New Book about 'The Apple II Age' Celebrates Early Software Developers - and Users (thenewstack.io) 76
By 1983 there were a whopping 2,000 pieces of software for Apple's pre-Macintosh computer, the Apple II — more than for any other machine in the world. It turns out this left a trail for one historian to understand The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal.
The new book (by New York University academic Laine Nooney) argues that it was the first purchasers of that software who are the true overlooked pioneers during the seven years before the Macintosh. And (as this reviewer explains, with quotes from the book), collectively they form the most compelling story about the history of Apple: It's about all those brave and curious people, the users, who came "Not to hack, but to play... Not to program, but to print..." And you can trace their activities in perfect detail through the decades-old software programs they left behind. It's a fresh and original approach to the history of technology. Yes, the Apple II competed with Commodore's PET 2001 and Tandy's TRS-80... [But] this trove of programs uniquely offers "a glimpse of what users did with their personal computers, or perhaps more tellingly, what users hoped their computers might do."
Looking back in time, Nooney calls the period "one of unusually industrious and experimental software production, as mom-and-pop development houses cast about trying to create software that could satisfy the question, 'What is a computer even good for...?'" The book's jacket promises "a constellation of software creation stories," with each chapter revisiting an especially iconic program that also represents an entire category of software...
[T]he book ultimately focuses more heavily on the lessons that can be learned from what programmers envisioned for these strange new devices — and how the software-buying public did (or didn't) respond... The earliest emergence of personal computing in America was "a wondrous mangle," Nooney writes, saying it turned into an era where "overnight entrepreneurs hastily constructed a consumer computing supply chain where one had never previously existed."
Vice republished an excerpt in May which describes the "roiling debate" that took place over copy protection in 1981.
The new book (by New York University academic Laine Nooney) argues that it was the first purchasers of that software who are the true overlooked pioneers during the seven years before the Macintosh. And (as this reviewer explains, with quotes from the book), collectively they form the most compelling story about the history of Apple: It's about all those brave and curious people, the users, who came "Not to hack, but to play... Not to program, but to print..." And you can trace their activities in perfect detail through the decades-old software programs they left behind. It's a fresh and original approach to the history of technology. Yes, the Apple II competed with Commodore's PET 2001 and Tandy's TRS-80... [But] this trove of programs uniquely offers "a glimpse of what users did with their personal computers, or perhaps more tellingly, what users hoped their computers might do."
Looking back in time, Nooney calls the period "one of unusually industrious and experimental software production, as mom-and-pop development houses cast about trying to create software that could satisfy the question, 'What is a computer even good for...?'" The book's jacket promises "a constellation of software creation stories," with each chapter revisiting an especially iconic program that also represents an entire category of software...
[T]he book ultimately focuses more heavily on the lessons that can be learned from what programmers envisioned for these strange new devices — and how the software-buying public did (or didn't) respond... The earliest emergence of personal computing in America was "a wondrous mangle," Nooney writes, saying it turned into an era where "overnight entrepreneurs hastily constructed a consumer computing supply chain where one had never previously existed."
Vice republished an excerpt in May which describes the "roiling debate" that took place over copy protection in 1981.
And created a world that modern Apple destroyed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And created a world that modern Apple destroyed (Score:4, Insightful)
You could get software disks from any store, not just approved ones, and you can expand with any expansion card you wanted to engineer. Woz's World was destroyed for a 30 percent cut of all software sales by Jobs and Cook.
And, with a bit copier, only one person needed to buy teh program and everyone gets a copy...
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People griped about piracy back then, and for many years, said that if people stopped pirating their stuff, game prices would go down in price. Ironically, with modern DRM, resulting in an effective 0% piracy rate, that sure as heck never happened.
Ironically, it was interesting watching how DRM involved in those days, going from just bit by bit copies of tracks and sectors to double-boot, timing checkers with a different track ID for every part, to reading constantly from the boot drive in order to mitigat
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The original intent for the iPhone was to disallow all native third-party app development. Web apps were to be the mechanism for delivering functionality but the developers complained and Apple rushed out a solution. The app store, that you think was the destroyer of software delivery, was based on the Blackberry model.
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You could get software disks from any store, not just approved ones, and you can expand with any expansion card you wanted to engineer. Woz's World was destroyed for a 30 percent cut of all software sales by Jobs and Cook.
Yeah, instead, you had to handle all your own marketing, distribution, duplicating; hoping that you wouldn't sell just 10 copies before bootleggers simply stole your work.
And all that for a Distribution Chain that ended up taking not 15% (hopefully eventually 30% if you sold over a million dollars' worth!); but more like 50%.
You know; the Good Old Days...
Apple computers still let you load software ... (Score:2)
And created a world that modern Apple destroyed. You could get software disks from any store, not just approved ones ...
You still can. Apple computers (Macs) still let you load software from disc, from flash, from the net, etc. It's only mobile devices (iPhone, etc) that do not.
... and you can expand with any expansion card you wanted to engineer. Woz's World was destroyed for a 30 percent cut of all software sales by Jobs and Cook.
After Jobs 1.0 was fired from Apple, Woz helped with the Mac and slots were added to some models. Today, many of the things that once required slots and specialized adapters now use standardized interfaces likes usb or thunderbolt. Want to engineer your own device and connect, no problem, there is no shortage of support for such hacking via usb. See
Wrote a number of things in Apple Pascal (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Wrote a number of things in Apple Pascal (Score:4, Interesting)
BASIC and Merlin Pro here :) Even some of the last games for the ][ were a hybrid of basic (for rapid development) and assembly (for fast/efficient performance) - "best of both worlds".
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Leisure Suit Larry and the Land of the Lounge Lizards!!!
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Would you like fries with that?
[Yes] [Yes]
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I wrote lots of stuff to do cognitive-processes research. My first real programming job. Apple II with 2 (!) floppy drives and some 80-character video card feeding a 9" monitor in the lab and 2 others in the study rooms.
Pre-Macintosh (Score:2)
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The "pre-Macintosh" was the Lisa, not the Apple II.
Macintosh and Lisa blur together, because the last Lisa WAS the first Macintosh.
Lisa was not a Mac, ex memory protection (Score:4, Interesting)
The "pre-Macintosh" was the Lisa, not the Apple II.
Macintosh and Lisa blur together, because the last Lisa WAS the first Macintosh.
Lisa becoming a Mac was retroactive. The original OS under Lisa was not Mac OS. Like Unix, Windows NT, and Mac OS X; Lisa OS had memory protection. The Mac would not get that for decades. Turning a Lisa into a Mac XL was a downgrade of sorts, one offset by more software available for it.
Re: Lisa was not a Mac, ex memory protection (Score:2)
Turning a Lisa into a Macintosh was the only reasonable thing to do with it because of the software situation... Which was that apple had abandoned it otherwise. Which is what they have done again and again since, but people still keep buying their stuff and then complaining when they do it again.
For some Apple II literally was pre-Macintosh (Score:4, Interesting)
LOL. The "pre-Macintosh" was the Lisa, not the Apple II.
Only for those with $10K lying around. For the rest of us the Apple II was literally our development system for the Macintosh. We would add a 68K coprocessor card to the Apple II. Write our code in assembly on the coprocessor, test it the best we could. We learned that nice habit of separating functional code from the system code. :-)
Then when ready to test the system code we would download a binary to the Mac using a MS-Basic program that would read the serial port and "poke" the data into RAM, then jump to that poke'd code. Let's say debugging was primitive. Hex values in the corner of the screen. But it was doable, and so very very educational.
68K is still my favorite assembly language.
Payed my first adventure on an Apple II (Score:2)
Montezuma's revenge.
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Didn't IBM and some other PC developers help port that to the Apple architecture?
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Pretty cool how they crammed 100 rooms [symlink.dk] shaped like a pyramid into less then 48 KB of RAM!
Did you know that the Atari prototype [youtu.be] that had handwriting has an off-by-one bug in the data which causes the "R" to look like it is missing a pixel? :-)
The good old days really were good (Score:4, Insightful)
I used all three of those machines back in the day, as well as the TI-99/4A. God it was a fun time as a hobbyist. Figuring out what was possible, typing up programmes from mags and then spending hours debugging, automating tasks like some insane Goldberg Machine, Gerry-rigging LANs with tape-recorders, etc. Weirdly though I never got into BBSs.
What I remember the most is that users were trying to do stuff with their (or their school's) machines, programme, modify, and create - this was a beautiful age before the Internet made us all consumers.
The PC was their competition (Score:1)
They mention the TRS-80 and the Commodor PET but don't mention IBM and PC especially when discussing games and produciivity software?
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IBM PC's did not yet exist in the time period being discussed.
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IBM officially released their official PC about 4 years after Apple II. The Intel 8080 processors that those first PC's were built on were introduced about 3 years before the Apple II and became the standard more or less. Non PC architectures struggled to make usable software as the closed standards made it difficult.
8088, not 8080 (Score:4, Informative)
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The IBM PC had an 8088 CPU, not an 8080
Incidentaly you could get an 8088 co=processor card for the Apple ][ but it came with CPM-86, not PC-DOS
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The 8080 was used to spark the person computer revolution in the Altair 8800 and the Imsai 8080 but Zilog came out with the Z80, which was substantially cheaper, and became the standard for homebrew and turnkey solutions. Commercially, the Mostek 6502 was even cheaper than the Z80 and dominated the retail home computer market with Apple, Commodore, Atari, and the BBC Micro with the Z80 making a showing with the TRS-80, Sinclair, and the later MSX. Intel saw little market-share until the IBM Person Computer.
History twistory? (Score:1)
I doubt that. CP/M machines, the first "clone market", had access to a wide variety of titles.
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And you could get a Z80 CPU board for the Apple ][ to run CPM software. It was hard getting the software onto apple disks though.
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And you could get a Z80 CPU board for the Apple ][ to run CPM software. It was hard getting the software onto apple disks though.
Oh, yeah. I had one of those monstrosities. I was a bit too young to understand what I had and now I'm a bit too old.
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And you could get a Z80 CPU board for the Apple ][ to run CPM software. It was hard getting the software onto apple disks though.
Not really. The Osborne was out by then and you could use those disks on the Apple ][ with the z80 co-processor. I use Wordstar on mine daily back in the day.
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The Z80 Softcard for the Apple was made by Microsoft and was one of their best sellers in the 80's.
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But that's an add-on, not sure it counts. It's essentially attaching Computer Type B to Computer Type A, and then claiming that A can run all the software that B can.
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I doubt that. CP/M machines, the first "clone market", had access to a wide variety of titles.
There was a LOT more than 2000 software titles for the Apple ][.
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There's probably was also a lot more than 2K for CP/M, much if it for business niches, so they wouldn't typically be listed in a consumer catalog, but rather niche trade magazines/newsletters.
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There's probably was also a lot more than 2K for CP/M, much if it for business niches, so they wouldn't typically be listed in a consumer catalog, but rather niche trade magazines/newsletters.
I could believe that.
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it was the start of the age of productivity (Score:4, Interesting)
The Apple ][ brought the computer out of the geek's basement and into the family room, where it made the parents' lives easier with things like word processors, checkbook balancers, recipe books, etc. And the kids had a virtual arcade in front of them. The parents just wanted to use it to get things done and get a good return out of this "expensive toy", while the kids were able to get entertainment, education, and an introduction to programming. Kids couldn't wait to get their hand on a computer at school, it was the ultimate teaching platform to keep kids' attention for education.
And after the initial purchase, expansion was relatively cheap. Games and software were pretty cheap, despite being pretty high quality. The peripheral and expansion market flourished in a new ecosystem of new users looking for new ways to use their first computer. Printers were the anchor of the peripheral market, and suddenly everyone could print not just text but also graphics, and in color! Everyone wanted a color monitor, and all the kids wanted a joystick controller. Memory footprints expanded rapidly as software and especially games were growing rapidly in sophistication, and suddenly "48kb is enough" became 128kb standard.
Despite the software being crunched against the hard walls of memory ceiling, processor power, and storage, (floppies only, no hard drive for most!) software and game development didn't slow down. Programmers developed new and groundbreaking techniques, and continued to push the hardware to its absolute limits. Unlike today's new computers, there was so much innovation going on at the programming level that they had a huge gap to cover in performance and features. I think this is what allowed the ][ to stay relevant for as long as it did. There was still so much to learn, so many techniques that needed to be conceived, developed, and optimized.
By the time the next generation (Macintosh) hit the market, it was actually a serious challenge at the start for developers to write software that actually performed better than what was already available on the Apple ][. This helped the ][ to stay in the home for many years to come, long after the next generation was available. Even YEARS later, there were still Apple IIe's sitting in the back corner of so many k-2 classrooms, getting used for their learning games. ABCs and Math never get old, and the colorful musical games never lose their effectiveness as an educational tool.
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And don't forget VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet.
I never bought that though. I did have a copy of course
Re:it was the start of the age of productivity (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember my Apple IIgs had a one megabyte expansion card. It was about the size of your current GPU. The long-form GPUs that take up the entire width of an ATX case. The sales dude told us, "You'll never, ever, need that much memory."
God, I'm such an old man.
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My IBM PC 5150 had 64kB RAM onboard, and a full length 8 bit ISA card with a RTC and 384kB more RAM on it that was mostly intended to bring an XT up to 1MB... but which worked fine to bring my PC up to 448kB where I could run most DOS software, at least the early stuff. For instance Lotus 1-2-3 1.0...
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I bought a memory upgrade card for my //c. the card cost $250. four banks of 256kb each (8 chips per bank, the 16 pin variety) cost another $250. But it was amazing!
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True story. I used it as a softdrive for the OS (Apple OS 1.0 YAY!), Appleworks, and a music program. Though the chances the OS could survive starting the music program and shutting it down were about 50/50 on any given day. Ah, good times. When I had time to just play with computers.
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Franklin Ace (Score:4, Interesting)
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Same! Mostly...It was a CV-777 Apple ][+ clone, but the rest is history!
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Apple Inc will now be tracking you down for that copyright infringement! Look out!
Not so much the PET/CBM machines... (Score:2, Interesting)
Apple ][ ended up competing not so much against the C= PET/CBM machines, but the C=64. There were pros and cons with both machines. C64 had color, sound, game controller ports, etc. Apple ][ had expandability, faster drives, more 'standard' ASCII ;), and (being apple) cost a boatload more.
The venerable 6502 is still being produced / sold. Still a solid bit of kit with gobs of documentation, tutorials, etc. to hack with.
Timelines (Score:3)
The C64 was released five years after the Apple II. By that time, the II had a solid foothold in the education sector. People upgrading their old Apple IIs were going to the IIe for 80-column support for spreadsheets and word processing. If you were buying a Commodore 64, you were probably getting it to play games.
As for price, most contemporary reviews said it was fairly priced, as the equivalent IBM PC/XT was twice as expensive, didn't have color unless you spent another $500 for a CGA card, nor had joyst
Good marketing tactic (Score:3, Insightful)
> The new book (by New York University academic Laine Nooney) argues that it was the first purchasers of that software who are the true overlooked pioneers
More authors should try selling me books by telling me that I'm the real hero of a bygone era
uncopiable paper (Score:1)
who can forget the "uncopyable" red paper covered in a grid of numbers as the next level of anti piracy. It just caused us to hand write for a few hours then xerox worked just fine. then came scanners and killed that.
Rich kid's machine (Score:5, Insightful)
I never saw an Apple ][ in that era, outside of a store display. Couldn't afford anything as a student, before 1980, didn't know any university students (and I was in engineering) with a computer. Our proud possessions were programmable calculators. I even had a TI-59 that took magnetic cards, and plugged into a printer. These were in the low hundreds, as was the VIC-20 I got after graduation, and ran with an old TV because a monitor was out of the question.
An Apple ][ with two floppies - so that you did not have to exchange master and copy floppies five times to copy one - and the minimal 16K of ram was about $2000. Note that my first car, a 2-year-old Honda Civic, was $4000.
I was the most-computerized-guy in my circle of engineers, with my VIC-20, and some experience on a TRS-80 (more like $800+) bought by a rich guy I knew. A small business paid me to do their client list on their TRS-80, too: a small business wouldn't splurge on the twice-the-price Apple if the list could be printed on an $800 machine with a $400 printer.
Note that your little computer lived in a box, no contact with the Earth, unless you spent another $400 on a printer (Price of a movie: $3.50; record album $6) because computers had zero communications. So businesses looking at Apple just saw higher prices for printers, monitors, a separate cost for the connection to a TV, whereas Commodore automatically output to TV. So we used TV, though that meant only 40 char/line.
Later on, gamer friends splurged on an Atari 400, again half the price of Apple. Never did see an Apple ][ in my circle. Apple has never, ever been price-competitive.
Re:Rich kid's machine (Score:4, Informative)
"with my VIC-20". Yeah me too.
[For more, see Brian Bagnall's "Commodore: The Early Years" or "The Story of Commodore: A Company on the Edge"].
Interestingly, Commodore significantly outsold Apple for quite a while in that early 1980's era. But Apple had the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field/great marketing working for them, and Commodore had some of the best hardware engineering and worst management imaginable.
The really funny thing is that Commodore owned the 6502, which most of its competitors used, so it had a pretty good idea about both MOS' [the company not the process] and MOS-licensee volumes. And they still did a pretty bad job of trumpeting their own successes in North America especially.
That said, I had a VIC, and no question the Apple ][+ was what I wanted for a time (never said I too wasn't susceptible to Jobs!). But $300 vs $2000, I could see why my parents weren't going to go down that road.
I would speculate that there was a lot more software for the PET/VIC, but that the article could well be correct that there was more commercial software for the Apple 2. Wikipedia airily suggests (with no great sourcing) 300 cartridges for the VIC and 500 [commercial] cassettes. "Free" programs you could type in on the Vic were absolutely legion and available even in the grocery store impulse purchase magazine rack.
Interesting times.
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Another detail remembered: my VIC was $520 (canada) that is, $400 plus $120 for a tape recorder that was like a very slow floppy drive, and not random-access; basically, you stored one program per tape, so that you didn't have to type it in every time. (Think about that, a second).
My brother was doing traffic engineering as a work-from-home job to put himself through law school, and we concluded that a Commodore 64 could handle the job, $400 plus I think $200 for the one floppy - and the 64K memory meant o
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Rich kid's book, too, even at Kindle prices.
Jim Nitchals (Score:2)
Books (Score:1)
Software in the before times (Score:1)
A couple of stories from back in the day (Score:2)
Not just Software but Games (Score:2)
I was there in 1980. I was in high school. I spent all my time working so I could buy one. I did, I spent the rest of my high school with my friend the Apple ][ +.
And like so many others, the things the drove the computer sales was playing games, not the software because most of it was pirated through pirate parties. Who had the extra money for software when you spent it all in the arcade or on things like your 300 baud modem, more memory (64K), floppy disk drive and disks, those who knew about it could add