Apple II History

I’ve just finished the new book about Steve Jobs, written by Walter Isaacson (I listened to the CD audiobook version). I was not sure what to expect as I started it; there had been much said about this book when it was first released last fall. Isaacson’s account was reputed to be very negative in his presentation of Jobs; some comments I read felt that it was too negative.

For my part, I really found no surprises, as regards his behavior. I have enjoyed learning about the inside story of Apple Computer through other books I’ve read about Apple in the past, and they have always prominently featured recounts of Jobs and his famous temper, his poor social skills in dealing with people, and his maddening perfectionism. The Little Kingdom by Michael Moritz (1984), West Of Eden by Frank Rose (1989), and The Second Coming Of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman (2000) are all in agreement about how hard Jobs was to deal with. The first two books deal with him before he left Apple, and the third takes the story up through his rejoining the company and bringing it out of near-bankruptcy.

This newest book, Steve Jobs, bares his conduct no less graphically than any of the previous ones. It adds details of his personal life that I have not previously seen in print. The stories of the creation and introduction of the Apple II and the Macintosh were already familiar to me, though in this book they were naturally more Jobs-focused than others. Personally, I found some of the most interesting and satisfying parts were those about the creation of the wildly successful products Apple has released during Jobs’ second tenure at the company: The iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Certainly, during this segment it appeared that Jobs had his head together better than he had previously – he had focus and a sensibility that he did not seem to demonstrate in his past efforts at leading his company. (An example of his previous lack of common sense was his demands that the assembly-line robotic equipment at the factory making the original Mac be painted different colors than they way they were designed, thus causing them to malfunction.)

As much as I enjoyed these parts, the chronicle of Apple’s ascendancy from a computer company to a media company, it was painful to hear the story of his cancer, his choices to ignore medical advice, and the tragic consequences of those choices. The entire book is, in a way, another rise and fall story (with a number of rises and falls happening along the way). The fall of Steve Jobs was a personal choice that was as much a part of him as were any of his successes. The book illustrates how he was able to accomplish so much by almost literally willing it to happen (his so-called “reality distortion field”), and how that personal disbelief in his illness was his undoing.

His complex personality, with its binary view of everything (good/bad, winner/loser, brilliant/sucky) was a part of him from his earliest days, was molded by adherence to Zen Buddhism, by his experimentation with mind-altering drugs, and by the era in which he grew up. Certainly, if Jobs had been a “nice guy” like his co-founder Steve Wozniak, he would have been unable to build the company that Apple became. He would not have been able to push so strongly for the various advancements that appeared under his leadership: a home computer that looked good in the home (the Apple II), the commercialization and distribution of the concept of the graphic user interface, a personal music player that was light-years beyond Sony’s original Walkman, a phone that was unlike anything else that came before it, and a tablet computer that really worked well and was usable by anyone. Not only did Jobs have the ability to push to create these great products, he also had the power and influence to push for changes in related businesses (consider the difference in the music industry today compared with where it was in the 1990s). A “nice guy” might have wanted such things to exist, but would not have had the demanding perfectionism that would enable them to appear, and to appear in the perfect minimalistic way in which they did.

Issacson’s book is a great read for anyone who wants to know the whole story of where these great inventions came from, and how they were conceived. I would hesitate to recommend it as a model for anyone to use as a lifestyle; Jobs had many faults, and the world would not be a better place if more people acted like he did. But he did what his “Think Different” commercial talked about – he pushed forward the human race. And the world without Jobs would have not advanced technologically as fast as it did with him. Despite his idiosyncrasies, our world is lessened by his passing.

I’ve not mentioned it much before this, but one of the ways in which the retrocomputing community is telling the world about their interests and “what’s new about what’s old” is via web sites and podcasts. There are several retrocomputing podcasts to which I regularly listen, and one of my favorites is the Open Apple podcast, hosted by Ken Gagne and Mike Maginnis. I had the opportunity to be a guest on the Open Apple podcast #4 back in May 2011, and again was asked to be on the most recent episode, #11, released on 1/11/12. The guest on this episode was David Greelish, who was mentioned in my last post with regard to his interview with former Apple Computer CEO, John Sculley. During the Retroviews segment, Greelish and I discussed more about John Sculley and his role at Apple, particularly in relation to the Apple II. It was fun to discuss it “live” with others!

You can listen to this podcast episode via iTunes at this link, or go to the Open Apple website to listen online.

Per Evan Koblanz of the Mid-Atlantic Retrocomputing Hobbyists (MARCH), the 2012 edition of the Vintage Computer Festival East (“8.0”) will be held on May 5-6 at the InfoAge Science Center in Wall, New Jersey. Keynote speakers will include Thomas Kurtz, who helped invent the BASIC language at Dartmouth in 1964, and Dan Kottke, Apple Computer employee #12. An early friend of Steve Jobs, Kottke helped with Apple’s early products, including the Apple-1, the Apple II, the Apple III, and the Macintosh.

You can find out more about the Vintage Computer Festival (VCF) East at their web site or their Facebook page.

During the years when I was in the heyday of my use of the Apple II, my primary community was initially via Softalk magazine. Softalk treated all of Apple’s products with equal enthusiasm, whether the Apple II, the Apple III, or the Mac’ n Lisa, and so I had a neutral attitude toward those products. And, since most of what Softalk featured dealt with the Apple II anyway, those bits that did not were simply educational to me.

After Softalk ceased publication, I quickly jumped on board with former DOSTalk columnist Tom Weishaar and his new Open-Apple newsletter. Weishaar was more opinionated on the subjects that were dear to his heart, specifically his passion for the Apple II. His newsletter also introduced me to the A2 Roundtable on GEnie, which he began to manage in the late 1980s. During those years, the hot topics both in Open-Apple and on the A2RT were the increasing feeling of having to battle Apple’s perceived indifference towards the Apple II. We complained to each other of the unfairness of Apple’s focus and its love toward the underpowered Macintosh (whether 128K or 512K), instead of the Apple II, with which you could actually do something useful and do it quickly. Weishaar seemed to have access to people within the Apple II division in the company, and occasionally stories about the inequities between the Mac/Lisa group and the Apple II group appeared in Open-Apple. Between these two communities, I adopted the prevailing attitude that criticized Apple’s management, and blamed them for the dwindling population of Apple II users.

After Jobs left the company in 1985, CEO John Sculley remained in charge of Apple. As far as we were all concerned, all of the decisions made there were, naturally, his fault. Despite great products like AppleWorks, ProDOS, GS/OS and the amount of processing efficiency they manage to squeeze out of a 10+ year old product, Apple basically ignored the Apple II. Stories repeatedly appeared in computer publications predicting the soon demise of the Apple II line, and we were frustrated because Apple would not challenge them. As with the rest of my Apple II peer group, I resented Apple, I resented the Macintosh, and I resented John Sculley for what was being done to my favorite computer. I went so far as to put his name in my American Pie parody, Apple II Pie, replacing the name “Satan” in one of the verses with “Sculley”. It implied that he joyfully presided over the destruction of the Apple II.

Because of my attitude towards Sculley, I never was interested in reading his own book, Odyssey, or any other story about him. However, David Greelish of the Classic Computing and Retrocomputing Roundtable podcasts has just released a two-part interview he conducted with John Sculley. In that interview, Sculley points out that when he arrived at Apple, Steve Jobs was so focused on promotion of the Macintosh that he was fully prepared to pull the plug on the old, clunky Apple II line immediately. Sculley, a more experienced businessman, realized that killing Apple’s primary source of revenue in 1983 would have been disastrous for the company. Neither the Macintosh nor the Lisa had gained sufficient traction in the marketplace to make them profitable enough to carry the company.

Sculley asserts that one of his major efforts at the company in his early days was to keep the Apple II line profitable long enough to give time for the Macintosh to grow and itself become profitable. To give support to the Apple II division, Sculley placed his office initially in the Triangle Building, off campus, where they had been relegated. He gave his attention to that group, recruited Bill Campbell for marketing and Del Yocam to lead the division. Under his leadership that the company released the Apple IIc, the Apple IIGS, the Apple IIc Plus, and the Enhanced Apple IIe, as well as the various versions of ProDOS 16 and then GS/OS for the IIGS. In the process, the company actually increased its cash flow, and regained some of what had been lost to IBM PC and the MS-DOS operating system.

Because of these points that I had not well considered before, I must revise my opinion of Mr. Sculley, and I want to publicly apologize for anything that I may written in the past that was disparaging to him. Yes, the company as led by Sculley did eventually discontinue the Apple II line, first the Apple IIGS and later the Apple IIe, But as painful and disappointing as this was at the time, history has proven that these decisions ultimately were the right decisions. From the perspective of twenty years later, I can see that this was the right business decision. As was said in The Godfather, it was not personal, it was strictly business. And unfortunately, we all took it very, very personally.

Sorry, Mr. Sculley. You really were our friend, even though we didn’t know it.

I want to wish all a Merry Christmas, as we head into 2012. I have no new info to share this Christmas, but had so much fun writing my song parody last year, I decided I would share it again. I have not yet moved this into my song parodies section, but for those who missed it last year, please enjoy this link to the lyrics I wrote last year to Dan Fogelberg’s Another Old Lang Syne song.

I’ve added some info to Chapter 12, expanding on the foreign Apple II models in the pre-Apple IIe era. If anyone has further information about the ITT 2020, Apple II Europlus, or Apple II j-Plus, please feel free to share it.

When I first got my hands on an Apple II Plus back in 1980, the floppy disk that Woz had made available for his prized invention was old hat (heck, this computer was up to DOS 3.3!) Because of this, I never experienced any of the trials and tribulations of running an Apple II without a disk, as did the earliest owners. A few months ago, I wrote an article here called “Cassette Security“, in which I briefly discussed the ingenuity of early Apple II software vendors in making their products difficult to copy, and so harder to pirate.

Antoine Vignau of Brutal Deluxe has been archiving this under-represented aspect of Apple II history on his web site. He has been cataloging as many early cassette-based Apple II programs as he can find, and posts an audio file of the program, if possible. This is making it possible for the first time in many years to actually access some of the earliest products sold for the Apple II.

My thanks go out to to Call-A.P.P.L.E. for making mention of one of the newest entries on the Brutal Deluxe site in this cassette category. It is a clever program called “Disk-O-Tape”, written by Dann McCreary. In an era when the new disk media was still expensive and cassettes were abundant and cheap, McCreary had written a program that would transfer an image of an entire floppy disk to a cassette tape. If you only had one box of floppy disks to work with, but had more programs than would fit on those disks, the cassette became a type of archive media to allow temporary offloading of that data in a safe place. Restoring a disk from the cassette was just as easy.

A related story that was also reported by Call-A.P.P.L.E. was about Apple Game Server, which has taken the retro-cassette concept to a new level. Here, the site designer has taken a number of old games, compressed them, and added a routine to make them load from the cassette input on an Apple II. To play these games, connect a cable from your playback device of choice (even an iPhone) to the cassette input of your Apple II. Start up the Apple II without a floppy disk in the drive, and press Ctrl-RESET to drop to BASIC. Type “LOAD”, and start playing the selected game audio file into the cassette input. The game will load and automatically start playing.

Advantage: It is really easy to load and play an old game this way. The files are very small (even the largest game could be no bigger than 139K (0.139 meg), and so load quickly.

Disadvantage: I’ve not been successful in getting Virtual II, my favorite Apple II/II+/IIe emulator to work with these files (I may not be converting them properly).

Between these web sites, here are two ways of looking at software from the earliest days of the Apple II, whether cassette only, disks stored on cassettes, or disk images converted to work as cassettes. Enjoy!

I’ve got an exciting new exhibit in the Apple II History Museum! Thanks to the permission of Howie Shen, I have his photos of his recent acquisition of a true piece of history – An Apple II, originally purchased by someone in Palo Alto, CA. In July 1977, this person spent about $2000 for a 24K system, including the brown vinyl zipped carrying case. He apparently then made very light use of his new computer for a while, and then zipped it up in the vinyl case and stored it in the closet until after he passed away. His son contacted Mr. Shen, who was advertising his interest in purchasing an Apple II.

As Mr. Shen examined his new purchase, he found that he had taken possession of a very unique item. This was not just an early serial number Apple II; this is probably one of the earliest surviving examples of how the first few Apple II computers were built and shipped. A member of Applefritter.com, he posted pictures of his acquisition on the forum in October of 2011, and discussed it here:

I am the new owner of a very early 1977 Apple II system, serial number A2S1-0101. The machine is in amazing condition, having been zipped up in its brown vinyl Apple bag in the closet of the original owner for the better part of three decades. Remarkably, the components are all original, never upgraded, including the completely unmoved Revision 0 motherboard, serial number 1.303 with Integer BASIC ROMs. Also, the early case has no vents, and appears hand-painted and rather crudely finished at the edges. Best part is that the system works perfectly!

It really is a time-capsule find inside and out … I bought it from the son of the original owner who said he couldn’t remember it being used all that much, and the overall condition certainly supports that. The inner wall of the case has a stamp indicating “July 6 1977” so that’s either the assembly date for the complete system or just the case … Note the “16K 4K 4K” memory select blocks; this system was ordered with 24K that surely was a whopping configuration that early on.

There are relatively few online images of Apple II systems with early silkscreened logo power supplies and cases without ventilation slots, so maybe these photos reveal details that folks are curious about. (For example, I didn’t realize that the earliest power supplies had simple handwritten serial number stickers.)

In addition to the computer itself, I received a nice selection of documentation including the original direct-from-Apple sales receipt (check out the price in 1977 dollars!), and among the accessories and disks a pair of very early paddles. These were a big surprise, as they look to be the ones shown in the original advertisements, but I always thought they were just mockups that were replaced with the familiar square paddles with big round spinners when the systems actually shipped.

One of the most unusual characteristics of this early Apple II is the lack of ventilation slots in the sides of the case. As noted during his keynote given at KansasFest 2011, early Apple employee Bob Bishop had also purchased an Apple, with a serial number of 0013, and his Apple II also lacked the ventilation slots. Bishop used his computer quite a bit, and the heat build-up inside the case caused it to soften and sag. Bishop brought the problem to the company’s attention and was given an upgraded case with the ventilation slots. Most likely, most other early Apple II owners with these cases lacking vents also complained about the problem, and were upgraded to the proper type of case. The original owner of Howie Shen’s Apple II presumably did not use it enough to cause the case to sag, and so did not seek out a replacement from the company.

The only manual that shipped with these original Apple II was a collection of typewritten notes; this is the bound booklet that has the “Simplicity is the ultimate Sophistication” advertisement on the top. According to an interview with Chris Espinosa that can be found here, this booklet was created by Apple’s first president Mike Scott, who went through employee’s desk drawers to get anything that he could to create some sort of documentation to include with this computer. Later, these notes were cleaned up and collated into the Red Book, which was apparently sent to early owners to replace that less-professional booklet. (Espinosa was later tasked with creating a better technical reference manual for the Apple II).

You can view more pictures in the Apple II History Museum here.

Even at this late date, nearly 20 years after the end of production of the last Apple IIe, there are still little bits of the story that come to light.

An article was published in the October 13, 2011 edition of The Grand Island Independent, of Grand Island, Nebraska. The article, written by Robert Pore, made mention of a business in the village of Alda, Nebraska. Located just west of Grand Island (and about 150 miles west of Omaha, where I live), with a population 652 (as of the 2000 census), Alda was home to Leon Plastics. The Alda plant was part of the larger Leon Plastics company, based in Detroit, Michigan, and in recent years it was making plastic parts for the auto industry. Though the Alda plant closed just this year, Leon Plastics in the late 1970s was producing parts for some of the computers that were being manufactured at the time, including the Apple II. Through a salesman from the Michigan office who contacted Apple in 1977, Leon Plastics got a contract to make the case for the Apple II and II Plus from 1977 to 1982. These were injection mold cases, using structural foam for the case material. At one point during the Apple II era, the cases were shipped from Alda to Richardson, Texas, where the computers were assembled at one of Apple’s plants.

In speaking with a former employee of the company, I was told that he believed that at the end of their association with Apple, Leon Plastics also produced some of the early cases for the Apple IIe (which was released in 1983). After late 1982, Apple outsourced to Singapore the production of these cases, and so Leon Plastics role in the story of the Apple II came to an end.

We all knew was it coming, but didn’t want to hear it. The news broke yesterday evening, informing the world that Steve Jobs passed away from (presumably) recurrence of his pancreatic cancer. He didn’t get a chance to do much as chairman of the board of Apple, after stepping down from his role as CEO in August of this year.

Jobs has a reputation of being a difficult person to work with, but he was driven to perfection in his work life and the products he promoted. His methods, whether or not they were good, resulted in amazing advances in getting great technology in the hands of the masses.

This is the Apple II History site, not a general Apple, Inc. history site, and so my only focus on Steve Jobs has been the parts he played in the development and maturation of that platform. Most of his love changed over to the Macintosh, because it was a representation of a newer, easier paradigm in computing, much as the Apple II was an advance over the teletype/printer/front-panel-switch methods of hobby computer interfacing the preceded the Apple II. But, as much as Jobs turned his attention away from the computer that got the company its first big success, he did not completely ignore it. Even as the Macintosh project was moving forward, Jobs was involved in the design of the Apple IIc, his vision of the Apple II as an appliance.

At first, I didn’t plan to make a specific post here about Jobs, as so much was being written on the web and in print since word got out about his death. But I did see three items that I wanted to share here. My thanks to Tony Diaz for posting the first two of these in his Twitter feed.

To start with, here is a picture that made the rounds a couple of years ago. I believe it was created originally by Jonathan Mak, who lives in Hong Kong (see his site here). It is a cool pictorial tribute to Jobs and the company he co-founded (and I like it better than one other profile of Jobs superimposed on the Apple logo):

Tony also pointed me to an Applesoft program written by Chris Baird (link gone as of 4/14/13), a program that creates this image on an Apple II hi-res screen:

In my RSS news feed today, I came across a link to this video interview with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, speaking to the Associated Press:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dK_XEGrzHUo

Thanks to Ken Gagne, I would point you to this 1995 interview of Steve Jobs done by Computerworld. It was done in the era of his life when he was still two years off from being asked to rejoin Apple. It gives his insight on NeXT computer, what he thought of Apple, and other insights on the genesis of the computer paradigm that the Macintosh and NeXT computers pushed forward.

Finally, also from Ken, here are thoughts of the editors of Computerworld about Steve Jobs and his legacy:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6BBvLZXa8Q

Thank you Steve, for the many ways that your leadership pushed forward technical matters and made them simple to use in our daily lives.