Ep. 2: Apple II

Morgan Hale

Picture the floor of the San Francisco Civic Auditorium in April nineteen seventy seven. The West Coast Computer Faire is packed with hobbyists, surrounded by exposed circuit boards, wires, and soldering irons.

Morgan Hale

But then you see it. A sleek plastic case with a keyboard built right into the body, outputting vivid color graphics to a monitor, with eight expansion slots hidden right under a lid that pops off without a single tool.

Morgan Hale

That was Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs introducing the Apple II to the world. And when it officially shipped on June ten, nineteen seventy seven, it completely rewired expectations.

Morgan Hale

Unlike preceding home microcomputers, the Apple II was sold as a finished consumer appliance rather than as a kit. You did not need to be an electrical engineer to assemble it.

Morgan Hale

The base model started at twelve hundred ninety eight dollars with four kilobytes of memory. You plugged it into the wall, hooked it to a display, and it just worked.

Morgan Hale

Well, mostly worked. At first, you still had to load software from slow, finicky audio cassette tapes.

Morgan Hale

If you have ever waited minutes for a tape to load only to get an error at the very end, you know the frustration.

Morgan Hale

That changed in nineteen seventy eight with the Disk II. Steve Wozniak designed a floppy disk controller card using a fraction of the usual chips, bringing affordable five inch floppy drives to home users.

Morgan Hale

Suddenly, loading a program took seconds instead of minutes. It transformed the machine from an impressive hobby standard into something truly usable everyday.

Morgan Hale

Before we look at how the software market blew wide open, a quick word from our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Jellypod AI, the generative media creation studio.

Morgan Hale

Now, if the Disk II was the hardware breakthrough, the ultimate software breakthrough arrived in nineteen seventy nine. That was VisiCalc, the world's very first electronic spreadsheet.

Morgan Hale

Before VisiCalc, businesses saw microcomputers as toys for schools or enthusiasts. Suddenly, accountants and executives realized they could calculate complex budgets in minutes instead of days.

Morgan Hale

People bought two thousand dollar Apple II systems just to run a two hundred dollar spreadsheet program. It turned the Apple II into an essential corporate purchase.

Morgan Hale

And that momentum created a massive lineage. The original II led to the II Plus, the incredible IIe, the portable IIc, and eventually the sixteen bit IIGS in nineteen eighty six.

Morgan Hale

Even after the Macintosh launched in nineteen eighty four, the Apple II line accounted for roughly eighty five percent of Apple's hardware sales in early fiscal nineteen eighty five.

Morgan Hale

It was the reliable cash engine funding Apple's future for well over a decade. In fact, the IIe model stayed in production for nearly eleven years.

Morgan Hale

But in nineteen eighty, Apple wanted to build a direct follow up targeted straight at corporate offices. They called it the Apple III, and as we will see next time, replacing a legend is never easy.