple put, if a sector is damaged, it is possible to skip over it, and read sectors after it on the same track. Not possible (with ANY reliability) using a soft-sector format. As to cost savings? The hole detector is in the drive anyway (for either 1 hole, or n holes).

And, yes, my Apple ][ still works.

Ratboy

Re:It's tragic and bad they weren't more open.

[Pope]

Once you've been here long enough, you'll notice that any attempts to correct incorrent statements about Apple gets one labelled an "apologist," whatever that means.

Now THAT, my friend, is insecurity. :)

Besides, the early Macs weren't really worth owning, IMHO. System 7 and the 68040 is where they really started to shine as a platform. It's too bad the management in the late 80s/early 90s were too focussed on profit margins to really compete with the x86 machines of the day.

At the end of the day, a computer is a tool to get a job done, whether it's DNA sequence processing or running Counter Strike to blow off some steam. With Apple still in the game there remains a viable commercial competitor for Windows. Whether their machines do what you want is another matter. Mine does. :)

Re:Ahem

[LWATCDR]

The Mac did not have a 1.44 floppy it orginaly had used a double sided double density drive. The 1.44 High Density disk was introduced with the PS/2