An Apple (II) for Teacher

By early 1980, the Apple II, which had trailed the Commodore PET and Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 at first, had become a remarkable success, with a great deal of help from Personal Software’s VisiCalc. The Apple IPO at the end of the year ratified that fact, minting hundreds of new millionaires. The two primary co-founders of Apple Computer, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, responded to their sudden success in very different ways.The FoundersAfter his bravura performance in designing the Apple II Disk, Wozniak’s drive to contribute to Apple seems to have waned. He had created the computer he always wanted, had more money than he knew what to do with, and had a beautiful new girlfriend to distract him from the failure of his first marriage. He had never been interested in managing people or running a company: had Jobs not pulled him along in the wake of his ambition, Woz would have happily spent his career as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard. After a brutal plane crash in 1981, he spent eighteen months away from Apple. He began working again towards an abandoned computer science degree at Berkeley, and poured millions into the money-losing “US” music festival (intended to restore a sense of community after the “me” decade of the 1970s).Woz, always the prankster, with Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth at the 1983 US Festival. Woz appears to be drinking a soda, Roth probably not.He meekly returned to Apple in 1983, applying for a job as an ordinary engineer, and worked on a sixteen-bit successor to the Apple II (though much of his time went to maintaining his symbolic role as an inspirational engineering hero, or even a mascot). Then he left again, for good, in 1985. The sudden fame and fortune granted to him in 1980 came as a bolt from the blue, not an expression of an inborn telos.

His subsequent ventures, including a stint teaching computer skills to students in the Los Gatos School District, were marked by amiability and good nature, not a will to technological power.[1]Steve Jobs, on the other hand, driven by an ambition to one-up himself and “make a dent in the universe” (a favorite phrase of his), went in urgent search of a second stroke of lightning. At first, he focused his attention on the design of the Apple III, the anointed successor of the II. Jobs, as Vice President for Research and Development, was involved in high-level product design decisions, but Wendell Sander, recruited from Fairchild Semiconductor as Apple’s first staff scientist, led the engineering team (the project was code-named after Wendell’s daughter, Sara). A fully-powered business machine, the III would lean into the success of VisiCalc by offering serious users everything they might ever want: more memory, a built-in floppy disk drive, upper- and lower-case text, an eighty-character-wide display, a clock chip, and backwards-compatibility with Apple II software. It was rushed to market in late 1980, to cover an expected drop in sales from the aging Apple II, and make a splash just before the IPO.It bombed. Many explanations have been offered for this failure, but most come down to inadequate development time. Jobs’ decision to design the case before the hardware that would go in it was fully defined also contributed. The rush to cram everything needed into the case led to a circuit board with wires spaced too closely together, causing shorts from solder that bridged these small gaps; much of the initial production run didn’t work at all. The promised clock chip was not ready in time and would not ship with new computers until late 1981. These technical failures in engineering and production were expensive and embarrassing.[2]Apple III. In addition to its other flaws, a far less handsome computer than its predecessor. [Alexander Schaelss / CC BY-SA 3.0]But Apple could have overcome them if not for the serious flaws in the Apple III as a product: hardly any software was ready for the launch (VisiCalc was the only major application) and its backwards compatibility strategy was deeply compromised. Many users already had third-party 80-column display cards for their Apple IIs, and software designed to use them.

The Apple III could emulate a II, but none of the advanced Apple III features (such as 80-column display) worked in emulation mode; the very users most eager for a better business machine would have to throw away their software to migrate. Jobs expected sales of 50,000 units in the first year, but it would take almost three years to reach that figure.[3]Jobs had little interest in the incremental Apple III after the initial product direction was set; this was not the revolutionary computer he was looking for. And so, he moved on before the whiff of incipient failure became a stench. His next stop was the Lisa computer, then, after Apple’s CEO forced him off of that project, Macintosh. The history of these computers more properly belongs to another volume of this story, but suffice it to say that the Lisa, released in 1983, was another commercial failure and the Macintosh, released in 1984, did not really take off until it was upgraded in 1986.[4]Looking CaliforniaDespite its failure to launch any successful new computer line, Apple Computer continued to rake in revenues and profits. The Apple II series, believed by Apple execs to be on fumes circa 1981, somehow carried the company for half a decade more. The original 1977 model had already been supplanted by the expanded-memory Apple II Plus in 1979. Then, in 1983, Apple released the IIe, which had an improved keyboard and display circuitry capable of supporting lower-case characters (the original Apple II was upper-case only), among other features. But its most valuable advance from Apple’s point-of-view was invisible to users: reflecting the lessons of the home computer wars, the Apple IIe had custom-built chips to control the input, memory, and output. At scale, these were far cheaper to manufacture than the off-the-shelf circuits in Woz’s original design, allowing Apple to continue to rake in profits even while slashing prices: by 1984 a complete IIe system with monochrome monitor, disk drive, and expansion card with eighty-column support, sold for $1300, about the same price as a barebones Apple II Plus at release, despite the intervening years of high inflation.

That same year Apple released the luggable Apple IIc, with a built-in floppy disk and printer controller card.[5]The Apple IIe looked more or less like the previous Apple IIs, but the IIc, pictured, had a new ‘Snow White’ trade dress. [Bilby / CC BY 3.0]These models sold. The Apple II accounted for one quarter of the six-hundred-million-dollar American microcomputer market in 1982. In volume terms, it hovered between ten and fifteen percent of all American computers sold throughout the first half of the 1980s. The IIe alone sold 110,000 units over Christmas 1983. While Jobs pursued projects that offered more glory and glamor, unsung figures like engineers Walt Broedner and Peter Quinn and Apple II division director Del Yocam were bringing home the bacon.[6]Apple had set in motion a flywheel in the late 1970s whose momentum carried the company through most of the subsequent decade. The initial impetus for the flywheel came partly from Wozniak’s insistence on making the Apple II expandable like a mini-computer, but also partly on the fact that the company’s early leaders understood that the external communities that feed and sustain a computer are at least as important to its success as the hardware itself.We have already said something about how the Apple II became especially attractive to software developers in the context of the success of VisiCalc. With high-resolution color graphics, an inexpensive floppy disk drive, and a maximum of 48 kilobytes of memory, the Apple was technically superior in several ways to its late-1970s competition. But Apple also directly encouraged outside software developers in ways that many of those competitors did not. While some computer vendors tried to protect their technical secrets in order to give as much advantage as possible to in-house software products, or even (in the case of Radio Shack) excluded outside software from their sales channels, Apple made the details of their hardware freely available.[7]The story with third-party hardware was similar – the Apple II’s open hardware specs and eight expansion slots

encouraged the proliferation of hardware vendors making boards to do everything from supporting external peripherals like modems, printers, or drawing tablets to expanding the capabilities of the Apple II itself with more memory, better graphics, or even the ability to emulate other computers.[8]Instructions for installing the M&R Sup’R’Terminal, a typical third-party expansion card of the early 1980s. This one extended the display from forty to eighty columns of text, a very popular feature, especially for business software. [M&R Enterprises, “SUP’R’TERMINAL” (1980) (https://archive.org/details/SupRTerminal)%5DWithout a ready-made retail network like Radio Shack, Apple had to work hard to build relationships with retailers, and had a close relationship with the largest chain, Bill Millard’s ComputerLand. The robust software and hardware ecosystems attracted the most important community of all to those stores: buyers, many of whom came to the Apple II to get their hands on software or hardware available nowhere else. The most sophisticated computer role-playing games in existence in 1981, for example (Ultima and Wizardry), could be experienced onlyon the Apple II. More buyers, in turn, made Apple all the more attractive for new software and hardware makers, and the flywheel spun faster still. By the early 1980s, while other companies were selling higher volumes of computers, Apple was able to hold to a higher price point and pull in greater profits. People were willing to pay a premium to get access to what Apple had to offer.[9]The Apple II sat within (and could not succeed without) this nurturing matrix of relationships with third-party hardware and software makers, retailers, and computer users.  But it took one more community to sustain the incredible longevity of the Apple II: America’s educators. In 1984, Apple held about half of the market for computers in primary and secondary schools. As late as 1995, a survey found that 37.5% of the computers installed in public schools came from the nearly two-decade-old Apple II line (another 20% were Apple Macintoshes). As Steve Jobs reflected that same year, “[o]ne of the things that built Apple II’s was schools buying Apple II’s”.