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The Apple II Turns 35 Today
harrymcc writes "35 years ago this week, at San Francisco's first West Coast Computer Faire, a tiny startup named Apple demonstrated its new personal computer, the Apple II. It was the company's first blockbuster product — the most important PC of its time, and, just maybe, the most important PC ever released, period."
Lemme guess. You are in the 18-24 demo?
My 48K Apple ][ was my first major purchase (in 1981); it cost more than the nonrunning car I bought in 1980, and more than the total of the car and the repair costs to get it running. Saved every penny, used a used color TV for a monitor, hacked a gameport print driver cable, and with later purchases played marathon sessions of Wizardry 1 and 2. It took a year to save up enough for the floppy drive (a Lobo, not an Apple Disk ][ which I could not afford for another year) and a better monitor.
I still have my ][, it gets pulled out every few months and hooked to the TV to play old games on, annoy the nieces and nephews with 8 bit graphics and raspy sound effects, and totally make my day. Dunno about yours, but my Apple ][ is forever ;)
(I still have the car too but its back to not running...)
Although not strictly the Apple II, the IIe was the first real computer brought into my house growing up. Now that I'm a professional working adult, looking back on that box with the green monitor, the one floppy drive, and other details I wondered how in the world my parents were able to justify and afford the thing! As the article correctly points out, at $1200~ 1980 dollars that is around $5000 today! That was probably the most expensive piece of technology in the house at the time and I never realized it at the time where instead I was simply happy to mess around with Applesoft Basic and various games.
Are /all/ your computers called Eric?
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Toast to evenings once upon with that soft green monochrome glow... and me dying of dysentery.
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
Apple II was released in 1977.
Macintosh in 1984.
IBM PS/2 in 1987.
Remove you presence from our lawn, n00b.
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
>>>sixteen colors
You poor souls. My PC had 4096 colors, near-CD-quality sound, and true multitasking (preemptive). In 1985. My PC was a Commodore. ;-)
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
And don't forget the GPU. In 1987, Gerald Hull even used it to perform simple additions for an Amiga version of Conway's Life, making it an early example of more general purpose programming with a GPU!
Unfortunately the Amiga wasn't that important, though it should have been.
35 years ago one could play games on their Apple computer, like Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Dragon Wars, Wasteland, among others.
Today Apple distributes the first and third most popular single Unix distributions in the world.
Not fair. I'm still in the 18-24 demo and this is great to read. It helps me to learn more about the experiences of computer evolution. I still go on and on about the NES to the kids and they can't figure out the excitement I have. This puts it into perspective I suppose.
You can still play Wizardry, Bard's Tale, Dragon Wars, Wasteland, and others on your Apple computer, even if it isn't 35 years old.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Commodore, Atari, Coleco, Tandy, IBM - all were there to eat Apples lunch.
And every one of them is out of the PC business today.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Coincidently Conway's game of life is why I forked out $80 on a secondhand Apple][ in the early eighties. I had read about the game of life in an old SciAM magazine and was obsesed with drawing pages and pages of little squares with pencil and paper, I had no idea how to program the apple, but if you have ever spent all night playing Conway's game using graph paper, you may appeciate why I forked out $80 and took the time to learn. A few years later I dumped my factory job and signed up for a CS degree (graduated in 1990, a couple of years before the commercial boom started in earnest), Even though I didn't know it at the time, that $80 'toy' changed my working life like nothing else since. And I think that last point explains a lot of the nostalgia surround Apple]['s, C64's, XT's Amiga's, etc, because I'm sure I'm not the only slashdotter who (for nerdy reasons) was fiddling with a home computer in the 80's and shitting gold bricks in the 90's.
OTOH, I had little to no interest whatsoever in the internet at first, I couldn't see what was so fasinating about 'diplaying a formatted document on a remote computer'.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I'm sorry but there was something more: The Floppy drive, namely, Woz floppy drive... Did you ever use floppies with the other machines? Then you know what i mean, several minutes vs few seconds to boot the very same program, and hell nothing would crash if you accidentaly pushed a button when the drive was reading, unlike certain other brand...
Marketing pushed Macs later.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
>>>they were using Video Toasters for those special effects
False. I've used the Video Toaster in a television studio. It creates the various sweeps between scenes, but the actual graphics are generated by the Amiga's GPU. When you look at ships in B5 or Voyager, or subs in seaQuest, or CGI-generated people in Hypernauts, you're looking at actual polygon graphics produced by the Commodore Amiga at 704x480 resolution. It took the computer days-and-days of rendering to produce just a few minutes of CGI. (If you still have doubt, just watch the Star Wars Walker demo... all of which was produced without the video toaster.)
BTW thanks for fixing the name of the software (Lightwave). Over 20 years one forgets names. Even now I don't remember the software I used to get online, even though I used it daily. JXterm or something like that.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
False. I've used the Video Toaster in a television studio. It creates the various sweeps between scenes, but the actual graphics are generated by the Amiga's GPU. When you look at ships in B5 or Voyager, or subs in seaQuest, or CGI-generated people in Hypernauts, you're looking at actual polygon graphics produced by the Commodore Amiga at 704x480 resolution.
None of those graphics were generated by an Amiga "GPU", because the Amiga didn't actually have one.
It had a blitter, which is a fancy DMA memory copy engine, and it had "copper programs", which were an old and primitive tech (as in, not Turing complete) descended from Jay Miner's previous personal computer design (the Atari 8-bit). Neither is a recognizable relative of a modern GPU.
Programs like Lightwave 3D did everything with software rendering engines. The only function of the Amiga's graphics hardware was to be a dumb framebuffer.
(Also, as far as the Toaster was concerned, the main unique feature of Amiga video HW it took advantage of was that the Amiga had relatively high quality NTSC signal generation, and facilities for interfacing external HW (the VT) into the analog signal path. The digital side or "GPU" as you're calling it was basically irrelevant to anything in the VT or LW3D.)
While i'm an Atari guy, i admit we lost and they won. Marketing is what made the difference.
Steve Wozniak's hardware, Steve Wozniak's software and Steve Jobs vision made the difference.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
> true multitasking (preemptive)
Well... yes, and no.
The Amiga's UI was preemptively-multitasked (and interrupt-driven). To a large extent, Intuition was indifferent to the state of running applications. If an application crashed, the mouse pointer still moved, you could still drag screens, and you could still move and uncover windows. It SEEMED like preemptive multitasking compared to Windows, because Windows has always made applications responsible for managing their own window contents. If you obscure a window in Windows, Windows leaves it up to the application to re-draw it. In contrast, when you obscured a Window under AmigaDOS2.x (for instance), it just set a 'dirty' bit that didn't get cleared until the application did something to change the screen. As long as the dirty bit didn't get cleared, Intuition itself would save the contents of whatever got obscured, and put it back when you revealed the underlying window again. Under Windows, if the app crashed, covering the crashed app's window with another one just smeared it away into junk.
Likewise, Amiga's dialog boxes were completely indifferent to the state of the running application. This occasionally caused problems, because if your application threw up a dialog, then took a long time to do something before bothering to check its message queue, you could end up with absurd situations, like "User clicked BOTH 'ok' AND 'cancel' at least once".
In a real sense, Windows 2000 (maybe even NT) had better preemptive multitasking than the Amiga... but it didn't feel like it, because a badly-running (or crashed app) made the UI itself appear to be partly crashed. If you think about what Windows 2000 was really doing when it ran DOS apps, it was basically the equivalent of multitasking crack screens and megademos.
Put another way, the Amiga's multitasking was more sizzle than steak, but it pulled off the illusion well, and basically pulled off multitasking better than everything else in its era (Mac, PC, ST). Win32 multitasking (at least, NT and beyond) was technically superior in more and more ways with each new version, but because Windows apps themselves sucked so badly UI-wise when things didn't go well, the illusion of multitasking was prematurely shattered, and the user felt like it was inferior. If you really want to see true preemptive multitasking in a vintage OS, get Windows 2000 and run DOOM, WordPerfect for DOS, AutoCAD, and a bunch of other DOS apps in windowed mode. That was where Windows could really shine... it's just that by the late 90s, nobody really cared about multitasking DOS apps any more, and Windows did such a shitty job of multitasking the UI for actual Windows apps.
Except that the IBM PS/2 came with a VGA video adapter. It could display 256 colors from a 65K color palette; the Amiga could only display 32 colors from a 4096 color palette. The extra half-bright (EHB) mode still used a 32 entry CLUT... it generated colors 32-63 by halving the luma intensity of colors 0-31; it wasn't a true 6bpp color mode. And the hold-and-modify (HAM) mode used differential values to calculate color; subsequent pixels had a limited color range as you could only jump so far in the color palette from one pixel to the next. Sure, you could use unique CLUTs for each scanline to increase the number of on-screen colors, but it required a great deal of processor power to calculate on the fly. That's why it was mostly limited to static images (just as it was on the Apple IIgs that could do a similar trick).
And while the Denise could thump any PC audio chipset in the 1980s, it was not near CD quality. The highest sample rate was only 28KHz with 8 bits of resolution. CDA has a sample rate of 44.1KHz with 16 bits of resolution. Sure, you could use the 6-bit volume control register to create additional quantization steps, but you sacrificed two audio channels to do it. And 12 bits of resolution was a theoretical maximum; real world resolutions were smaller, especially as samples got louder. And again, it required a great deal of processor power to calculate on the fly
Lastly, you could install Coherent-386 on an IBM PS/2. True multitasking along with memory protection and multi-user support. You also had Concurrent CP/M-286 and -386 editions. They weren't popular, but they were available. And if you really want to split hairs, OS-9 was one of the first preemptive multitasking operating systems for consumer computers (read: not mainframes or minicomputers).
I was able to get a standing pass out of art class as a sophomore in high school to go work on art projects in the Apple II lab for a couple of months. Our art teacher was on maternity leave. I decided I did not like the substitute teacher, and luckily for me she had been given the explicit instruction to let me do whatever the heck I wanted to. So I elected to spend my time elsewhere.
The graphics available from BASIC on the Apple ][+ were crude, but better IMHO than the programmable-character "graphics" available on the early Commodore and TI machines. I wrote code for all of them -- including a program that let you use a joystick or paddle for an on-screen "Etch-A-Sketch" style drawing program that would let you save and restore your drawings. Doing that by re-defining characters on the fly in BASIC was not much fun. It did have an advantage over the "real" Etch-A-Sketch in that you had to hold down a joystick button in order to draw, otherwise the single-pixel cursor would just be moved around. I wrote that same program in Commodore Basic for my best friend's PET (at his house while he spent the time playing Intellivision), TI-Basic, and AppleSoft Basic.
That was the level I was at when I started trying to do "art" on the computer. While playing with things and reading magazines from the stack in the corner of the lab, I learned about how the Apple colors were actually pulled off, and realized that White 1/White 2 and Black 1/Black 2 were a half-pixel offset from each other. This allowed you to draw a white line and then draw a pixel-shifted black line on top of it to get thinner lines, which worked great for crosshatching and other fill effects. That got me interested in the fact that the fonts exploited this feature to get smoother curves on-screen, and I began exploring writing my own fonts and doing graphics from inside the assembler/monitor. As a result, I taught myself 6502 assembler and wrote fast "vector" graphics routines that I could call from BASIC, as well as routines that let me draw my own text on-screen as well, not constrained to the rectangular grid of normal characters.
I had to demo how I had been spending my time to my real art teacher when she returned. She appreciated what I had accomplished artistically (including various "vector" animations), but understood little of it. Her eyes glazed over when I began explaining assembly language routines. I got an "A" for my self-directed art study though, which consisted mostly of learning 6502 assembler :-)