Slashdot Mirror
The Beginnings of Apple Computer
John Burek points out an article written by Stan Veit, former editor-in-chief of Computer Shopper magazine, and one of the first retailers to deal with the fledgling Apple Computer in the late 1970s. Veit describes his introduction to the Apple I and his early interactions with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak as they developed their early models. Quoting:
"After Woz hooked his haywire rig up to the living-room TV, he turned it on, and there on the screen I saw a crude Breakout game in full color! Now I was really amazed. This was much better than the crude color graphics from the Cromemco Dazzler. ... 'How do you like that?' said Jobs, smiling. 'We're going to dump the Apple I and only work on the Apple II.' 'Steve,' I said, 'if you do that you will never sell another computer. You promised BASIC for the Apple I, and most dealers haven't sold the boards they bought from you. If you come out with an improved Model II they will be stuck. Put it on the back burner until you deliver on your promises.'"
The sad thing is, without Jobs the Apple might never have gotten anywhere. Now Jobs runs it all.
I wonder if Woz is happy.
I miss the "Old" Computer Shopper.
Paul Allen got pretty sick during the early years of Microsoft. According to Cringely, Allen overheard Gates and Balmer scheming to re-capture the portion of the company that he owned:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2006/pulpit_20060330_000890.html
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Actually, I don't think I've heard of Gates screwing employees out of stock.
Tell that to all of the MS permatemps before Vizcaino v. Microsoft.
I liked my old Apple II. Then one day apple was all about MAC and those of us who already spent a lot of money and time on the Apple II were left behind with no upgrade path, as though we were nothing more than garbage. That is why I have been a PC user ever since.
- James
The Apple users were much more oriented toward software and graphic applications. They were more interested in what a computer did then how it did it.
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
In the 1980s, I made the following call, which changed my career -- and my life. call -151
No, "Pirates of Silicon Valley" gave far more credit to Apple than they deserved in the early days, and is an example of some outrageous revisionist history. Remember that the battle was between Commodore and Radio Shack at the time. Apple was constantly playing catch-up, and by the end of the 70's remained far back in third place in terms of volume and sales in spite of their marketing claims.
Wozniak, Jobs, Peddle, and Tramiel all discussed a Commodore buyout of Apple in '78. The Steves were receptive, were it not for Tramiel's stubborn and short-sighted decision to walk away from the deal.
Apple has had some brilliant people in marketing and many of them are guilty of revising history to suit the company's expected image.
If you have any interest in the origins of personal computing, you should read about Chuck Peddle's first-hand account of the relationship between the Steves and Commodore in "On The Edge" by Brian Bagnall. It's an amazing account of those years.
Apple makes some great products, and there are some incredible engineers who have been with NeXT and Apple. But let's be truthful about the origins of the Personal Computer. Apple and Microsoft were sideshows at the time.
Oh, and apropos TFA: this guy misspells Mike Markullas name repeatedly. Not sure where that comes from; hopefully it's not in his book.
Wozniak just wanted to innovate and see how he could push the technological envelope. Jobs just wanted to see how far he could push his financial envelope... at the expense of the Woz and anyone else he could manipulate.
The glaring contrast between Wozniak and Jobs was one of the earliest influences that led me to despise manipulators of all varieties. I admired Woz and hated Jobs.
An associate of mine opened the first retail computer store in Anchorage selling the Apple II and the Commodore PET and hired me (supposedly on a share of the profits) to run it for him. I could have sold at least one Apple II each day, but the distributer in Seattle was hording the inventory and distributing it to local stores. I could only get one Apple II per week. I called Apple, talked to Steve Jobs, and he passed me off to someone else who flat-out told me they depended on the distributor so much that they couldn't do anything to make the distribution more fair, and I couldn't order directly from Apple because they had a territory agreement with the distributor. (I felt that orders should be filled on a first-ordered, first-filled basis, and we were paying cash up front for our inventory, so there was no credit problem. Dumb move; the distributer was probably using the money we sent with the order to finance their friends' stores.) It got worse when Apple came out with the hard drive. I was selling accessories, but they weren't moving very fast when nobody could get the computers to attach them to. I remember ordering a digitizer tablet from Houston Instruments, and how surprised I was that I couldn't just plug it into the computer and make it work. There was no interface, and I ended up buying the parts and soldering them together to make a serial port. (Lucky background in connecting modems, teletypes and CDC 160A and 160G systems earlier in my career.) Then I had to write the software: I tried to write it in the BASIC that was included on the Apple, but a couple of conversations with Bill Gates and he convinced me to write it assembly language. I spent many hours after work writing, first the communications code (which we would now call drivers), and then a small application to draw geometric shapes using the tablet. I had some help from Steve Wozniak and a lot of help from a guy named Chris Espinoza who was absolutely brilliant at explaining things over the phone. I was also lucky that I had a good background in assembly language programming from the Army and subsequent stints with CDC and Honeywell writing things like light pen interfaces. I managed to write the software and sell both tablets and two Apple II's to a couple of Burroughs guys for enough money to keep the store open a little longer.
As bad as my experience with Apple was, my relationship with Commodore pissed me off each time I had to deal with them. We had to buy 5 Commodore PET systems at a time. We had to put up $5000, which gave us a "credit line" of $5000 dollars, and which was enough to buy 5 systems (which sold retail for $1499). However, the manufacturing of the PET was sloppy, to say the least. I've had as many as 4 of the 5 in my order come in DOA. So I had to RMA the defective systems for repair. Then, in order to get more inventory, I had to put up another $5000 to "increase my credit line". In order to keep enough stock to sell, we ended up letting Commodore have $15,000 of deposit money. This shouldn't have been news to me: Before I worked for Honeywell in 1968, I sold business machines in Minneapolis. The guy I worked for sold Commodore calculators. Commodore actually came out with the first truly programmable calculator, which used a Nixie-tube display and magnetic cards to preserve the programs. (Marchant and Friden also had "programmable" calculators, but neither of them did recursion and both of them were twice the size of the Commodore.) My boss used to complain about the way Commodore treated him, for the same reasons. In 1990, in Houston, the vendor I worked for who sold the Amiga was still complaining about the same problems. (Rumor has it that Commodore was a Mafia-owned company and very risk-aversive while not being particularly customer-sensitive.)
Eventually, the owner/investor of the store decided that there was no point in keeping it open since there was not enough saleable stock to satisfy the customers or make a profit.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
so people never upgraded hardware or software before Apple came along? what, did Steve Jobs invent software versioning too?
and that quote only refers to hardware upgrade, not a hardware/software upgrade cycle. the whole point of it was that they promised BASIC for the Apple I. so they're not going to make people buy an Apple II before they've delivered BASIC on the Apple I. how is that a hardware/software upgrade cycle? they're not using hardware to make people upgrade their software. they're not even using software to make people upgrade their hardware.
It's funny that after the Apple II, all the other computers looked like an Apple II. The Apple II was the first to use molded plastics instead of metal, and its technical design was ahead of its time. Don't get me wrong-- I owned the VIC-20, C-64, and even C-128; I didn't own an Apple under the Mac Plus. But considering most people my age got their first exposure to computers through their school's Apple II's, it's hard to underestimate its influence.
E pluribus unum
"Look at the people running free software projects: Linus, Richard, Theo, etc. They tend to be egotists and jerks too, for exactly the same reasons."
So what does that make the leader of the most trafficked site?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Have you ever considered publishing the Integer BASIC source code? I remember reading the system ROM source code in my old Apple ][ manuals, but I don't recall seeing Integer BASIC.
Program Intellivision!