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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.'"
Priceless
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
When Apple went public, Jobs would not give stock to several employees who made the Apple possible. My son gave them stock out of his allotment, or they would have never benefited from the long hours and devotion they put in to start the company. If you had given Jobs the money, he would have found a way to keep you from getting the stock.
I guess Wozniak is a class act. And as far as Jobs is concerned, well; I guess he and Gates are similar people. Actually, I don't think I've heard of Gates screwing employees out of stock.
I can't imagine that Woz isn't happy. He has money, time to play, time to spend time on whatever he wants without deadlines, and even a fan following.
Jobs clear gave and continues to give Apple a customer-focused vision - something that almost every other company fails at - to the level of a fault.
It is one thing to design an awesome computer - its another to take one that propels a multi-billion dollar industry forward.
Mr. Jobs: If you're going to post on Slashdot, at least log in.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"It is one thing to design an awesome computer - its another to take one that propels a multi-billion dollar industry forward."
Apparently it always takes a raving ego maniac to do it, however. And I'm not just talking about Steve Jobs. The world is run by the nearly and the wholly sociopathic. One could argue that those types drive progress, but there is plenty of wreckage left in their wakes. And in the end it might be that some people who got screwed over by people like Jobs refused to see him--and others like him--for what he was simply because they got dollar signs in their eyes.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
From 1986 to 1996, Microsoft's stock soared more than a hundredfold as the company's Windows operating system and Office applications dominated the PC industry.
That explosive climb made millionaires of employees who had accepted options as a substantial part of their compensation for 60-hour workweeks fueled by a diet of Twinkies, Coca-Cola and marshmallow Peeps. The sudden riches led many to refer to themselves as "lottery winners.
"While the exact number is not known, it is reasonable to assume that there were approximately 10,000 Microsoft millionaires created by the year 2000," said Richard S. Conway Jr., a Seattle economist whom Microsoft hired to study its impact on Washington State. "The wealth that has come to this area is staggering."
The Microsoft Millionaires Come Of Age [May 29, 2005]
_____
Not everyone draws the winning hand, of course - some simply come into the game too late.
The Few, the Tech-Savvy Few: Option Millionaires [Feb 11, 2007]
For comparison's sake, Microsoft currently employs about 90,000 world-wide.
In 1990, around 6,000.
"'...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.'"
And lo, the hardware/software upgrade cycle was born.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
Not that I'm disagreeing completely with that statement but I don't think Jobs is anything like sociopathic. Egotistical and obsessive, perhaps, maybe narcissistic as well, but not sociopathic.
He is inarguably brilliant, in any case--not that I'd want to work closely with him.
This ain't rocket surgery.
The Mac released in 1984. Several Apple IIs, including the relatively sophisticated IIGS, came out after the Mac was released, and Apple continued making the IIGS until the early nineties. If you'd complained about buying an Apple I, Apple III, or Lisa, I could have agreed with you, but the Apple II continued to be made long after it was effectively obsolete. Of the old eight bitters, only the Commodore 64 lasted longer, and the Commodore 128 was never nearly the upgrade the IIGS was.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The nice thing about their path is that they're not afraid to cut off backwards compatibility. That's pretty much the biggest flaw with Windows. A lot of the security issues in Vista today are there because drivers used those holes to work. People still use hardware that uses those broken drivers, and the companies who released the products stopped supporting them years ago.
Microsoft knows they can't go "We no longer support anything from before Windows 2000" because EVERYONE will be pissed. From corporate accounts who can't use their ancient printers to Joe Sixpack who has a scanner from 1992.
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.
C'mon. You think if that really was Jobs, he'd post anonymously? And miss another chance to have his name appear somewhere?
The Apple I and II BASIC were basically the same thing and the project was never put on hold. The Apple II had very little extra code, only for handling character I/O differently, some color graphics commands that I added, and the slot-directed character I/O commands (PR #6). If there was some trying to back out of implementing this BASIC on the Apple I, it was never communicated to me. I never spoke to Stan Veit myself about this.
In fact, I definitely had the completed Apple I BASIC running Star Trek on a dozen Apple I's in a store in Orange County, long before BASIC was adapted for the Apple II.
Bottom line is...it's news to me although it makes some sense (the push to support the Apple I).
OK a new size TV
I read about this awhile go ago and thought it was relevant. For those that are still addicted to the Apple I, there is a functional replica with a few extra features. http://www.brielcomputers.com/replica1.html Just thought someone might get a kick out of it.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
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.
My understanding by reading "On the Edge" and looking at some microcomputer sales charts that used to be on the web is that Apple was in 3rd place behind PET and TRS-80 *until* the spreadsheet started to take off, around 1981.
This happened largely out of happenstance. The budget-tight VisiCalc programmers simply couldn't get access to PET's and TRS's at the time, but an Apple II was available for their use. Thus, they programmed VisiCalc on and for the Apple first. When VisiCalc started selling well, Apple was the only computer VisiCalc ran on. This is when Apple pulled ahead of PET (and prompted Commodore to produce the C-64).
VisiCalc was eventually ported to other computers, but Apple got a big boost for being first with it. VisiCalc (and later clones) had a huge influence on turning microcomputers from hobby machines into a serious market. Apple probably would not have the funds to produce the Mac if not for spreadsheet revenue, and flounder like most others when IBM PC clones commoditized the market. Apple is the only proprietary microcomputer vendor from the early years I know of to survive this commoditization. (There may still be some very nichy vendors around.)
Apple also rode a second software revolution: Desktop publishing. Commodore Amiga narrowly missed this opportunity.
Thus, luck played a large part in Apple's survival.
Table-ized A.I.
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!"