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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."
What's the big thing that seems to have changed at Apple over 30 years?
In 1977, Apple Computer included the schematics for all of the motherboard and CPU design for the Apple ][.
In 2006, Apple Ceased & Desisted a site for merely linking to a service manual.
Please come back Woz, we miss you.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
My Apple ][ was something that challenged and taught me.
Woz is brilliant and I spend countless hours pouring over the big red book with the fold out schematic of the Apple ][. Not only open source but open hardware too. The Apple ][ was fundamental in my development as a computer programmer.
Computers now have lost the special aspects of the Apple ][... simplicity and understandability.
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
Zork, not Zonk. I'm assuming that's a braino, since the 'N' key is nowhere near the 'R' key.
... the graphics in your head.
All those text-only Infocom games had the best graphics
SLM
main() {1;}
Like any geek 30+, I had an AppleII too (in fact, the computer's name was TK2000, a brazilian clone). And I must say that the world of computers were sooo funnier then... Obviously I'm takking from a romantic point of view, where typing 500 lines of BASIC code to save it in a K7 tape (after 3 hours debugging your mistypings) is real fun! I remember a book called "the black book of TK2000" that contained several hard-to-find informations that allowed me to really explore my machine, and the assembly programs that made it read even bugged tapes without errors. :-) And, last but not least, Karateka! :-)))
:-) IRQs, DMAs, conflicts, fun, fun, fun! :-) But since then, everything went downhill (or uphill). From 64Kb to 4Gb of RAM in 10 years...
After that, I had a MSX (I don't know if this japanese computer was famous in other countries, but here in brazil it was) with a single-sided drive, and some years later my first 386SX.
Today, you buy a computer, connect it to your 8Mb internet connection, download a 2Gb game in half an hour and play games that are almost real... You don't need to worry about tapes, typing, basic, anything. It's obviously better... But it's sad too. There's no fun anymore...
Yes, I know I'm getting old... But I really think that I was happy and I didn't knew...
--- Illogical Spock
That's what I love about Linux. I know the hardware is still closed, but one can go into /etc and look at the scripts that control the system - in (almost) human readable form!
/etc could certainly be better and more logically organised!
Now I'm no hardcore hacker (basic bash is as gritty as I get) but it's beautiful that the system is configured by a heap of text files and scripts.
Having said that -
call -151
I don't think anyone would argue that the Apple II was technically inferior to the machines that came later from other companies. The Commodore 64 was released five years after the Apple II, that's ages in computer years and features several custom chips for its special features. Apple stuck to the same off-the shelf mentality for a long time, because that's what their customers wanted. The Apple /// was a complete flop, so was the Lisa. People liked their Apple IIs. The Apple IIGS was late to the party, if they had moved in that direction sooner, maybe it would have made a difference, but technical superiority isn't everything in mass marketing. Ask Sony.
... and because they developed an affordable laser printer before anyone else. Not unlike how Apple were the first to develop a fast and affordable floppy system -- engineered by who? W
While the Mac was buoyed by the desktop publishing revolution, the Amiga did manage to capture a niche: video and graphics. Amiga computers are still used today by many video professionals. There is a Video Toaster sitting eight feet from me (and its PC successor, the VT[4], in the box I'm using right now). Unfortunately for Commodore, the potent Amiga / Toaster combo were way too far ahead of their time; home video was nowhere near reaching the mass market revolution that is going on right now. In those days, printing out really, really nice documents was something people could get their heads around, especially in the ugly reality of dot matrix printers and fanfold paper. These days, thanks mostly to good timing and savvy purchases, Apple all but owns the video and graphics niche as well.
Commodore failed simply because of horrible management, just like Atari. Hell, the Amiga never even should have been a Commodore product, it was designed by Jay Miner, the Atari engineer behind the Atari VCS and the Atari 400/800. Atari was offered the Amiga and payed for some of its development, and for some reason decided not to see it to completion. No doubt the same kind of idiocy that lead Atari to pass on the rights to the Nintendo Entertainment System. When Commodore slipped in and sneakily purchased the Amiga out from under them, a livid Jack Tramiel, president of Atari, (who founded Commodore and introduced the PET/VIC/C64 series and eventually got all pissy and left Commodore to purchase a money hemorrhaging Atari) sued Commodore and scrambled to slap together the Atari ST as a competitor, practically out of spite. Engineered in something like 6 months, while the Amiga languished in legal limbo, the Atari ST (dubbed by some, "the Jackinstosh") actually wasn't too bad (if quirky) and featured a single-tasking OS from Digital Research, the guys who passed on the IBM PC operating system allowing Microsoft to step in to save the day. While slightly faster than, and sharing the same CPU as the Amiga and the Mac, the Atari ST was nothing compared to the much more complex and amazing multi-tasking Amiga. The ST would eventually sport an inexpensive laser printer (two years after Apple) and the ability to run Mac and PC software better than the real thing. Atari tried to compete in desktop publishing, and some big name publishing software got their start on Atari, but Atari couldn't shed its gaming stigma and refused to spend the marketing dollars to correct that. Commodore didn't fare much better in the image department and didn't even bother to make a laser printer or try to compete with Mac at all it seems, although the Amiga outsold the Atari by a substantial margin. Maybe that's all they cared about. They later tried to get into the game console business with a dumbed down Amiga with a CD-ROM, but it was too late for Commodore and the faded away in all but the video realm. Atari eventually did find their niche in music thanks to built in MIDI and sequencer software like Cubase, and it is still used by a few musicians, although nothing like it was in its heyday.
Apple made it out almost by default because Atari and Commodore were so inept
+0 Meh