In April 1977, in a rented booth at the West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco, two Steves showed off a beige plastic box that didn't look like anything else in the room. Most of the machines on the floor were kits — bare boards, exposed wires, toggle switches, the kind of thing you soldered together on a weekend. The Apple II had a molded case, a keyboard, a power supply that didn't hum or cook itself, and, when you plugged it into a color television, it drew pictures in color. It went on sale that June. It would still be selling, in one form or another, sixteen years later.
The Apple I had been a board for hobbyists — you supplied your own case, keyboard, and power. The Apple II was the opposite bet: a computer an ordinary person could carry home, plug in, and switch on. That shift — from hobby to appliance — is the whole story of this part.
Woz's masterpiece
The Apple II was, at its heart, Steve Wozniak's design — and it remains one of the most admired feats of engineering in the history of personal computing. Built around the inexpensive MOS Technology 6502 processor running at roughly one megahertz, it did more with fewer chips than any of its rivals. Woz found clever ways to generate color graphics almost for free, wringing effects out of the machine that its parts had no business producing. He gave it eight internal expansion slots, an open invitation for anyone to plug in and build on top of the machine — a decision that seeded a whole industry of add-on cards and, eventually, software.
But the Apple II was not Woz alone. Steve Jobs pushed for a machine that looked finished rather than hacked together: Jerry Manock designed the friendly foam-molded plastic case, and Rod Holt engineered a lightweight switching power supply that ran cool and quiet, without the bulky, hot transformer everyone else used. Because the machine could show color, Apple even commissioned a new logo — the rainbow-striped apple — to advertise the fact. It shipped with a base price of $1,298, though a genuinely useful configuration cost quite a bit more.
It didn't launch into an empty field. That same year, Byte magazine would come to call the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the Radio Shack TRS-80 the "1977 Trinity" — the three machines that dragged computing out of the garage and onto the kitchen table. For a while, the Apple II was arguably the runt of the three by sales. What changed that had almost nothing to do with hardware.
The killer app
The problem with a home computer in 1977 was simple: once you'd played a game and typed a few lines of BASIC, what was it actually for? Apple answered part of that question in 1978 with the Disk II, another Woz design — a 5.25-inch floppy drive that stored 140 kilobytes per disk and, crucially, was fast and cheap. Loading a program stopped meaning fiddling with a cassette recorder for several minutes. Software could suddenly be sold, swapped, and run in seconds.
Then, in October 1979, came the thing that turned the Apple II from a curiosity into a purchase a business could justify. VisiCalc — written by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston's Software Arts and published by Personal Software — was the first spreadsheet program for a personal computer. It let you lay numbers out in a grid, change one, and watch every dependent figure recalculate instantly. Accountants and small-business owners who had never cared about microcomputers suddenly discovered a reason to want one. And for its first year, VisiCalc ran only on the Apple II.
The effect was extraordinary. People walked into computer stores and asked to buy "that machine that runs VisiCalc." It became the textbook example of a "killer application" — software so useful it sells the hardware underneath it. Over the following years VisiCalc sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies, and a meaningful share of Apple IIs went out the door because of it. A hobbyist's color computer had quietly become a tool that paid for itself.
The machine that made a company
By the end of the decade the Apple II wasn't a product so much as a platform. The open slots filled with cards; the disk drives filled with software written by strangers; classrooms and home offices filled with beige boxes. The company that had been three people and a garage in 1976 was, by 1980, a fast-growing business with a genuine hit and a rapidly expanding payroll — the foundation for everything that followed, including a stock offering that was about to make a lot of early employees very wealthy.
That combination — an elegant machine, an open design, cheap storage, and one piece of software that people couldn't live without — is why the Apple II is remembered not just as Apple's first real success, but as one of the computers that created the personal-computing industry itself. It gave Apple its first fortune. In our next part, we'll watch the company cash that fortune in: the 1980 IPO that minted a generation of millionaires overnight.
Comments
Post a Comment