“To me, a personal computer should be small, reliable, convenient to use and inexpensive.” You’ll want to read this: Steve Wozniak’s original description of the Apple ][, published in May 1977 in Byte Magazine.
“To me, a personal computer should be small, reliable, convenient to use and inexpensive.” You’ll want to read this: Steve Wozniak’s original description of the Apple ][, published in May 1977 in Byte Magazine.
For any article less interesting I sure as hell wouldn’t have waited for those page reloads. It was indeed an entertaining read however and sparked some nostalgia for simpler days. Cheers.
Yeah. Downloading the PDF was faster.
Regardless of how one feels about Apple, specially the current one, the way the company come to be is a very interesting story.
The book Revolution in The Valley is full of technical details and private stories, how Apple achieved success
http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9780596007195.do
It’s a great book and I own it. But most of the content is also available for free here:
http://www.folklore.org/index.py
with the added bonus of a number of insightful additional comments from people that were Apple engineers at the time.
If you’re a audiobook nut, a lot of those stories are available read by Derek Warren here:
http://www.macfolkloreradio.com/
Well worth investing some time in.
Thanks for the pointers, I’ll have a look into them.
There is more content too at te first link. It obviously carried on being a site, even after Andy complied the book.
In the linked PDF there is the original “Introducing Apple II” advertisement.
I find it interesting how much it focused on the programming aspect (You can create.. Write simple programs…).
As in: it’s a computer – you program it, duh!
Edited 2012-05-20 08:07 UTC
On the OS X App Store Xcode has been in the top 5 free apps for as long as I remember.
…they used an OCR or some such to import the text from the PDF, I could only remember 16 colours in lores mode, not 75 of them (well, 75 for the demo 🙂 When I saw the PDF from BYTE, sure enough, 15 colours there was in the demo.
Until AppleSoft came out I guess they didn’t really focus on hires graphics too much. I wish Woz wrote the float BASIC too, that would have been so much faster then AppleSoft was. I remember Beagle Bros and others had compilers for BASIC. To be honest, I never used Int BASIC too much, I was introduced to the Apple ][ in 1980, AppleSoft was already there.
Anyway, what a great read, I remember with fondness those days, but I’d hate to relive them now I’ve seen todays computers / Internet 🙂
] CALL -151
# 3D0G
Ignore…
Edited 2012-05-21 05:10 UTC
Granted, the primary purpose of the interpreter is to manipulate 16-bit pointers on an 8-bit system, but I have to wonder:
If BrainF*ck is Turing-complete, and Conway’s Game of Life can simulate a Turing-complete system, can Sweet16 also be considered Turing-complete?
It almost gives me a headache. Conway’s Game of Life, running a BrainF*ck interpreter, implementing a Sweet16 virtual machine. Owwww….
If you like vintage BYTE, go here:
http://malus.exotica.org.uk/~buzz/byte/pdf/
Not to detract from its place in computer history but, since the original retail price of the Apple ][ computer was $1298.00 for the model with 4 KB of RAM and a whopping $2638.00 for the one with 48 KB, I wouldn’t call that inexpensive — unless the meaning of “inexpensive” has changed overnight, of course. 😉
And just to put things in the right context: if we account for inflation $1298.00 from 1977 are the equivalent of today’s $4928.00! (http://www.usinflationcalculator.com)
Oh, and the TRS-80 also debuted in 1977 and Radio Shack sold it for $399.00 or $599.00 with a 12″ monitor, which proves that Apple and “inexpensive” really don’t belong together.
RT.
PS: Even the Commodore PET 2001, also introduced in 1977 with built-in monitor and cassette for storage, retailed for $795.00.
Edited 2012-05-22 08:56 UTC