Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tech Stuff from how
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at
Speaker 1: how Stuff Works and I love all things tech. And
Speaker 1: in our last episode, I talked about the many different
Speaker 1: computers that appeared in the late seventies and early to
Speaker 1: mid eighties as the home computer market began to coalesce.
Speaker 1: But there were numerous contenders. Obviously, there were companies like
Speaker 1: Texas Instruments and Commodore and Tandy, and they had all
Speaker 1: put forth various computer systems onto the market. And while
Speaker 1: the computers those and other companies made had an impact,
Speaker 1: For example, the Commodore sixty four was the best selling
Speaker 1: computer of all time, ultimately none of those machines stuck
Speaker 1: around to define the market. Instead, there were essentially two
Speaker 1: entities that one out over everyone else in very different ways,
Speaker 1: and those were Apple and IBM. I'll talk about IBM
Speaker 1: in an upcoming episode. We'll we'll learn how the company's
Speaker 1: strategy played out. But and this and the next episode,
Speaker 1: I'm going to focus on Apple and how it weathered
Speaker 1: many storms to become the company it is today. I've
Speaker 1: chatted about Apple in the past, from profiles on Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs to an overview of the company's history. This episode
Speaker 1: is mostly going to focus on what Apple was doing
Speaker 1: in the seventies and eighties. The next episode will continue
Speaker 1: through the late eighties and into the nineties, and we'll
Speaker 1: investigate how Apple was able to outlast competitors despite some
Speaker 1: extremely shaky corporate moves. And that's putting it lightly. First,
Speaker 1: let's start at the beginning. The classic story of Apple
Speaker 1: is that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both of whom
Speaker 1: were scamps and computer enthusiasts, dropped out of college to
Speaker 1: form their own computer company out of Steve Jobs as
Speaker 1: family's garage. A third partner named Ron Wayne provided some
Speaker 1: startup cash and wrote the operation manual. He also designed
Speaker 1: the company's original logo. But the whole Apple was formed
Speaker 1: inside a garage story is kind of an oversimplification. According
Speaker 1: to Wozniak, it was a romanticized version of the real history.
Speaker 1: Wosniak has said in interviews, specifically in an interview with Bloomberg,
Speaker 1: that the garage story is mostly just that a story.
Speaker 1: It's one of those stories that fits right into the
Speaker 1: history of Silicon Valley because there are a lot of
Speaker 1: companies that were said to have emerged from a garage
Speaker 1: somewhere in the California area see also Google, Amazon, Hewlett Packard,
Speaker 1: and even Disney, but Apple was not one of them.
Speaker 1: When Wosniak, in jobs mainly wosnia let's be honest, designed
Speaker 1: the first Apple computer, the Apple, and they didn't do
Speaker 1: it in a garage. They did use. The garage is
Speaker 1: kind of a halfway point between their workspace, which was
Speaker 1: actually Steve Wozniak's bedroom, and the stores where they were
Speaker 1: planning on selling their computer kit, the Apple one. They
Speaker 1: would go to the garage make sure everything worked properly
Speaker 1: before they would continue on to the stores. At least
Speaker 1: that's what Wosniac said happened. Most accounts state that Wosniac
Speaker 1: designed and built the printed circuit board that was the
Speaker 1: heart and soul of the company's first computer. And if
Speaker 1: you listen to my last episode, you know the real
Speaker 1: brain on that circuit board was the six five zero
Speaker 1: two microprocessor from Most Technologies that was a company that
Speaker 1: Commodore had purchased. Wozniak also decided to design the computer
Speaker 1: to run Basic Basic stands for Beginners all Purpose Symbolic
Speaker 1: Instruction Code, and it's a high level programming language that
Speaker 1: Thomas E. Kurtz and John G. Kimminey created back in
Speaker 1: nineteens sixty four at Dartmouth College. Now they created it
Speaker 1: as a teaching tool. They wanted something that would let
Speaker 1: students build programs without having to create their own customized software.
Speaker 1: By the time Wosniak was working on the Apple One,
Speaker 1: it was common practice among many computer designers to hard
Speaker 1: code Basic into the firmware of their machines, into the
Speaker 1: read only memory or ROM. Wozniak wanted the Apple one
Speaker 1: to be much more user friendly than the binary based
Speaker 1: kit computers like the Altare eight hundred. Wosniac used hexadecimal
Speaker 1: code to build a basic language assembler by hand, directly
Speaker 1: into the Apple ones read only memory. Now, Ron Wayne
Speaker 1: was busy working on the operations manual, and Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: was kind of the hype man. He was marketing this
Speaker 1: upcoming computer to anyone who would listen. It was nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy six when the two introduced the Apple one computer
Speaker 1: at a May meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club. This
Speaker 1: was a hobbyist computer club in California, where people were
Speaker 1: working with various kits that they had ordered and and
Speaker 1: assembled computers out of all these different parts. One of
Speaker 1: the attendees at that meeting was a guy named Paul Terrell,
Speaker 1: who owned a computer store called the Bite Shop. He
Speaker 1: made a deal with the Apple partners, and that deal
Speaker 1: was to build fifty fully assembled computers, which he would
Speaker 1: then purchase for five dollars apiece. A fully assembled computer
Speaker 1: didn't mean that Apple one had all the bells and whistles.
Speaker 1: In fact, it didn't have really that many bells and
Speaker 1: whistles at all. It didn't have a display, it didn't
Speaker 1: have a keyboard. Technically, the Apple one was a bare
Speaker 1: circuit board housed in a wooden case. The partners took
Speaker 1: out loans to buy the various components they needed to
Speaker 1: make fifty of these computers. They had just one day
Speaker 1: left to pay back those loans when they rolled up
Speaker 1: to Terrell and delivered the Apple one computers. They weren't
Speaker 1: as fully assembled as what Terrell is expecting, but he
Speaker 1: did pay the founders enough for them to be able
Speaker 1: to pay off those loans. At that stage, Ron Wayne
Speaker 1: resigned from Apple. He had invested money in the company,
Speaker 1: and he was worried that Apple was destined to crash
Speaker 1: in on itself. He returned his ten percent share of
Speaker 1: Apple ownership, and he was paid out the princely sum
Speaker 1: of five hundred dollars. Now, in case you're the curious type,
Speaker 1: on the day I am recording this, Apple's market capitalization
Speaker 1: value is approximately eight hundred fifty four point one six
Speaker 1: billion dollars with a B, so ten percent of that
Speaker 1: company would be essentially about eighty five billion dollars. He
Speaker 1: got out for five hundred. But of course there was
Speaker 1: no way to know back then what would happen with Apple,
Speaker 1: and there were plenty of times between Apple's founding and
Speaker 1: today when it seemed like the company was on the
Speaker 1: verge of bankruptcy and sometimes seemed was being too generous.
Speaker 1: It really was on the virgin bankruptcy. Apple would go
Speaker 1: on to sell Apple one kits for six hundred sixty
Speaker 1: six dollars and sixty six cents. That price was likely
Speaker 1: arrived at not just because it represented more money than
Speaker 1: it costs to build the machines, but also because both
Speaker 1: jobs in Wosniac were known to have a mischievous sense
Speaker 1: of humor, though there is another story that said Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs originally wanted to sell the Apple One for seven
Speaker 1: hundred seventy seven dollars. Wozniak objected, saying that that was
Speaker 1: too much to charge for the computer he was building.
Speaker 1: He said, that's that's overcharging people. So he countered with
Speaker 1: the six hundred sixty six dollar figure, saying he didn't
Speaker 1: do it to be cheeky. He wasn't saying, oh, I'm
Speaker 1: going to choose the number of the beast to be
Speaker 1: the price of this computer. Rather, he just took seven
Speaker 1: seven seven, and he subtracted a one from each of
Speaker 1: those digits, and that's how he arrived at his price.
Speaker 1: According to Wozniak, while Jobs in Wosniac worked on selling
Speaker 1: and deliver ring Apple one kits, Wozniak was also looking
Speaker 1: ahead at what should be the company's next step. He
Speaker 1: wanted to create a computer that had everything a person
Speaker 1: would need to get started. This would help push computers
Speaker 1: out of the realm of just the dedicated hobbyists. It's
Speaker 1: a very small slice of the population. They had time
Speaker 1: and interest to learn how computers work, and so they
Speaker 1: were willing to take something that was bare bones and
Speaker 1: go the rest of the way to make it something
Speaker 1: that was useful. That's not true with the general public.
Speaker 1: They need something that's more robust, more user friendly. So
Speaker 1: to do this, the computer had to contain all the
Speaker 1: components necessary to work. He began to design the Apple
Speaker 1: to the Apple two, use the first Apple computer design
Speaker 1: as its foundation. It had the same most technology six
Speaker 1: five oh tube microprocessor running at the same one mega
Speaker 1: hurts clock speed. They had basic hard coded into the
Speaker 1: Apple two's read only memory, but it also had stuff
Speaker 1: the original Apple computer lacked, like a plastic case. Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs concentrated on making the Apple to look esthetically pleasing,
Speaker 1: while Wozniak concerned himself with the computer's innards. Jobs just
Speaker 1: wanted to make sure that looked like a product that
Speaker 1: people would feel compelled to buy. He wanted it to
Speaker 1: be an appliance, something that would be a a ready
Speaker 1: adoption into the standard American home, something akin to like
Speaker 1: a refrigerator or a washing machine. It also had a
Speaker 1: video connector that would let users link the Apple Too
Speaker 1: to a television and use that as a monitor. With
Speaker 1: such a TV, who could display up to sixteen colors
Speaker 1: at low resolution and by low resolution, I mean really
Speaker 1: low forty by forty eight pixels. At high resolution, which
Speaker 1: was just two eighty pixels by one ninety two pixels,
Speaker 1: it could only display six fixed colors. It could also
Speaker 1: produce sound, and a lot of those early computers were silent.
Speaker 1: They didn't have anything that could produce sound. The Apple
Speaker 1: two entry came with four kilobytes of RAM, so if
Speaker 1: you're buying the basic Apple two computer, four kilobytes of
Speaker 1: random access memory was what you got. You could, however,
Speaker 1: buy versions of the Apple two that had up to
Speaker 1: sixty four kilobytes of random access memory. It had expansion slots,
Speaker 1: eight of them, in fact, but the first one was
Speaker 1: reserved for upgrades to the computers RAM or ROM. If
Speaker 1: you were a pure hobbyist, you could even opt to
Speaker 1: buy the computer's circuit board as a standalone product. You
Speaker 1: would then have to supply the case, the keyboard, the display,
Speaker 1: and other peripherals all on your own. The base model
Speaker 1: of a fully assembled Apple two at four kilobytes of
Speaker 1: RAM was one thousand, two hundred ninety eight dollars when
Speaker 1: it hits store shelves. The forty eight kilobyte RAM version
Speaker 1: sold for two thousand, six hundred thirty eight dollars, and
Speaker 1: if you went bare bones with the circuit board, that
Speaker 1: sets you back five bucks for the four kilobyte RAM version.
Speaker 1: The computer debut in April nineteen seventy seven, almost a
Speaker 1: year after the founding of the company, which was on
Speaker 1: April Fool's Day of nineteen seventy six, and then it
Speaker 1: would go on sale a little bit later in seventy seven.
Speaker 1: A couple of months after that, Apple signed a big
Speaker 1: deal with a company that would be both an ally
Speaker 1: and a competitor over the years, and that company was Microsoft.
Speaker 1: The deal was that Apple could use Microsoft's software called
Speaker 1: Apple Soft Basic. The licensing agreement term was eight years
Speaker 1: and cost Apple twenty one thousand dollars. Now, the reason
Speaker 1: for the switch to Apple Soft Basic was that the
Speaker 1: integer basic that Wozniak had designed for the Apple Too
Speaker 1: had limitations. It didn't have support for floating point math,
Speaker 1: which meant that you could have well, you had restrictions
Speaker 1: essentially on what you could program on the Apple Too. Now,
Speaker 1: Wosnia's reasoning originally for using integer basic was one it
Speaker 1: was easier to program for or to code for, and
Speaker 1: thus it would take less time to actually build into
Speaker 1: the Apple too. But also he was thinking of the
Speaker 1: Apple too as a computer for games and for programming games,
Speaker 1: and at that time games didn't require sophisticated operations, so
Speaker 1: there was no need to go more complicated, because what
Speaker 1: Wozniak was thinking was that this Apple two was going
Speaker 1: to be meant for less ambitious projects. Wozniak at that
Speaker 1: time was already working on other technologies that would be
Speaker 1: released in nineteen seventy eight. He didn't have time to
Speaker 1: develop a new dialect of Basic, and so they decided
Speaker 1: to go with Microsoft's solution. Apple employee Randy Wigginton, who
Speaker 1: was a teenager at the time, helped adapt the Microsoft
Speaker 1: designed Apple sauce for the Apple Too. He added in
Speaker 1: some additional features in the process. Wigginton would go on
Speaker 1: to become one of the more important people in the
Speaker 1: Macintosh development team a few years later. Upon launch, the
Speaker 1: external media device available for the Apple two was a
Speaker 1: cassette drive. This used cassettes with magnetic tape to store information.
Speaker 1: In nineteen seventy eight, Apple would introduce the Disc two
Speaker 1: or disc close bracket open bracket because they use the
Speaker 1: little brackets as Roman numerals at those times. I don't
Speaker 1: know how you're supposed to say that. Apart from Disc
Speaker 1: two it was a five and a quarter inch disk drive.
Speaker 1: If you guys remember those, A lot of save icons
Speaker 1: still look like discs, so maybe you know what a
Speaker 1: five and a quarter inch disc looks like. And Apple
Speaker 1: two's new operating system was DOSE three point one. Just kidding,
Speaker 1: it's DOS. DOS three point one. DOS, by the way,
Speaker 1: stands for disc Operating System, and DOSS is a generic term.
Speaker 1: It's not it's not something doesn't mean that all operating
Speaker 1: systems called DOSS are related. In fact, the Apple version
Speaker 1: of DOSS is not related to MS DOS or IBMPC DOS.
Speaker 1: A computer is only useful if you can buy or
Speaker 1: build good soft air for it. The Apple, too, was
Speaker 1: fortunate and that it was the first home computing platform
Speaker 1: that could support a computer program called visit calc so
Speaker 1: visual calculation if you if you are, vision calculation if
Speaker 1: you prefer. This was a spreadsheet program capable of running
Speaker 1: basic operations on figures entered into the spreadsheet. So for
Speaker 1: the first time, a personal computer could run software that
Speaker 1: small businesses and accountants depended upon to do their work.
Speaker 1: It could speed up a laborious process considerably, and it
Speaker 1: was far more affordable than the computers intended for big enterprises,
Speaker 1: which were routinely around ten thousand dollars. The Apple Too
Speaker 1: became a popular computer, not just because people were adopting
Speaker 1: it for their home, but as a business machine for
Speaker 1: various companies, as well as an educational tool in schools.
Speaker 1: It was pretty much perfectly positioned for its time. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy seven, Apple two sales hit only seven seventy
Speaker 1: thousand dollars. Remember it didn't launch until the second half
Speaker 1: of nineteen seventy seven, but they sold seven hundred seventy
Speaker 1: thousand dollars worth of units. The following year, Wozniak launched
Speaker 1: the disc To that perphal had a price tag of
Speaker 1: four dollars, which was actually much lower than a lot
Speaker 1: of other disk drives that were hitting the market at
Speaker 1: that time, and Apples sales skyrocketed. They were boosted by
Speaker 1: the components that were being released, like the disc To
Speaker 1: as well as the killer app VisiCalc and by skyrocketed,
Speaker 1: I mean that their sales increased more than tenfold. In
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight, the company racked up seven point nine
Speaker 1: million dollars in sales, So they went from seven hundred
Speaker 1: seventy thousand in seventy seven to seven point nine million
Speaker 1: dollars in seventy eight. That gave Apple a very strong
Speaker 1: position and the home computer market. As other machines like
Speaker 1: the Commodore Pet, the Atari four hundred and the Atari
Speaker 1: eight hundred machines, and the TRS eighty we're all vying
Speaker 1: for a spot, but Apple's position was not yet guaranteed.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you a little bit more about this story
Speaker 1: in just a second, but first let's take a quick
Speaker 1: break to thank our sponsor. The success of the Apple
Speaker 1: to encourage Wozniak and Jobs. But then something happened that
Speaker 1: set the two at odds with one another. Jobs had
Speaker 1: seen that visitalc really propelled sales of the Apple too,
Speaker 1: and it turned the Apple too into a must have
Speaker 1: computer for anyone who needed an easier way to perform
Speaker 1: accounting and bookkeeping tasks. Wozniak had designed the Apple to
Speaker 1: originally as a machine upon which you could program games
Speaker 1: and do some simple software. But what if Apple went
Speaker 1: after the business market on purpose instead of just kind
Speaker 1: of accidentally falling upon it. That was a big move.
Speaker 1: From a corporate point of view, IBM had a dominant
Speaker 1: position in that realm. The company had yet to enter
Speaker 1: into the home computer market, but it definitely had a
Speaker 1: huge presence business machines. I mean, that's what part of
Speaker 1: IBM stands for, right, business machines. Jobs saw this as
Speaker 1: a chance to push Apple into the same league as IBM,
Speaker 1: and he began to lead work on the Apple three computer.
Speaker 1: Unlike the previous Apple computers, this one was intended to
Speaker 1: be a business machine first and foremost, and according to Wozniak,
Speaker 1: the other big difference between the Apple three and the
Speaker 1: previous two computers that Wozniak had designed was that marketing
Speaker 1: was in charge of the design process rather than engineering.
Speaker 1: It was a marketing driven product, not an engineering driven product.
Speaker 1: Wozniak said. This marketing focused approach created frustrations among the
Speaker 1: development team, particularly when they were given seemingly impossible tasks.
Speaker 1: One of those tasks was to design a computer with
Speaker 1: a form factor that was literally too small to fit
Speaker 1: all the necessary components inside it. This was not a
Speaker 1: simple error on the part of marketing. It was an understandable,
Speaker 1: though preventable mistake. At the time teams and Apple were
Speaker 1: working on the Apple three. The f c C was
Speaker 1: creating a new set of standards that computers were going
Speaker 1: to have to follow with regard to radio frequency emissions.
Speaker 1: Without those standards codified, without them actually set, Apple designers
Speaker 1: couldn't be sure that the computer they were designing was
Speaker 1: actually going to meet those standards. So there was a
Speaker 1: danger that they could create a computer that would not
Speaker 1: meet f CC standards and then it would be recalled
Speaker 1: and that would be a huge waste of time, energy,
Speaker 1: and money. So they decided they were going to make
Speaker 1: the case out of aluminum, and that would help block
Speaker 1: any radio frequency emissions and avoid problems further down the line.
Speaker 1: It also would make the computer incredibly heavy. The big
Speaker 1: problem was they settled on the case size and shape
Speaker 1: based off the engineer's list of requirements early in the process.
Speaker 1: So the engineers get a list of requests saying we
Speaker 1: want the computer to be able to do X, Y
Speaker 1: and z. The engineers look at the requests and they say,
Speaker 1: all right, in order to do X, Y and Z,
Speaker 1: these are the components that are going to have to
Speaker 1: go into the computer. Here's the size that we're gonna
Speaker 1: need to work inside, and then you have the case
Speaker 1: folks saying all right, well, we're gonna design a case
Speaker 1: that is of this size these dimensions, and then we're
Speaker 1: gonna get started. And once you go over to get
Speaker 1: the finalization of the chassis and you cast the mold
Speaker 1: for the case, you kind of committed because that's a
Speaker 1: fairly expensive process all in itself, and if you go
Speaker 1: back to the drawing board, you've wasted all that time
Speaker 1: and money. So once you've cast the mold, you're pretty
Speaker 1: much stuck with the form factor you've chosen. The other
Speaker 1: problem was that the management marketing was looking at what
Speaker 1: the computer was going to be able to do instead,
Speaker 1: you know, it would be great if it could also
Speaker 1: do A, B and C in addition to X, Y
Speaker 1: and z. And then the developers would say, you told
Speaker 1: us you wanted x, y and z, and that's what
Speaker 1: we told the people who are making the case, and
Speaker 1: so the case is going to fit X, y and z,
Speaker 1: but it can't fit x y and Z and A
Speaker 1: B and C. And then marketing would say, make it fit,
Speaker 1: and then developers would start to sweat bullets. This is
Speaker 1: called feature creep in general, the idea that features keep
Speaker 1: on creeping into the design of a product. It doesn't
Speaker 1: have to be a computer, it could be literally any product.
Speaker 1: Feature creep is a terrible thing to have happened to
Speaker 1: you when you're working on one of these projects. If
Speaker 1: you are not the one dictating feature creep, if you're
Speaker 1: the one dictating it, then you just wonder, why is
Speaker 1: this such a big deal? Why is this such a problem?
Speaker 1: Come on, just at it. But if you're actually the
Speaker 1: person who's trying to execute this, it's a huge problem
Speaker 1: because every feature that's added creates more complications, in this
Speaker 1: case literally In this case, the complication was that the
Speaker 1: components were taking up way too much space there were
Speaker 1: getting crammed together. In addition to that, Steve Jobs had
Speaker 1: a specific design that he wanted that was really going
Speaker 1: to cause a problem, which was that he did not
Speaker 1: want there to be a fan inside this computer to
Speaker 1: dissipate heat. Uh. The story goes that he felt that
Speaker 1: the fans were too noisy and inelegant, and they kind
Speaker 1: of violated his design principles of making a computer and appliance.
Speaker 1: So Wozniak and several of his team began to feel
Speaker 1: that Jobs, as ideas stressed form over function to a
Speaker 1: point that was untenable and later WASNIA would say the
Speaker 1: Apple three had a failure rate out in the field
Speaker 1: because of concessions that were made in order to meet
Speaker 1: the requirements that marketing had put down, but that were
Speaker 1: not good engineering decisions. This was not great. Apple did
Speaker 1: announce the Apple three in May during the National Computer Conference,
Speaker 1: so they had pretty much committed themselves at that point.
Speaker 1: The computers would eventually go on sale in the fall
Speaker 1: of nineteen. So let's talk about some of the specs
Speaker 1: of the Apple three and then talk about some of
Speaker 1: the problems that the Apple three suffered. On paper, the
Speaker 1: Apple three sounded great. It had a six five oh
Speaker 1: two compatible micro processors, so the same style of microprocessor
Speaker 1: as the Apple one and the Apple two. Uh. This one, however,
Speaker 1: was made by Center Tech, not by most technologies, but
Speaker 1: still it was a compatible processor is in that same
Speaker 1: general family. The processor at a clock smeat of two
Speaker 1: mega hurts, so essentially double what the Apple two was
Speaker 1: capable of doing. The computer shipped with a hundred bytes
Speaker 1: of RAM as the standard amount of memory that was
Speaker 1: expandable all the way up to five kilobytes, so that
Speaker 1: was great because with more memory you can run more
Speaker 1: sophisticated applications and programs. It had an internal five and
Speaker 1: a quarter inch floppy disk drive. This was the first
Speaker 1: of Apples computers to have an incorporated drive built directly
Speaker 1: into the case, so it wasn't an external drive that
Speaker 1: sat next to the CPU unit. It was actually incorporated
Speaker 1: into the case itself, which you know you often will
Speaker 1: see with PCs these days if they still have a
Speaker 1: floppy disk drive or an optical drive, they're usually built
Speaker 1: into the main case. But for a while that was
Speaker 1: not what you would find with home computers. They would
Speaker 1: find an external drive that you would connect via cables
Speaker 1: to your CPU um but this one had it built
Speaker 1: into the case, so put it all onto a nice
Speaker 1: form factor. Unlike earlier computers, the Apple three had a
Speaker 1: separate keyboard from the main computer chassis, so that would
Speaker 1: eventually become a standard characteristic for many computers moving forward,
Speaker 1: but at the time it was pretty standard have the
Speaker 1: keyboard actually built into the case. So while the drives
Speaker 1: were frequently external, the keyboard was incorporated directly into the
Speaker 1: CPU case. For a lot of early computers, in fact,
Speaker 1: a lot of Apples computers that follow this one would
Speaker 1: also have the keyboard built directly into the chassis, but
Speaker 1: for this one it was separate. The Apple three also
Speaker 1: had a brand new operating system called Apple s O S.
Speaker 1: S O S stood for Sophisticated Operating System, but perhaps
Speaker 1: given the problems Apple three and and encountered, the traditional
Speaker 1: interpretation of the letters S O S being used as
Speaker 1: a call for help would be more appropriate. While Wasnia
Speaker 1: criticized the hardware of the Apple three, he actually praised
Speaker 1: the operating system. He later would declare that was the
Speaker 1: best OS on any micro computer system at that time.
Speaker 1: One problem the s O S had was that it
Speaker 1: was not backwards compatible with the Apple two system, so
Speaker 1: that meant you could not run Apple to software natively
Speaker 1: on the Apple three. You could do it if you
Speaker 1: used an Apple DOSS boot disk in the Apple three,
Speaker 1: so you can actually run a program on the Apple
Speaker 1: three that would essentially emulate Apple too. Unfortunately, the demands
Speaker 1: that Steve Jobs and his marketing team had placed on
Speaker 1: the design team resulted in a pretty unreliable computer. Lots
Speaker 1: of people reported problems with the machines. According to Wozniak,
Speaker 1: a hundred percent of them did. For one thing, these
Speaker 1: machines got really hot. Now that's not a big surprise.
Speaker 1: The case was made of aluminium, there was no fan
Speaker 1: in there. The components were crammed together, so they would
Speaker 1: heat up inside these cases, and eventually that heat would
Speaker 1: be enough to warp the circuit try Sometimes chips would
Speaker 1: become unseated from their positions on the circuit board, and
Speaker 1: according to some accounts, a common way to fix this
Speaker 1: problem was to physically lift the computer several inches off
Speaker 1: a desk or table and then drop it, and that
Speaker 1: would reseat the chips. I believe that falls under the
Speaker 1: general category of what we call percussive maintenance. In other words,
Speaker 1: when it breaks, you hit it and hope that it
Speaker 1: works again. The Apple three quickly earned a reputation for
Speaker 1: being unreliable. Can't imagine why. This had a huge impact
Speaker 1: on sales, A negative one, that is. And even though
Speaker 1: Apple would revise the design and release a couple of
Speaker 1: upgraded versions later on, the Apple three never got much
Speaker 1: momentum in the marketplace. Apple had to continue to depend
Speaker 1: upon the Apple two platform sales to keep things going.
Speaker 1: In the early nineteen eighties, the Apple to sustain the
Speaker 1: company while other computers were getting a better foothold in
Speaker 1: the market. So just as Apple had eyed ibm S
Speaker 1: position in the corporate world, IBM was now looking at
Speaker 1: home computers as a possible market. In one IBM released
Speaker 1: the personal computer or PC. Now that term had been
Speaker 1: around before IBM used it, and we often will use
Speaker 1: personal computer as sort of a generic category for all
Speaker 1: computers meant for home use, but at the time it
Speaker 1: was very much the domain of IBM. So when you
Speaker 1: said PC, you meant an IBM machine, and for years later,
Speaker 1: if you said PC, you may in an IBM compatible machine,
Speaker 1: and more specifically, you meant something that was running either
Speaker 1: MS DOSS or later on Microsoft Windows. I'll talk more
Speaker 1: about the PC in an upcoming episode of Tech Stuff
Speaker 1: when we cover ibm s approach to the market. In two,
Speaker 1: Commodore launched the Commodore sixty four home computer, and that
Speaker 1: machine would go on to be the best selling computer
Speaker 1: of all time. So Apple had a great head start
Speaker 1: with the Apple too, but it was in danger of
Speaker 1: becoming irrelative irrelevant excuse me, as other companies were putting
Speaker 1: up challengers to the Apple two platform, and to make
Speaker 1: matters worse around this time, Apple had to start playing
Speaker 1: whack a mole with various companies that were offering up
Speaker 1: clones of the Apple to computer. Apple chose not to
Speaker 1: license its designs, including both its software and it's hardware.
Speaker 1: They had made this decision that all Apple products were
Speaker 1: to come from Apple itself, not third parties offering up
Speaker 1: copies of the hardware or the official Apple software. But
Speaker 1: of course that didn't stop companies from trying to do
Speaker 1: that anyway. Some of them made blatant copies of the
Speaker 1: Apple hardware. They were literally opening up Apple two computers
Speaker 1: and copying the design as closely as they possibly could.
Speaker 1: Other companies tried to accomplish the same result through reverse engineering,
Speaker 1: so they weren't opening up an Apple computer and trying
Speaker 1: to use the exact same components. They were studying how
Speaker 1: the Apple two worked and trying to figure out how
Speaker 1: to make a machine that worked exactly like the Apple too,
Speaker 1: thus creating a semi plausible denial that they had copied
Speaker 1: Apple's proprietary technology. One of the companies that did this
Speaker 1: was called Franklin Computer Corporation, that created an Apple two
Speaker 1: clone called the Franklin Ace that ended up being pretty popular.
Speaker 1: Apple sued the Franklin Computer Corporation, and the US Court
Speaker 1: would ultimately rule in favor of Apple, which was a
Speaker 1: landmark decision because it established the computer software, including a
Speaker 1: computer's operating system and need only memory firmware, could be
Speaker 1: protected by copyright. The Franklin Ace was introduced in ninety two,
Speaker 1: and Apple was eventually able to force the company to
Speaker 1: stop selling the clone devices in nineteen eight, six years later.
Speaker 1: So it was an important victory, but perhaps one that
Speaker 1: happened a bit too late to be of much help
Speaker 1: to Apple. There were numerous other Apple clones on the market.
Speaker 1: In fact, some estimation state that there were about two
Speaker 1: hundred different clones of the Apple two machines UH and
Speaker 1: all of its descendants, so not just Apple two, but
Speaker 1: Apple to E, Apple to C, Apple two, g S, etcetera.
Speaker 1: The Apple was not able to sue all of these companies.
Speaker 1: One of them, the Laser one, was actually a reverse
Speaker 1: engineered version of Apple's software, so or in hardware, it
Speaker 1: didn't copy it, it was reverse engineered, which eventually made
Speaker 1: it determined to be a legal clone of the Apple too,
Speaker 1: and a lot of the clones that were illegal were
Speaker 1: in other countries, which made it trigg key for Apple
Speaker 1: to do anything about it. Ultimately, the clones were eating
Speaker 1: into Apple's sales for the Apple two platform, and the
Speaker 1: company decided it needed to do something new. So what
Speaker 1: was next? In Apple launched two new computers. One was
Speaker 1: an update of the Apple to model called the Apple
Speaker 1: to E. I had one of those when I was
Speaker 1: a kid. The other was an experimental high end computer
Speaker 1: called the Lisa. But let's start with Apple to E.
Speaker 1: When the Apple Too E debut in January three, no
Speaker 1: one could predict it was going to become one of
Speaker 1: the most successful computers of all time. Internally, you wouldn't
Speaker 1: guess that it would do so well because it had
Speaker 1: the exact same microprocessor that both the Apple one and
Speaker 1: Apple two had, that would be that six five O two,
Speaker 1: and it was running at that one mega hurts clock speed,
Speaker 1: so it wasn't going any faster. Really. The Apple to
Speaker 1: E did get an operating system update, so it was
Speaker 1: running on a new system called pro DOS, which was
Speaker 1: evolved from that Apple three s OS operating system. It
Speaker 1: had thirty two kilobytes of read only memory, upon which
Speaker 1: Apple Soft Basic was burned, and it had sixty four
Speaker 1: kilobytes of RAM that was upgradeable to a kilobytes using
Speaker 1: an eight column card. Later, you could get third party
Speaker 1: expansions that would allow the Apple to E to have
Speaker 1: several megabytes of RAM, which would make it a really
Speaker 1: versatile machine for lots of different projects. This was part
Speaker 1: of the reason the Apple to E was able to
Speaker 1: remain relevant despite relying on a CPU that was more
Speaker 1: than five years old. When the Apple to E launched,
Speaker 1: the two introduced another new feature in Apple products, garyy.
Speaker 1: For this, you could type letters in lower case yeah.
Speaker 1: Until the Apple to E you were restricted to upper
Speaker 1: case letters, but now you had a shift and a
Speaker 1: cap slut key on the Apple to E keyboard. The
Speaker 1: Apple to eat could also support color displays, though I
Speaker 1: remember the one we had when I was a kid
Speaker 1: was a monochromatic display because I remember it being all green.
Speaker 1: The Apple to E would get some enhancements later on
Speaker 1: in its life cycle. If you combine the original to
Speaker 1: E with the enhanced version that came later, the computer
Speaker 1: remained in production at Apple for a decade. That's pretty incredible.
Speaker 1: Even as the company pushed forward with other products, the
Speaker 1: Apple two line remained a steady source of revenue. It
Speaker 1: was also a bit of a sore spot for Wozniak
Speaker 1: because he recognized how much of Apple's success depended upon
Speaker 1: the workhorse that was the Apple to product line, but
Speaker 1: he felt that the teams on those projects were regularly
Speaker 1: overlooked in corporate meetings and messaging. Instead, Wosniac felt the
Speaker 1: company's more experimental and often less successful ventures were elevated
Speaker 1: over the teams responsible for providing the actual sales figures.
Speaker 1: Wosniac would eventually leave Apple, not just because of these misgivings,
Speaker 1: but also because he was severely injured in an airplane
Speaker 1: crash and decided he would rather work engineering products than
Speaker 1: being some sort of manager. By June three, Apple had
Speaker 1: manufactured the one millionth Apple two computer. That's a big number,
Speaker 1: but remember that Commodore sixty four ultimately sold seventeen million units,
Speaker 1: so you just want to keep things in perspective. The
Speaker 1: other computer I mentioned a minute ago was the Lisa.
Speaker 1: This machine was another victim of design by committee and
Speaker 1: also a victim of future creep. Steve Jobs wanted to
Speaker 1: create a powerful computer, specifically with educational institutions in mind.
Speaker 1: He named the project after his daughter but throughout the
Speaker 1: design phase, the computer kept getting more complicated. This also
Speaker 1: made it more expensive. By the time the Lisa was
Speaker 1: ready to debut in nineteen eighty three, the price tag
Speaker 1: hit an astronomical nine thousand, nine nine dollars. This was
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty three, so if we had just for inflation,
Speaker 1: that would mean the computer would cost approximately twenty five thousand,
Speaker 1: four hundred fifty dollars in today's money. For that price,
Speaker 1: you better be able to ride the computer to working back. Obviously,
Speaker 1: that put Lisa outside the realm of personal computers unless
Speaker 1: you're a millionaire. So I'm not gonna dwell on the
Speaker 1: Lisa here because that's not the focus of this show.
Speaker 1: But the important thing was it did pull focus away
Speaker 1: from the home computer market. Apple teams were being dedicated
Speaker 1: to this project that was for something that wasn't gonna
Speaker 1: be for the average consumer. Apple was seeing a lot
Speaker 1: of success in that market and wasn't. The act felt
Speaker 1: that it was a mistake to look at other areas.
Speaker 1: It was also a black mark against Steve Jobs, because
Speaker 1: you know, he had had two failures in a row.
Speaker 1: The Apple three was something that he was really behind
Speaker 1: and that didn't succeed and the Lisa was a colossal failure.
Speaker 1: So it was two strikes against him in a row. Now,
Speaker 1: a quick word on leadership at Apple. Steve Jobs and
Speaker 1: Steve Wozniak were both new to the business scene when
Speaker 1: they formed the Apple Company, and the first CEO of
Speaker 1: Apple was brought in from outside. His name was Michael Scott,
Speaker 1: had no relation to dunder Mifflin, and he served as
Speaker 1: CEO from nineteen seventy seven to nineteen eight one. Scott
Speaker 1: was a controversial leader. In nineteen eighty one, on a
Speaker 1: day that became known as Black Wednesday, he fired half
Speaker 1: of the Apple two team, saying that he believed their
Speaker 1: jobs were redundant. He was pretty quickly removed a CEO
Speaker 1: after that, and then Mike Markola, who was an early
Speaker 1: investor in Apple and gets the credit for being the
Speaker 1: third Apple employee, took over the role. He would serve
Speaker 1: as CEO until nineteen eight three, but then would join
Speaker 1: the board of directors as chairman and stay on until
Speaker 1: nineteen More on him in a little bit. In nine,
Speaker 1: the former CEO of PepsiCo, John Scully, joined Apple. He
Speaker 1: had to deal with the fall out from Lisa, but
Speaker 1: he was also at Apple while another project was nearing completion.
Speaker 1: This project would ultimately define the future for Apple. It
Speaker 1: was a project that Apple developers have been working on
Speaker 1: since the late nineteen seventies, and it was called Macintosh.
Speaker 1: I'll tell you more about that in just a second,
Speaker 1: but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor.
Speaker 1: Now we're gonna talk about Macintosh. But it's hard to
Speaker 1: trace the actual origins of the Macintosh project, as finding
Speaker 1: the exact moment to say here's the beginning is next
Speaker 1: to impossible. There were talks of creating an innovative machine
Speaker 1: while the Apple two was still in development, and even
Speaker 1: when it was launching, there were talks about what's gonna
Speaker 1: come next. Those discussions were energized after Steve Jobs and
Speaker 1: some other Apple folks visited the Xerox Park facility. When
Speaker 1: I did the Xerox series, I talked about this, uh,
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs and his team got a chance to see
Speaker 1: the innovations Xerox had been more or less sitting on
Speaker 1: since nineteen seventy three. That included a graphic user interface
Speaker 1: or gooey g u I and the computer mouse. Although
Speaker 1: I should also point out the computer mouse did not
Speaker 1: come out of park itself. Xerox essentially acquired the computer mouse,
Speaker 1: but that's a discussion for a different episode. The talks
Speaker 1: with an Apple, coupled with these concepts of a gooey
Speaker 1: based operating system and a computer mouse input device, led
Speaker 1: to a couple of big projects within the company. One
Speaker 1: of those was Lisa, the failed educational computer I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: and the other was the Macintosh. So the Macintosh was
Speaker 1: a project that executives nearly scrapped on multiple occasions. At
Speaker 1: one point, the team on the project had only four
Speaker 1: people on it. They had to regularly argue for the
Speaker 1: projects survival. Jeff Raskin was the chief champion of the
Speaker 1: Macintosh in the early stages. He was the lead voice
Speaker 1: of the project until nineteen one when Steve Jobs would
Speaker 1: join the Macintosh team. So Jobs had been booted from
Speaker 1: the Lisa project in nineteen eight one after team members
Speaker 1: were complaining to the CEO. They were saying that Steve
Speaker 1: jobs demands were unreasonable. He was getting really interfering with
Speaker 1: their work and moreover, the whole the whole process was untenable.
Speaker 1: It was it was making it impossible for them to
Speaker 1: do their jobs. So They said that because of Jobs involvement,
Speaker 1: the Lisa project was suffering from feature bloat, including what
Speaker 1: was then a massive and massively expensive amount of RAM
Speaker 1: at one whole megabyte at the time, that was a
Speaker 1: whole bunch, and so executive leadership stepped in and removed
Speaker 1: Jobs from the Lisa project, and then he migrated over
Speaker 1: to Macintosh, and he brought some of the developers of
Speaker 1: Lisa along with him. Now, that caused some friction in
Speaker 1: the Macintosh team, but many on that project credit Jobs
Speaker 1: with providing some valuable insight. First, he was a genius
Speaker 1: when it came to making a user friendly physical form factor.
Speaker 1: The Macintosh design avoided the mistakes of Lisa. Jobs thought
Speaker 1: that Macintosh was a work of art, and as such,
Speaker 1: he arranged for the entire design team to sign the
Speaker 1: case mold for the Macintosh in two The mold was
Speaker 1: used for nearly all Macintosh computer cases until nine six,
Speaker 1: So if you bought a Macintosh from that era and
Speaker 1: you opened up the case and looked inside, you would
Speaker 1: be able to see the signatures of the design team
Speaker 1: on the inside of that case. But Jobs also play
Speaker 1: some tough restrictions on the project. One was that he
Speaker 1: demanded the original Macintosh ship with no more than a
Speaker 1: hundes of RAM memory was really expensive, and Jobs did
Speaker 1: not want to see the price tag of the Macintosh
Speaker 1: balloon the way Lisa's did, and the original design team
Speaker 1: of the Macintosh actually wanted the price to be even lower.
Speaker 1: They were hoping to keep it out around a thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs had already added an features that was going
Speaker 1: to make that impossible, but he did not want it
Speaker 1: to run away from him like Lisa. This memory restriction
Speaker 1: was also really hard to work with because the graphic
Speaker 1: user interface required a lot of computer memory just a function,
Speaker 1: which meant if you executed a command, there was only
Speaker 1: a limited amount of memory left over to handle the job.
Speaker 1: In fact, if you wanted to just copy one floppy
Speaker 1: disks contents onto a second blank floppy disk, you'd actually
Speaker 1: have to switch the two discs out multiple times and
Speaker 1: would take several minutes to complete the task because there
Speaker 1: just wasn't enough space in the computer's memory to handle
Speaker 1: all of the operation. The Macintosh did not use a
Speaker 1: six five O two microprocessor the way the earlier Apple
Speaker 1: computers had. It relied on a Motorola sixty eight thousand
Speaker 1: chips six eight zero zero zero, and it had a
Speaker 1: seven point eight three mega hurts clock speed. It also
Speaker 1: had a monochromatic screen with the resolution of five hundred
Speaker 1: twelve by three forty two. Steve Jobs wanted to go
Speaker 1: monochrome attic because you could go higher resolution to make
Speaker 1: the everything on the screen look more crisp, and so
Speaker 1: he didn't want to incorporate color because he felt that
Speaker 1: that would compromise on resolution. The Macintosh featured several ports
Speaker 1: for peripherals, and it shipped with a computer mouse, and
Speaker 1: it launched in January four with a big marketing campaign
Speaker 1: to differentiate it from what Apple claimed were the boring
Speaker 1: limited computers like the IBM models, and it cost two
Speaker 1: thousand four on launch. Within that same year, Apple would
Speaker 1: release an updated version of the mac with five twelve
Speaker 1: kilobytes of memory. This was done in defiance of Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs's insistence to keep memory down to limit the cost.
Speaker 1: In fact, Apple would end up marketing this new Macintosh
Speaker 1: with a campaign that alluded to the fact that the
Speaker 1: designers made these upgrades without the consent of leadership. But
Speaker 1: these episodes are meant to focus on how Apple got
Speaker 1: its position in the marketplace. The Apple two had been
Speaker 1: a huge success, but the computers following it had not
Speaker 1: done so well. The Apple three was a technical and
Speaker 1: commercial failure. The Lisa was incredibly expensive and had very
Speaker 1: few interested parties willing to pony up the cash for
Speaker 1: what appeared to be an experimental system. You could call
Speaker 1: that a complete flop. The Apple to E was doing well,
Speaker 1: but it was essentially an Apple two with a few
Speaker 1: minor enhancements, and the company couldn't place all its bets
Speaker 1: on a rapidly aging platform. So could the Macintosh save
Speaker 1: the company? Well, that was the initial hope. Apple was
Speaker 1: putting forth a lot of effort to make McIntosh a success.
Speaker 1: The design included many proprietary components to make it more
Speaker 1: difficult to clone the Macintosh than the Apple two platform.
Speaker 1: The advertising campaign was more than a little ostentatious, with
Speaker 1: a famous ad shown during the Super Bowl. That commercial
Speaker 1: compared the established computers in the workplace. In other words,
Speaker 1: IBM machines as big brother in an orwellianlike environment, the
Speaker 1: Macintosh was poised to break free of the shackles or something.
Speaker 1: The commercial was a big hit. It was directed by
Speaker 1: Ridley Scott of Hollywood fame, but would the commercial move
Speaker 1: units would boost sales so that Apple could wean itself
Speaker 1: off of the Apple two platform and move into its
Speaker 1: next phase as a company. When the Macintosh was still
Speaker 1: in the planning stages in the late seventies, Apple had
Speaker 1: high hopes for the platform. In fact, initial projections in
Speaker 1: a business plan dating to nineteen eighty one said that
Speaker 1: Apple was going to try and sell two point to
Speaker 1: million Macintosh computers between nineteen eighty two and nineteen eighty five.
Speaker 1: That would be about forty seven thousand machines a month. Obviously,
Speaker 1: that was not gonna happen because project delays and feature creep,
Speaker 1: as well as Steve jobs general involvement, had delayed the
Speaker 1: release of the Macintosh to nineteen eighty four. That meant
Speaker 1: Apple had to write off two years of sales from
Speaker 1: its initial projections. Further, after hot sales in the Macintosh
Speaker 1: first debuted, the figures slowed down considerably to five thousand
Speaker 1: units per month. Apple was falling far short of those
Speaker 1: optimistic projections that the company had made. In part of
Speaker 1: the problem was the price. That was a bit of it,
Speaker 1: but part of the problem was also that the there
Speaker 1: was just not any software for the Macintosh. I mean,
Speaker 1: the gooey interface was taking up a lot of RAM,
Speaker 1: the cost of the computer was high. But both of
Speaker 1: those were problems that you could probably get around if
Speaker 1: there were stuff to do on the Macintosh. There was
Speaker 1: very limited programming. Apple offered up the mac Wright program
Speaker 1: that was kind of a word processing program, and there
Speaker 1: was an art program called mac Paint, and then there
Speaker 1: were a few other applications, but that was it. Apple
Speaker 1: to software was not compatible with the Macintosh platform. And
Speaker 1: so while the IBM computers on the market might not
Speaker 1: have been as user friendly as the Macintosh, and they
Speaker 1: might not have had a graphic user inter face the
Speaker 1: way the Macintosh did, they might not have had a
Speaker 1: useful input device like the mouse, they did have a
Speaker 1: very large software library, which meant you could do a
Speaker 1: lot more stuff on an IBM compatible computer than you
Speaker 1: could on a Macintosh. The lackluster sales of the first
Speaker 1: Macintosh created severe tension with an Apple, particularly between the CEO,
Speaker 1: John Scully and Steve Jobs. By those tensions had reached
Speaker 1: a point of no return. Scully removed Jobs from the
Speaker 1: Macintosh team, and they've been struggling to meet jobs as
Speaker 1: expectations while delivering upon what they thought would be a
Speaker 1: good computer well suited for its intended market. Jobs was
Speaker 1: pushed off to a remote part of the company's offices
Speaker 1: and he was left there. He went to the board
Speaker 1: to protest this. He said, Hey, do you know what
Speaker 1: the CEO is doing. You see what he's doing here.
Speaker 1: He's removing me from my my duties and I've got
Speaker 1: nothing to do. The board, which included Mike Markola, sided
Speaker 1: with Scully and said, yeah, but you're kind of part
Speaker 1: of the problems, so sorry. What happened next is a
Speaker 1: matter of some dispute. Ultimately, what matters is Jobs and
Speaker 1: Apple parted company at this point. Now some say that
Speaker 1: Jobs quit. Jobs said that he had been fired. Either way,
Speaker 1: the co founder was out of the company. Wozniak was
Speaker 1: also out after his airplane accident and his general disagreements
Speaker 1: with the direction of the company. So at this point,
Speaker 1: Apple is a company that has precisely one or you
Speaker 1: could argue one and a half successes under its belt,
Speaker 1: and that would be the Apple two platform and the
Speaker 1: Apple to E computer. But another computer came out around
Speaker 1: the same time as the Macintosh and the Macintosh itself
Speaker 1: wasn't a lost cause obviously, So in the next episode,
Speaker 1: I'll talk about how Apple carried on during this era,
Speaker 1: how it nearly sunk under unsteady leadership, and how it
Speaker 1: was able to come back from the brink of bankruptcy.
Speaker 1: And then in the next episode after that, we'll take
Speaker 1: a look at ibm s journey to the home computer
Speaker 1: market and how it took a very different course. If
Speaker 1: you guys have suggestions for future topics for tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: get in touch with me and let me know what
Speaker 1: they are. The email address for the show is tech
Speaker 1: Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can
Speaker 1: drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter using the
Speaker 1: handle tech stuff hs W. Join us on Instagram follow us.
Speaker 1: You can see all sorts of behind the scenes goodies
Speaker 1: back there. And also if you want to watch me
Speaker 1: record this show live, go to twitch dot tv slash
Speaker 1: tech Stuff. There's a schedule there tells you when I record.
Speaker 1: It's typically on Wednesdays and Fridays. You can watch me
Speaker 1: in the studio and even join a chat room and
Speaker 1: say funny things to me or serious things if you like.
Speaker 1: You know, whatever floats your boat really and I'll talk
Speaker 1: to you again really soon for more on this and
Speaker 1: bathans of other topics because it has to works. Dot
Speaker 1: com