"Retro" - January 2000 edition of PCW (UK)

[lefebvre@klatch.demon.co.uk (John & Anne Le Febvre)]

This was the back page of the Jan 2000 edition of Personal Computer
World in the UK.  I make no comment on the facts presented, merely
retyping it "as-is".  If anyone is interested I could scan the page
onto my web-site.  The only pic is a //e with twin disk IIs but no
monitor.  Brought a tear to my eye... ;-)



Retro

APPLE II

Gordon Laing looks back at the fruit that first tempted the PC
consumer, kick-starting an industry.

In the last issue before the new millennium, we thought we'd look back
to the birth of personal computing, and find the machine which really
kick-started the industry.

The MITS Altair was arguably the very first personal computer,
originally making itself known to the techie masses by being the cover
star of January	1975's Practical Electronics magazine. This issue
single-handedly became the catalyst for both Microsoft and Apple. Bill
Gates and Paul Allen had been into computers for some time, the former
yet to drop out of Harvard, and the latter holding a comfortable job
at Honeywell. When they saw the Altair, they knew their time had come.
one licensing deal of BASIC later and the first Microsoft product
shipped.

Our story, however, concentrates on the members of the Homebrew
Computer Club in Santa Clara Valley, which included Stephen Wozniak as
a regular. Wozniak had met his future business partner Steve Jobs back
in 1973, in the garage of mutual friend Bill Fernandez. Woz and
Fernandez had just completed their first computer, named the Cream
Soda after their favourite canned beverage, and Jobs had been invited
over to take a look. Jobs (16 years old) recognised a genius when he
saw one and quickly became friends with Wozniak (20 years old). Both
were later inspired by Homebrew's first demonstration of the somewhat
flaky Altair in 1975. If the club members could fix or soup one up,
what was to stop them creating their own personal computer from
scratch?

Rather than going for the aspirational, but relatively expensive,
Intel 8080 processor, Jobs and Wozniak instead opted to use the
bargain-basement 6502 processor for their new baby. The 6502 was
developed by Chuck Peddle, the man who designed the Commodore PET and
started up Sirius a few years later. Jobs and Woz's computer was
unveiled to their friends at the Homebrew Club in 1976, and on 1 April
that year, they registered the name Apple.

However, the Apple I was far from being the influential personal
computer this page is searching for - that was to arrive one year
later in the form of the Apple II. While hunting high and low for
someone to lend him the money he needed to expand, Jobs met Mark
Markkula, an ex-Intel employee, already enjoying retirement before
middle age. Markkula liked what he saw, raised capital, hired a CEO to
run the business, and made himself one-third of Apple.

The lead-up to May 1977's first West Coast Computer fair in San
Francisco was almost too much to bear for Apple. All were committed to
launching the Apple II at the show, but it was taking longer than
anticipated. While Wozniak pondered the technical side of things, Jobs
perused consumer appliance designs in high-street stores. Rather than
going for the boring old metal cases employed by PCs so far, Jobs
decided that a beige plastic case with rounded corners was much more
palatable. The logo, too, enjoyed a redesign into the multi-coloured
fruit still used today.

The Apple II made it in the nick of time, and easily stole the show.
In PCW's fourth issue of 1978, we enthused about its 'high-resolution
colour graphics, extreme portability and high-quality construction'.
Colour, unheard of back then, was top of Woz's design wish-list, and
his Apple II boasted no fewer than 16 of them at a resolution of 280 x
160 pixels. The basic 6502-based 16KB machine carried a UK price tag
of 1,250 ex VAT.

Any system lives or dies by its industry support, and back in the late
Seventies, things were no different. Apple helped by later releasing a
cheap 5.25in floppy drive for the system, but the real boost came with
the 1979 launch of VisiCalc. Dan Bricklin and Bob Franston had written
the world's first spreadsheet and arguably the first killer PC
application - and at launch it was available only for the Apple II.

Apple may have had its ups and downs, and happily is enjoying the
former with its iMac, but we can fondly remember the Apple II in 1977
as the first true personal computer platform.

GORDON LAING