How Apple owes everything to its 1977 Apple II computer
It's the Apple II that made the company, kept it afloat, and even made it a cult success -- but it was also the Apple II that Steve Jobs tried so hard to kill off with the Mac. It's the little machine that could, did, and for its fans, still does.
The Apple II computer
The iMac saved Apple, and the iPod ignited the company's incredible success -- but it was another machine entirely that got it started. The Apple II made the company, kept it going, and started the trend of Apple gaining fans as much as just a lot of customers.
Where the Apple I had been Steve Wozniak's hobbyist project, the Apple II was his hobbyist project with Steve Jobs pushing him on. Apple II was their company's first consumer product, as in a computer that was designed to be used right out of the box, instead of having to be assembled by technology fans.
Central to that was how, unlike the Apple I, this new computer came in its own case. Woz was most concerned with making sure that the Apple II had expansion slots, while it was Jobs who pressed for it to be in a casing -- eventually.
Jobs had tried selling the bare motherboards to Paul Terrell of The Byte Shop, but Terrell would only buy complete units. He was willing to buy fifty of them, though, so he got what he wanted -- and the Apple II got a case.
That machine in that case became what was truly American's first home computer as we know it.
While we do remember how important the Apple II was to the company, at this distance it's easy to forget just how revolutionary it was for users -- even as Woz mostly still wanted to impress the famous Homebrew Computer Club.
"If you can take it down to the club and show a 30-chip circuit instead of 32, that's a little bit of a plus," Woz explained in a 1984 speech to the Denver Apple Pi computer club. "The computer was not being designed to be a product and was not being designed to be sold nearly as much as it was being designed to impress."
Apple launched the Apple II on April 17, 1977, and the following month saw a highly technical, six-page technical article in Byte magazine with Woz detailing his design. It was another era -- not only did Byte include system bus diagrams for you to pore over, it also printed Apple's postal address.
"The latest result of my design activities is the Apple II," he wrote from 20863 Stevens Creek Boulevard, Cupertino, CA 95014. "To me, a personal computer should be small, reliable, convenient to use and inexpensive."
The Apple II was all of these things, and if he built it to impress hobbyists, it soon garnered a wider circle of fans -- specifically because this machine had a startling number of firsts.
"It was the first one to have BASIC included in ROM, the very first one," Woz continued in his Denver speech. "The first one ever to have a plastic case. The first one ever to be completely assembled, all you've got to do is plug it in the wall. The first one ever to have 48K of RAM built-in on the motherboard. It was unheard of. It was the first one to have color, the first one to have sound... graphics..."
In a separate 1990s interview quoted on the fan site apple2history.org, Woz explained just why his machine had ended up having all of these firsts. None of them were particularly planned, he says, and much of them came from him adding what he wanted, when he wanted it.
"A lot of features of the Apple II went in because I had designed Breakout for Atari," he said. "[That] was the reason that color was added in first -- so that games could be programmed. I sat down one night and tried to put it into BASIC... I got this ball bouncing around, and I said, 'Well, it needs sound,' and I had to add a speaker to the Apple II."
"Obviously you need paddles [for a game]," he continued, "so I had to scratch my head and design a simple minimum-chip paddle circuit, and put on some paddles. So, a lot of these features that really made the Apple II stand out in its day came from a game, and the fun features that were built in were only to do one pet project, which was to program a BASIC version of Breakout and show it off at the club."
If all of this made the Apple II appealing to Woz, the Homebrew club, and consumers, it was software to handle numbers that truly made it fly for everyone else. For the very first spreadsheet program ever created was VisiCalc for the Apple II, and that was world-changing.
Before its 1979 release, the word "spreadsheet" meant a large paper ledger document that companies relied on. After its 1979 release, it meant software and no one remembers physical ledgers.
"There have been two real explosions that have propelled the [technology] industry forward," Steve Jobs said in a 1996 interview for Japan's NHK network. "The first one... was the spreadsheet. I remember when Dan Bricklin, who ran the company that marketed the first spreadsheet, walked into my office at Apple one day and pulled out this disc from his vest pocket, and said I have this incredible new program, I call it a visual calculator. And that's what really drove, propelled the Apple II to the success it had achieved."
Before we make the Apple II sound like a machine you would want to buy today, you wouldn't. For all its firsts, it had a major deficiency in that only supported uppercase letters. If you bought an Apple II in 1977, you could only type on it in capitals. Later there were third-party expansion cards that added the ability to show lowercase too, but it wasn't until 1983 and the Apple IIe that it shipped with this feature as standard.
That was six years after the launch and if it seems impossible now that you could use a computer that didn't have this, back then it was more unusual that the computer could still be around. This was a time of incredible numbers of incompatible computers from astonishing numbers of different companies.
L-R: Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and then-CEO of Apple, John Sculley at the Apple II Forever event
And it was also a time when each of those companies would produce new machines that were incompatible with their old ones. That's perhaps where Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs saw things differently. Woz wanted to make a computer that lasted forever and, at the time, Jobs was expecting to replace it.
Even though the Apple II, and its variations, originally outlasted Jobs at Apple, he continued to believe that technology should be replaced as he founded NeXT.
"All computer architectures have about a ten-year life," Jobs said at the launch of NeXT Computer in 1988, "and that means if they're really revolutionary when they come out they don't run existing software."
The Mac, for instance, had not run Apple II software. Jobs was so disinterested in this fact that when he made a presentation at the famous Apple II Forever event earlier in 1984, he chose to spend most of his time talking about the then-new Mac.
At that point, the Mac was three months old and for all Jobs's massaging of the numbers, was failing. And also at that point, the Apple II was seven years old and so successful that it was still Apple's primary source of income.
Although that Apple II Forever event was really the launch of the Apple IIc, a version which somewhat failed to match the success of its predecessors. Arguably that event was also a presage of the Apple of the future, too, as it was large-scale, lavish, and expensive. It also had its own theme song, which you can only hope sounded good at the time. It was the 1980s, after all.
But then suddenly it was the 1990s, and still the Apple II was selling. By this point, it had gone through very many variations, but the final one was the Apple IIe. It ceased production in November 1993.
The Apple II, in its various forms, had survived for 16 years. It had weathered IBM launching the IBM PC, it had easily weathered Apple launching the Lisa, and even then the Macintosh. And it had, just about, survived the Apple III, which was as much of a calamitous failure as the II had been a giant success.
We might not recognize the company that Apple was in 1977 when it created the Apple II, as its hobbyists' roots are long gone. But we definitely wouldn't recognize the Apple of 1993 when it killed off the Apple II. Back then, Apple was on a downward spiral -- and Steve Jobs would not return to save it for another four years.
Keep up with AppleInsider by downloading the AppleInsider app for iOS, and follow us on YouTube, Twitter @appleinsider and Facebook for live, late-breaking coverage. You can also check out our official Instagram account for exclusive photos.
Read on AppleInsider
The Apple II computer
The iMac saved Apple, and the iPod ignited the company's incredible success -- but it was another machine entirely that got it started. The Apple II made the company, kept it going, and started the trend of Apple gaining fans as much as just a lot of customers.
Where the Apple I had been Steve Wozniak's hobbyist project, the Apple II was his hobbyist project with Steve Jobs pushing him on. Apple II was their company's first consumer product, as in a computer that was designed to be used right out of the box, instead of having to be assembled by technology fans.
Central to that was how, unlike the Apple I, this new computer came in its own case. Woz was most concerned with making sure that the Apple II had expansion slots, while it was Jobs who pressed for it to be in a casing -- eventually.
Jobs had tried selling the bare motherboards to Paul Terrell of The Byte Shop, but Terrell would only buy complete units. He was willing to buy fifty of them, though, so he got what he wanted -- and the Apple II got a case.
That machine in that case became what was truly American's first home computer as we know it.
While we do remember how important the Apple II was to the company, at this distance it's easy to forget just how revolutionary it was for users -- even as Woz mostly still wanted to impress the famous Homebrew Computer Club.
"If you can take it down to the club and show a 30-chip circuit instead of 32, that's a little bit of a plus," Woz explained in a 1984 speech to the Denver Apple Pi computer club. "The computer was not being designed to be a product and was not being designed to be sold nearly as much as it was being designed to impress."
Apple launched the Apple II on April 17, 1977, and the following month saw a highly technical, six-page technical article in Byte magazine with Woz detailing his design. It was another era -- not only did Byte include system bus diagrams for you to pore over, it also printed Apple's postal address.
"The latest result of my design activities is the Apple II," he wrote from 20863 Stevens Creek Boulevard, Cupertino, CA 95014. "To me, a personal computer should be small, reliable, convenient to use and inexpensive."
The Apple II was all of these things, and if he built it to impress hobbyists, it soon garnered a wider circle of fans -- specifically because this machine had a startling number of firsts.
"It was the first one to have BASIC included in ROM, the very first one," Woz continued in his Denver speech. "The first one ever to have a plastic case. The first one ever to be completely assembled, all you've got to do is plug it in the wall. The first one ever to have 48K of RAM built-in on the motherboard. It was unheard of. It was the first one to have color, the first one to have sound... graphics..."
In a separate 1990s interview quoted on the fan site apple2history.org, Woz explained just why his machine had ended up having all of these firsts. None of them were particularly planned, he says, and much of them came from him adding what he wanted, when he wanted it.
"A lot of features of the Apple II went in because I had designed Breakout for Atari," he said. "[That] was the reason that color was added in first -- so that games could be programmed. I sat down one night and tried to put it into BASIC... I got this ball bouncing around, and I said, 'Well, it needs sound,' and I had to add a speaker to the Apple II."
"Obviously you need paddles [for a game]," he continued, "so I had to scratch my head and design a simple minimum-chip paddle circuit, and put on some paddles. So, a lot of these features that really made the Apple II stand out in its day came from a game, and the fun features that were built in were only to do one pet project, which was to program a BASIC version of Breakout and show it off at the club."
If all of this made the Apple II appealing to Woz, the Homebrew club, and consumers, it was software to handle numbers that truly made it fly for everyone else. For the very first spreadsheet program ever created was VisiCalc for the Apple II, and that was world-changing.
Before its 1979 release, the word "spreadsheet" meant a large paper ledger document that companies relied on. After its 1979 release, it meant software and no one remembers physical ledgers.
"There have been two real explosions that have propelled the [technology] industry forward," Steve Jobs said in a 1996 interview for Japan's NHK network. "The first one... was the spreadsheet. I remember when Dan Bricklin, who ran the company that marketed the first spreadsheet, walked into my office at Apple one day and pulled out this disc from his vest pocket, and said I have this incredible new program, I call it a visual calculator. And that's what really drove, propelled the Apple II to the success it had achieved."
Before we make the Apple II sound like a machine you would want to buy today, you wouldn't. For all its firsts, it had a major deficiency in that only supported uppercase letters. If you bought an Apple II in 1977, you could only type on it in capitals. Later there were third-party expansion cards that added the ability to show lowercase too, but it wasn't until 1983 and the Apple IIe that it shipped with this feature as standard.
That was six years after the launch and if it seems impossible now that you could use a computer that didn't have this, back then it was more unusual that the computer could still be around. This was a time of incredible numbers of incompatible computers from astonishing numbers of different companies.
L-R: Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, and then-CEO of Apple, John Sculley at the Apple II Forever event
And it was also a time when each of those companies would produce new machines that were incompatible with their old ones. That's perhaps where Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs saw things differently. Woz wanted to make a computer that lasted forever and, at the time, Jobs was expecting to replace it.
Even though the Apple II, and its variations, originally outlasted Jobs at Apple, he continued to believe that technology should be replaced as he founded NeXT.
"All computer architectures have about a ten-year life," Jobs said at the launch of NeXT Computer in 1988, "and that means if they're really revolutionary when they come out they don't run existing software."
The Mac, for instance, had not run Apple II software. Jobs was so disinterested in this fact that when he made a presentation at the famous Apple II Forever event earlier in 1984, he chose to spend most of his time talking about the then-new Mac.
At that point, the Mac was three months old and for all Jobs's massaging of the numbers, was failing. And also at that point, the Apple II was seven years old and so successful that it was still Apple's primary source of income.
Although that Apple II Forever event was really the launch of the Apple IIc, a version which somewhat failed to match the success of its predecessors. Arguably that event was also a presage of the Apple of the future, too, as it was large-scale, lavish, and expensive. It also had its own theme song, which you can only hope sounded good at the time. It was the 1980s, after all.
But then suddenly it was the 1990s, and still the Apple II was selling. By this point, it had gone through very many variations, but the final one was the Apple IIe. It ceased production in November 1993.
The Apple II, in its various forms, had survived for 16 years. It had weathered IBM launching the IBM PC, it had easily weathered Apple launching the Lisa, and even then the Macintosh. And it had, just about, survived the Apple III, which was as much of a calamitous failure as the II had been a giant success.
We might not recognize the company that Apple was in 1977 when it created the Apple II, as its hobbyists' roots are long gone. But we definitely wouldn't recognize the Apple of 1993 when it killed off the Apple II. Back then, Apple was on a downward spiral -- and Steve Jobs would not return to save it for another four years.
Keep up with AppleInsider by downloading the AppleInsider app for iOS, and follow us on YouTube, Twitter @appleinsider and Facebook for live, late-breaking coverage. You can also check out our official Instagram account for exclusive photos.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
Accurate but there lots of third-party 80-column terminal cards that allowed upper and lower case that were available before the IIe in 1983. They generally went into slot #3 and were kind of standardized. Doing a brief search, it looks like the availability started around 1980.
My first computer was a //c, in 1984. I loved it. It got better and better with stuff like AppleWorks, BeagleWorks, a ZipChip, a modem (remember BAUD rates?), a battery for portability. The OS and programming were so easy to understand that even I could play with the software, write little apps, etc. I mourned when I switched to a Mac.
I'd like to get my hands on a Macintosh SE.
[email protected]
We had an Apple ][, a Tandy Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I and four Commodore machines: an 8032, 8064, 4032, 4064, where the first two digits represented the number of columns and the second two represented the memory in Kilobytes. That 8064 seemed more advanced than the Tandy or the Apple because it was 80 column and had more memory than the base Apple machine.
The data cassettes were only for the TRS-80. I read the manual, figured out how to load them and looked at the source code. I had heard of Basic, but had never seen it before, but had previously studied Fortran. So I pretty much understood the code. I brought the programming manuals home to study them. But the TRS-80 was horrible as it had keyboard bounce. But then I looked at the Apple manuals and thought that at least from a documentation standpoint, they did a much better job, so the Apple ][ became my machine of choice. And shortly after that the floppy drives were purchased and we didn't have to use cassettes on any of the machines anymore.
I got more and more involved and eventually became Director of Software Development. It was amazing what people used to do with so little disk storage space and so little memory. I remember that someone came out with a notch cutter, so you could write to the backside of a floppy, even though that side wasn't certified.
We developed a classroom test scoring and evaluation program and when we did the second version, the developer told me it was going to require three floppy drives and an extra 16KB of memory and I freaked out. We compromised on the drives by making the third drive optional and we wound up including the memory board in the software price.
Apple was great in those days. They had "Evangelists" who were trying to get software developers and publishers to issue software for the Apple ][, so they'd seed you with machines and let you buy others for half price. The Apple II+ was an especially good machine and it had those 8 slots that people developed all kinds of cards for. As an educational publisher, we issued over 60 software titles. I got hold of an Apple IIe some years go, but couldn't make it work. I've still got a bunch of Apple II software and a "lab" board. I think it was the Iic that had a little switch that enabled one to change the keyboard from QWERTY to DVORAK. It's too bad that never took off.
I don't remember any of those Apple II machines ever experiencing any hardware problems. Some years later, when the Commodore 64 came out, they would break so often, we used to pile them up against the wall. We must have had 30-40 broken machines and we finally just decided not to produce anything for it, although it was primarily a home computer anyway and we were producing for schools.
It enabled me to design screens exactly as I wanted them to appear and then send them to the programmers. It really cut down a lot of back and forth with the programmers. I also created demos for the customers.
https://timeline.com/apple-kids-cant-wait-2792d326aa31
Edit: ooooh, I see. That would’ve been indeed the Apple IIe Platinum. And judging from its specs, it wasn’t that different from the other IIe models. Still extremely weird, IMHO.
So, I was pushed into a miniature Casio programmable calculator / computer where the program was entered from a cassette tape.
From there, the Microsoft & IBM computers were better suited to my needs. In the latter 80's I used a MacIntosh for Word processing but that too was soon replaced with an IBM computer.
And, to this day, Microsoft continues to dominate in business.