You get a peculiar feeling when reading a history of events that took place when you were a 30-plus-year-old adult trying to earn a living. You recall some of them, but then you discover that not only were there many gaps in your knowledge at the time but there were significant things happening in these gaps. Laine Nooney’s The Apple II age is a masterful history of contemporary events. This book is fun to read--great stories told well.
The impetus of the book is Steve Jobs’s announcement of the iPhone in 2007. Jobs presented the iPhone as the newest innovation from Apple, so new and revolutionary that the company changed its name from Apple Computer Inc. to Apple Inc. to reflect the change of the business model to incorporate and emphasize products and services other than computers. In his presentation, Steve Jobs began with the evolution of Apple’s products starting with the Mac, made famous by the 1984 “Big Brother” commercial, and adding later products like the iPod. Nooney noticed that the problem with this story is that it is woefully incomplete. It would be as if a paleontologist discussing evolution began with the Triassic instead of going back to the Cambrian explosion at the start of the Paleozoic.
The Apple II, originally released in 1977, was the real foundation of Apple and the basis of what has become the commodification of computers and pervasiveness of computing in the world’s economy. Nooney argues that the Apple II made computers personal. They begin their story with a review of the state of computing prior to the Apple II with a discussion of mainframe computers and later minicomputers (for example, DEC VAX). The gradual diversification of computing power through minicomputers put computing power in smaller groups, for example, research labs and individual businesses. Still, individuals did not own computers unless they were constructed by hobbyists. DEC sold the LSI-11 kit that the research group I was in purchased in 1977. We assembled it. Soldering irons were required. Programs were written in machine language and stored on punched paper tapes. We used it for gathering data and control of laboratory scientific instruments, including one I was building.
The Apple II differed from the other two small computers (the Radio Shack TRS-80 and the Commodore PET) that led the small computer market. Nooney gives all of the engineering credit to Steve Wozniak. The Apple II had an open architecture, more memory, decent peripherals, and a larger price tag. If one considers what the average salary was at the time, very few families could afford a computer.
Nooney shows that it was the software developed for the Apple II that made personal computing possible, if not desirable. The Apple II was the most mature and capable computer prior to the introduction of the IBM Personal Computer (PC) and PC clones. They does this through the stories surrounding five software products that are early exemplars of entire software industries that grew up during that time period. The products were VisiCalc (business/spreadsheets), Mystery House (games/graphics), Locksmith (utilities/copy protection), The Print Shop (home/printing), and Snooper Troops (education/simulations). None of these software genres existed prior to the Apple II. Billion-dollar companies were spawned. The stories behind these software products and how these programs participated in the birth and gestation of entirely new industries of software and hardware (for example, printers and scanners) are fascinating.
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