The Apple II At 30

turnitover sends us to eWEEK for an appreciation of the Apple II on the 30th anniversary of its shipping. An overview of the history of the Apple II puts it in context. A nice tidbit: how important the floppy drive was to sales. The article quotes Sellam Ismail, the proprietor of VintageTech, which maintains archives of computers, documents, and software: "You could think of the Apple II's importance on two levels — the Woz level and the Steve Jobs level." The former refers to its allure to hackers, and the latter to its appliance-like polish, a first for its time, There is also an interview with Woz, who says, "[A]t the start there were no computers in the home — we had to make the word computer compatible with homes."

Comments

The D5 clip of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates is good..

[CatOne]

SJ gives a good overview of the original goals of the Apple ][ and later the Mac. He gives interesting details of the Apple ][... "we wanted people to be able to code themselves," and on Woz's implementation of Integer Basic and how broken it was (and that Woz knew he needed to fix it with something that supported floating point, but never got around to it). Was pretty neat.

There are some clips on the "All things Digital" conference site, and I believe on iTunes as well.

Re:What's changed in 30 years?

[Mattintosh]

Macs have always been PC's. They are computers, and they are personal (except for the servers, and even then, the recent ones could be used as a workstation). They are not and never will be "IBM PC Compatible", though right now is the closest they've ever been.

Just to remind you... the IBM PC lived and died by its BIOS. Without a BIOS, it can't be an "IBM PC Compatible". The Mac used to live (and potentially die) by its ROM, but Apple wisely turned it into an intangible brand and got rid of that thing.

Re:What's changed in 30 years?

[Ucklak]

My 1981 13" Mitsubishi ColorTV came with schematics.
My 1983 JVC VCR ($500 retail) came with schematics.
My 1989 19" Panasonic Stereo TV ($700 Retail) came with schematics.
My 2001) 43" Hitachi Projection HDTV (monitor 1080i/540p) has schematics available that I used to replace the convergence chips with.

It is true that most electronics - especially the Wal*Mart disposable type - do not have schematics. I was actually shocked that my 43" TV has them available for the public.
What I find offensive is that some appliance parts (refrigerator and dishwasher) from some manufacturers are not available to the general public - at least in my experience. I've read that some specialty ICs for TVs are only available to contract holders (repair shops) for said manufacturer.

Re:Again forgetting Commodore

[the_arrow]

Well, at the trade show where both the PET and the Apple II were anounced, what do you think got the most attention? A dull grey box that showed random data on the screen when turned on and then just a blinking prompt and had no functioning BASIC, or a futuristic nice-looking box with built-in monitor and tape-drive and a working BASIC that you could work with immediatly?

Apple was good at deceptive commercials, like saying that the Apple II was the best-selling computer of all time, when both Commodore and especially Tandberg (with the TRS/80) outsold them plenty. It wasn't until VisiCalc that the Apple II became really popular, and then mainly in business. In the term of number of sold units Commodore beat everyone, first with the VIC-20 and then with the C64.