The Apple II - Apple's most important computer
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 1 ต.ค. 2024
- I grew up with the Apple II - it was my first ever computer. I'm an old-school Apple guy. In this video I give a basic introduction to the Apple II system and its internal competition with the Mac before showing off my own personal IIc and IIGS. This video ended up a little more serious than I originally intended, but I guess I have a certain reverence for the subject matter. And you can tell I'm a Woz fan, though my thoughts on Jobs are probably a little more complex than you'd guess solely from this video.
This is a new edit with my new intro/outro and LPCM audio (should be better sound). This is one of my most important videos to me personally, so I wanted it to be its best.
I promised a few helpful links in case you're interested in some of the things I mention in the video:
Floppy Emu: www.bigmessowir...
ADT Pro: adtpro.sourcefo...
Ciderpress: a2ciderpress.com/
Find an Apple IIGS on Ebay: ebay.to/2mI29Rt
Subscribe to my channel: www.youtube.com...
Support me on Patreon!: / modernclassic
Follow me on Facebook: / modernclassicchannel
And on Twitter:
/ modernclassicyt
And some image attributions:
Apple II+, IIe, IIe Platinum, III Plus By Bilby (Own work) [CC BY 3.0 (creativecommons...)], via Wikimedia Commons
Apple Lisa: Simon Claessen
Apple IIGS cards: Blake Patterson
Mac Prototype: Victor Grigas
Commodore 1541: Nathan Beach
Atari 1050: MOS6502
Frying eggs: • Video
Please let me know if I neglected to credit you - it wasn't intentional, and I'd be happy to fix that.
Subscribe to my channel: www.youtube.com...
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![How the Apple ][ Works!](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/VStscvYLYLs/mqdefault.jpg)
![How the Apple ][ Works!](/img/tr.png)
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Wow! So much fun to watch this video! :-) It takes me back... I was hired by Apple in 1986 and was a developer on GS/OS. I wrote the file system portion of GS/OS (ProDOS) and was particularly happy that full floppy copy was faster than the Mac could do. ;-) The system/application loader and the little progress bar when GS/OS starts were also mine. The progress bar actually times how long it takes to boot and will use the number to adjust the duration of the progress bar on the next boot. This was pretty cool when you moved GS/OS to a ram disk and the progress bar would just fly across the screen. On the hardware side, I use to hang out with the guy who did the Apple IIgs accelerator card. I remember him letting me use a wire wrap tool to make connections on the prototype board. :-D Thanks again for all the great memories! :-D
Rob Turner
The 2GS was a way better buy than the Macintosh; it was color (not just black/white without any shades of grey) and as expensive as the Lisa may have seemed, the Xerox Alto, where the vision for the GUI came from was like $50,000 each
@@lect0n7 True, but still the Amiga computers were much better than all these, without extra price tag, like the 1986/87 Amiga 2000 that had the option of 68020 32 bit CPU/RAM card (A2620), SCSI HD (A2090) and PC emulator card (A2088) right from the launch (all these later factory-fitted in the A2000 model called A2500).
It would be great if the Woz and company would build and sell a version of his apple, either the two e or the g s. I know I would buy one and have a lot of fun. Todays computers are not as fun to use as the vintage ones
Awesome to learn a bit being certain elements. Its like the director commentary on a movie. Thank you for sharing a bit about the past and your efforts. I love learning about things like this and old tech, its astonishing how we went from a basic calculator to a phone that is actually a computer. And there were so many steps along the way. I hope life is treating you well mate.
Rob Turner, how much was GS/OS based on or influenced by LisaOS or MacOS?
I bought a used Apple II+ in 1983 when I was still in high school. I used it all the way through my undergraduate degree and finally replaced it with a next-station because I needed a workstation to capture a CMOS layout for my Masters Thesis work. I used the Apple II+ in my senior engineering project; I designed and built a card that plugged into the II+ that interfaced with a stepper motor and sonar module like was used to auto focus cameras. I wrote a program that controlled the stepper motor and sonar unit to graph out the layout of a room and display it on the screen. The program would also measure the distance of a given angle and report the distance in feet and inches. The program was written in AppleSoft and used PEEKs and POKEs to control the hardware. I still have the Apple II+ somewhere boxed up; I don't know if it works anymore.
John Hermann hey John a new Apple II enthusiast can you make a video showing this program I would love to see it.Thanks 👍
@@nomadicviewer3050 😢e
Unreal rI rvghvggggvgg
Holy balls! Talk about ahead of your time! You alreayd wrote the grandfather of modern tech just by dreaming it! Really makes you wonder what we can do now that we have no idea of with current computer tech!
I was selling Apple ]['s back in 1978. This was very well done! Bravo!
i thought the 8-bit guy was the only person on the internet whom i could listen to for countless hours without getting bored...and now i found you.
right!
Check out the 'databits', 'VWestlife', and 'Technology Connections' too, i think you might like those as well.
i would add "LGR" and "SteveMRE" they have great voice and great personality matching with their indepth knowledge of the topic they talking
LGR!
"Jobs' demand that the [Apple ///] have no fans." Given the harsh critical reception of the ///, I would say, "mission accomplished". :-p
He had a obsession on no fan systems the G4 cube failed because he had it made fanless with a Power pc chip. It ran not enough to damage the case.
Haha I just picked up my “New Apple 3” fun stuff
@@JeffreyPiatt I mean. The G4 was quiet AF as was the first gen G5 even though, If I remember the G5 with it's "thermal zones" had a total of 9 fans. It was still quiet. Jobs used to say on stage how fan noise was his nemesis. Mysphonia?
Jobs sounds like he was insufferable to work with
Linguini that’s because he was
@Kevin Prima what the hell are you on about?
@Kevin Prima you're injecting politics into a video about vintage apple products...really?
@Kevin Prima delete your account
I mean, Jack Tramiel was also hard to work with but from a different point. I see Jobs as somebody with vision, that he never wants to compromise, even if it is flawed. A.K.A PowerMac G4 Cube. He was very clever, inspiring but also very sinister character. Jack Tramiel was a business man, grounded and with lots of common sense but his innovations were much more practical. You needed to be really good to convince Jack Tramiel that your idea is good. Jobs had his own idea and nothing other mattered for him. That must really clashed with Wozniak's much more grounded understanding of things.
wozniak was a reserved genius who knew how to run a buisness, jobs was an arrogant visionary who knew how to persuade people to his side. if only they got along
Selling the Apple II to schools was a brilliant move. When the schools started dumping them, they were available around here for about $15 each - just the computer, no drives or monitors, and they looked like they had been through a war. Watched a video of kids today being given an Apple II to use. Funny.
Woz never got enough credit really. I respect Steve as a marketer and for his ability to see what users wanted feature-wise, but if Woz had his way in the 80s and each apple was backwards compatible we'd all be using them today.
The old Apple used to be cool.... Buying a Mac for more than 1000 bucks for very shitty hardware is being an idiot...
Mr Objection everyone knows that
Hackingtosh is the answer if you want a mac at a good price.
*if you want a billion issues and hardly no compatibility" lol true
LOL I love these arguments. It’s funny how all the coders and IT guys use Macs and the people who like to pretend they’re hardcore bitch about how overpriced they are…
Ah! Another measurebator :)
It’s not about the hardware. It’s about how well the HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE WORK TOGETHER, and this is something Apple always have done well.
Woz is the brain of Apple,Jobs became the voice
That's pretty much true.
I feel like Woz had the correct vision of the future of computing so much more than Jobs. Expandability, Upgrade paths, Graphics and Sound, he knew what people would want and tried to deliver it. I guess it took IBM and Microsoft to finally pick up the concept and run with it to where we are today.
Jobs was the anus.
This is a simplification. BTW, there are *THREE serious mistakes* in the video:
1. Wozniak had very little to do with any Apple's activity since the early 1980s, including Apple IIgs machine.
2. Jobs' wish to make something entirely new was not some mystery "only known to him", it was obvious since Apple II architecture had serious limitations that tampered with progress. Jobs' was always in favour of throwing the aging technology away. E.g. once he has returned to Apple he has thrown away old Mac OS, and then PowerPC.
3. Jobs had nothing to do with Apple IIgs CPU frequency limitations; he was ousted from Apple 1.5 years before the machine's release.
Well, the Apple II also already was quite old when the C64 came to market.
Ha! _Balance of Power,_ a game I tested on a number of systems as a QA analyst at Mindscape in the 1980's, including a IIgs specific version. Oh, how I grew to hate that game. Everybody else in the department got to test the fun, twitchy games, while I was forever stuck on endless ports of boring old _Balance of Power_ (including a PC port that ran in a runtime version of Windows).
I wasn't then (and am not now) much of an Apple person, but it always seemed to me the IIgs was the best kept secret in computing. People were going nuts over the closed-tight Macintosh with its tiny monochrome screen when Apple had an expandable color computer with a graphical user interface. It could have been then what the Mac took ten years to become. I had no idea it was intentionally hobbled by Jobs. The Apple II and its successors were computers; the Macintosh was an anti-computer. I think who each appealed to tells you a lot about a person.
Thanks for the stroll down Memory Lane.
Your videos are so well made dude. This is some damn good history.
I had a Laser 128EX in high school. I loved that computer.
"Imagine still using an 8-bit Apple II as your primary computer in 1993." No imagination needed! Like you, I got a lot of use out of the Apple IIc that was my first computer. Still annoyed at my parents for selling it at a flea market while I was away at college.
Fine video. Thanks for that!
Just a small correction: when you talk about that awful floppy noise (from about 19:00), you mention that Commodore drives "knew where their head was". Well, they were indeed smart and knew that, but still they occasionally made that noise (well, the 1541 did; I believe the 1571 did not): Whenever there was a serious read error, and also when formatting a disk, they did bang the head against its limit, to be sure they were positioned at the first track. A simple sensor would have made that unnecessary, but that was left out, probably for the same reason as in the Apple drive: cost.
If i recal 8 bit guy said the reason the disk knew where they were because the sectors were numbered, so when formatting a disk since they don't have thoes numbers it would click
I currently own both a C64 and 1541 drive. I can confirm that it indeed makes a dreadful noise now and again. When it loads normally though… oh it sounds very sweet.
Happy Birthday Apple II. Introduced at the West Coast Computer Faire on April 16, 1977
Star Wars ep IV came out that year.
@@GradyBroyles 1977 was a great year. Microcomputers (TRS-80, Apple II and PET).Star Wars and Punk Rock. I wish I had a Way Back Machine.....
Wow, had the IIgs line continued, along with clone manufacturing from other vendors the entire PC landscape in the modern era would be completely different.
Maybe? I had one. At the time the clones had better hardware than Apple was offering. It was really a foregone conclusion that when Jobs came back to Apple, that shiz was gonna stop.
imagine that, a world where two bespoke ecosystems actually existed! instead we have the PC market, just with different operating systems
@@InnoVintage Yeah, it'd mean *real* competition. Especially if the other platform used a different CPU architecture. Though now with Apple going to it's own silicon (ARM based) we're getting that again(sort of).
Switching to Apple ARM Hardware just means continuing into the none Upgradable direction Apple is already in. Just a Black box tied on it's own Operating System and Apps.
@@rajvinder89 The Mac Clones were made by "Power Computing" (among others) and had PPC CPU's and off-the-shelf and up-gradable PCI graphics). Basically the Mac Pro of it's day. They were faster in Mhz than Apple's own offerings at the time
Nice video, congratiolations with the new stuff
wut
THAT was a great video! It hadn't really dawned on me that the II could have and maybe would have become the default computer instead of the IBM if only Job's hubris hadn't derailed it in favor of overpriced and under-powered Mac which had the extra handicap of needing all new software - software that never really materialized outside of a few niche markets. In this view the Mac was more of an interloping turd than the revolution it is perceived as.
The funny thing is he seemed to have learned his lesson, even though he never admitted it. When the Mac switched to Intel processors, it was really no different than the Apple II to Mac changeover. But in the latter case, Jobs kept the Mac name and designs, re-worked the MacOS to work on Intel, and worked with other software developers to port major software titles to Intel. He could have done the same with the Apple II, maybe even including either hardware or software emulation for Apple II titles rather than trying to launch an entirely new line. It just wasn't in anyone's DNA (anyone but Woz, anyway) at the time that you could continue a computer line forever. Jobs thought he needed a whole new computer line to stay fresh, but he did the exact opposite when changing architectures years later.
Cool. Thank you Steve Wozniak for inventing the first personal computer, making the computer cheap enough and thus creating the internet.
God bless, Proverbs 31
My family got an Apple IIc in 1984...and my senior year of HS in 1994 the computer lab was still full of them. Even took a Basic class on one. Cutting edge.
You had a IIc in 84 and it was "cutting edge?" The C64 (over 2 years old at that point) was more powerful and ran CP/M and the Amiga came out a year later. The Apple ][ line was getting a little long in the tooth by then, don't you think?
@@GradyBroyleslol im afraid my sarcasm did not translate. I got a C64 in 86, a Miga in 89 & a 386 in 92...
Very impressed by this overview. My first computer was a slightly used Apple 2 Plus in 1983, with two drives. Good times!
The C64 was replaced with the C128, not the Amiga. The Amiga was a business that Commodore bought.
Gosh you sound JUST like VWestlife. And you are just as good. That is a serious compliment. You also sound like John Mcenroe too. And before you reply I cannot be serious, I am. Seriously.
Funny that .Mac and Mcnroe. I used a Macintosh too, when it rained at Wimbledon. That was 1980 before you owned your 1st PC. Sorry Apple.Whatever. Game over?
If you think about it, the only companies that thinked different were Acorn with the Acorn Archimedes (the debut of the almighty ARM CPU, but only because it shipped with a BBC emulator and that RISC OS was written in BBC BASIC and had a BBC BASIC prompt that was functionally the same as the command line on the original BBC and Electron) and Miles Gordon Technology when they released the SAM Coupe as a 16 bit computer that was backwards compatible with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum (however MGT were neither Sinclair nor Amstrad)
For me Commodore and Acorn were the unsung heroes. Commodore's 64, 128 and Amiga were revolutionary. The C64 was the definitive home computer of its time and the Commodore Amiga kicked off CGI.
As for Acorn... aside from the BBC Micro being the British Apple ][, Acorn were the A in ARM, the inventors of the CPU architecture that runs the world, the giant whose shoulders even Apple stands upon.
during the apple // days apple had a way of making their electronics absolutely beautiful, if only the apple //gs had taken off, maybe machines like that would have stayed as an actual competitor to the PC, instead only the most hardcore apple fans sticking on.
Ironically 68k views 😝
Apple has a good history, Steve Jobs made Apple as it is now, a good product with essentials.
I hope to work with an I -Mac again, with Apple programms.
The Lisa was highly innovative, but failed as a business success. You can see it as a masterpiece film failing to generate money. Lisa is the Blade Runner of Computing.
The Apple IIgs was, by every measure, a better computer than the Macintosh. They should have just kept that line going. Eventually they would have ended up in the same place, but perhaps without a lot of the pain in between.
IGnatius T Foobar The resolution of the early Mac screens made them perfect for DTP, which is what ultimately "made" the Mac.
Apple II kept the lights on at Apple for many years in the early to mid 80's Most of their sales was the Apple II through that point. Even when the Mac and Lisa failed, the Apple II kept Apple afloat. Think of the Apple II like a mid 90's Toyota Camry. It may be old and has a lot of miles, but it still runs and is very reliable getting to point A to B.
When Jobs dropped the Apple 2 andmade mine obsolete just like that, I walked from Apple and never went back. I ALMOST did in the 90's when Apple licensed other companies to make cheaper Mac clones, meaning the Mac was finally going mainstream like the IBM PC and I seriously thought of getting one. Then Jobs came back, cancelled all of the clone licenses and instead gave use the ugly and not-expandable colored egg line. I bow to the WOZ but never had respect for the "other Apple guy".
I still have a few boxes of the Apple 2 slot cards like GRAPPLER+ and ThunderClock to name a few. Can't say if they still work or not but they look fine.
Even today I have never owned an Apple product since. Don't plan to.
It’s so cool that you still had the disks. I’d really would love to see my old 80s and early 90s disks. But I chucked them out, when I moved on to bigger and better. Not realizing that at some point you may wanna actually use that old useless “junk” again. Last year in lockdown I refurbished a C64, two amigas and a 486. And I was amazed I could actually still write 6502 and 8088 assembler albeit with sometimes googling certain instruction and memory maps. Those days in the 80s, how I miss them! Care free days of wonder.
Man, I owned Test Drive II and Arkanoid II on my GS back in the day, this video really sent me back.
I really liked the 3.5” drive’s eject function. Rather than firing the disc at you with a spring, it’s motor whirred up to raise the disc up and slide it out to you. Ugly head seek noises aside :)
IIe or not IIe, that is not the question
I got a IIe in 1982 and used it until I got my Mac IIci in 1991... used that until 1997... I switched to PCs in 1998 until M1 was released. The Apple II still brings back many of my best computing memories. Thank you for this video!
Jobs was, in my opinion, at least a little sociopathic and many of the dick moves he did over the years are testament to that. Early on Woz perfected a design for, HP I think, that reduced the chip count and when Jobs received the bonus for it he gave Woz about 10% and kept the rest in spite of the fact that the work was 100% Woz. The throttling the II CPU so the Mac looked better was yet another dick move Jobs did to sabotage Woz and the II line. Jobs was not the only sociopathic type in the industry as Gates shared many of the same traits as Jobs. Gates probably had a much higher IQ, but Jobs had better vision, even if it meant harming some of the companies own products to better highlight his vision. Later on Jobs and Apple developed the iPod and it was that move that resurrected Apple and paved the way for the Juggernaut they became. But, when a company sued Apple over the design of the iPod Apple revealed that the design of the iPod was a direct copy of a system, developed in England nearly 20 years earlier, and was now freely copy-able because the inventor could not afford to renew the copy-write. They had him testify in court about his invention and since that preceded the litigants work by many years the case was thrown out. In the end Apple won the case and as thanks Apple gave the inventor an iPod and nothing else -- no money, no appreciation, no stock -- nothing. That was a 100% dick move by Jobs.
Another thing about Apple floppy drives. Most floppy drives had a "track zero" sensor. Even if you didn't know where the head was, you could keep moving it until you detected that it had reached track zero. Apple drives didn't have a track zero sensor so you had to keep slamming the head until it couldn't be anywhere else but track zero.
Well, the C64's 1541 did the same (not as loud, AFAIR though). I used to have an SFD 1001 some time later. Wow, that was a rocket. And you could save 1 MB per disk. Wow. I wans't sure I'll ever need a second one ;)
I agree. I had a II+ and ran away from apple to PC when the Mac became the thing. I'm not a Jobs fan. Their closed architecture approach was not just a poor business decision it was, in my opinion at the time, not honorable. I built a career on PC. I became one of the OS/2 developers. Life was good feeling superior to Apple when it was not doing well and not really taking them seriously when they started selling i products. Since the II, I see them as a marketing company selling the koolaid to fanboys, not a serious innovator. They made things simple that other engineers already got working.
The first computer I learned to use was the Apple II, in grade school. My parents soon purchased our first computer, and I used our Apple IIe (from 1983) up to and including my first year at college in 1991. The computer labs there had IBM PS/2s, so to be able to print from their fancy HP LaserJet series II printers (instead of my 8-pin dot matrix Canon), and to be compatible with other classmates, I switched to an IBM PC compatible 286. The transition was rough, but then again, more games were coming out for the PC with incredible VGA graphics, and 8-bit sound. Then Microsoft Windows 3.0 made its appearance. I dabbled with some Macs here and there, but I had pretty much converted over to IBM PCs. However, to this day, I still miss my Apple IIe.
Genuine question. What made an early 90s PC running DOS that different to an Apple IIe? I’ve always felt the PC was the 16 bit spiritual successor to the Apple II but perhaps I’m missing a stack of stuff.
I'll be honest, I thought Apple was dead until the M1. That being said, it does seem to be a pain in the ass for those of us who use torrents. (There are legal torrents... I'm not saying I do, but for plausible deniability, I'll mention it.) Fortunately I have like 30 computers, so one not cooperating isn't an issue. 🤣
I've held back my choice to get one of the 16" M1X units because of that compatibility. It might also be a translation layer issue, since my Intel units on the same system version aren't handicapped. 🤔 All of that being said, I love having a thin & light with a 20+ hour battery life, and a non-janky keyboard as the models in the middle had. (I was coming from a 2013 Retina; the keyboards in between sucked.)
Very nice video. Technically sound and well, I love the tone and nostalgia. The Apple IIe was the first computer to enter our home (after some long forgotten Micral) and my brother and I love playing Choplifter and Aztec.
23:54 - Apple did not squander the success of the Apple II. The Apple II was too heavily rooted in 1970s bare-metal optimizations to be a good basis for new products in the late 1980s and into the 1990s. But as a reliable money-maker it kept the company going long enough to establish Macintosh as a platform that could carry them forward.
Bare metal optimisations? Please stop the gobbledegook. Speak in meaningful English.
The problem with the Apple 2 was the graphics and sound became dated quickly. The sound capabilities were diabolical and the graphics had no fancy hardware to generate them, so the graphics capabilities were extremely limited.
Animated sprites consisted of very crude "shape tables".
Everything you said about the Apple II line feeling like "The" definitive computer of it's time was absolutely true. There was nothing like it. Nothing came close. They were the koolest computers ever made. Excellent video. Very well done.
Doing an Apple II buyer's guide next! Can't keep away from the subject.
I only mention the Commodore PET and the Tandy. Nothing came close? Ha!
@@bierundkippen720 The PET with it's trapezoidal monitor.
I will say in the movie Jobs, all 3 acts show Woz pointing out that Apple II was apple, even up until the iMac launch.
I don’t know how much personally Jobs cared by the late 90s about the Lisa, but I think the movie was using the fiction to prove your point.
You say you can't use high density floppies on the IIgs? Because I am able to use them just fine. I just load up Copy II Plus (version 9) and then format them no problem. Last night I was running Zany Golf off of an HD floppy I had formatted.
Also you can use the floppy emu with only one other disk but not two. It is kind of a pain. I ended up just copying all the software I wanted from the floppy emu onto actual floppies using Copy II plus.
Copy II Plus...now that's a name I haven't heard in at least 15 years.
Robert Travis Kirton I always liked Nibbler but Copy II Plus was also great, depending on the umm stuff I was trying to uhhh back up lol
Haven't used Copy II Plus or even said that name in over 30 years myself... My family's first computer was an Apple IIe, with the 80-column card, monochrome monitor, serial printer, and Kensington fan add on. We were going to get the much cheaper Franklin clone, but Apple sued them out of business. I think my parents still have it...
How refreshing that someone finally understands the significance of the //gs. Had Jobs not interfered, we'd all be running Apple today. For the sake of control and IN-THE-BOX thinking, Jobs destroyed Apple's ability to compete with PCs. And ironically, Apple is doing it again today with their phones vs Android. The most important capability people want in a computer or phone or ANY technology, is COMPATABILITY. Jobs turned Apple from a company that made great technology, to one that sold elitism, the idea that if you used their products, you were better than other people, smarter, more creative. His genius was, and still is, marketing. Fooling the public into buying lesser quality products because of a logo.
The 65816 retains the two-phase memory access cadence of the 6502 - you get half a cycle to satisfy any memory access. Therefore a 4Mhz 65816 would require RAM that could provide 8m access/second. That's twice the bandwidth of e.g. the Atari ST.
The CPU wasn't neutered by Jobs, no matter how pleasant a conspiracy theory that might be; it was actually pretty aggressive for the types of RAM then available. Performance is lower than the real 16-bit machines both because the 65816 uses only an 8-bit bus, and because it inherits the increasingly-false premise of the 6502, i.e. that RAM isn't a bottleneck on CPU performance.
This video sold me on a IIgs
Great video, thanks for posting it. Totally brings me back! I desperately wanted a II but had to “settle” for a C64, which I ended up loving ... literally to death. Enjoy your machines!
It’s all relative. I always wanted a C64 but had to settle for an Atari 8-bit.
I really DISAGREE with Apple II have an impact on the computer industry.
Between 1977 and 1993 5.5 million Apple II's were sold.
In a shorter period of time Between 1979 and 1993 5 million Atari XL,XE computers were sold, and another 2.2 million Atari ST computers where sold for about 7 million in total.
From 1982 to 1993, 15 million commodore 64 were sold, millions more Vic 20's, Commodore 128, etc were sold, and another 5 million Amigas were sold, reaching probably more than 30 million or much more computers sold, in a much shorter time period.
Even computers that many americans never heard about like the Sinclair out sold the Apple II.
Thus I beg to differ that the Apple II was an impact on the industry, and not even a foot note. It's importance, is all too exaggerated, as almost NO BODY had an Apple II computer(no matter the model, II+, IIc, IIe, IIgs, etc..), except for the models sold to grade schools and highschools.
The computers that really changed home computing was the Altair, and S-100 computers. What most people don't realize, is that card were sold to plug in monitors, keyboards, and floppy drives and these were very funcional computers with Gary Kildall's CP/M. In fact majority serious businesses used S-100 computers with CP/M instead of Apple II, before IBM came into the picture.
Thus niether was Apple II the first home computer, and FAR from the most popular, in fact one of the least popular in homes… but schools sure did have them.
Without Jobs, Apple 2 and Newton, there'd be no iPhone.
Jobs should have focused on the IIgs. He could have released a IIgs in a Mac form factor with a 9" hi-res color monitor, 16 bit 8 MHz processor, built-in 3 1/2 floppy drive, multimedia sound, 1 Mbyte of RAM with a GUI OS for under a thousand dollars back in 1984. The original Mac had 128k RAM, monochrome graphics and was just too expensive for most.
Personally I think Woz had the wrong idea here, and the IIgs actually demonstrates that pretty well in my opinion.
Basically, while it's true that the success of the Apple II carried Apple, gave them the resources to try other things and weather the failures that came out of that work... But I don't think Woz's concept of endlessly extending and enhancing the Apple II made much sense. Maintaining backward compatibility in a computing platform becomes a technical burden, and new iterations of the hardware face the risk of being dominated by that legacy software base they're trying to build upon. What they needed to do was more or less what they did: Keep capitalizing on the success of the Apple II, and use that to fund development of the next big thing for the company. I think Commodore faced much the same problem: the Commodore 64 was very successful, but that wasn't going to last forever, and it wasn't a good foundation to build a new computing platform on - it wasn't a platform where you could change things and just expect everything to keep on working.
In the case of the IIgs this resulted in it inheriting a lot of technical baggaged from the IIe like the 1MHz expansion cards and the 140kB floppy disks. Architecturally is was some new hardware built around, and synchronizing with, an Apple IIe core. I don't think it was a very good foundation for a new computing platform in 1986, let alone something that would be expected to continue through the 1990s. The PC managed this kind of long-term growth but with the result that the platform was still mired in that 1980s motif up through the late 1990s (i.e. dealing with the real-mode DOS environment and memory model, especially for gaming) - and then it succeeded largely because IBM gave up control of the platform.
In middle school we used Apple computers, but in high school? We used Windows 2000 PCs!
I had a C64 at home, but I spent so much time on the Apple II at school it's insane.
It's truth, and all we wanted to do was play Oregon Trail.
So when did this massive downhill spiral into rampant capitalism start and iMacs and iPads burning up with an a year or two because I remember at least into the 90s and apple were still regarded as higher quality than a standard Windows PC and this is probably around g2 days. I've watched so many videos of both forms of modern PC small form burning up more than 2 years and the Apple fuse is not even Scorched in still running a current any opinions on this I'm not a troll cos I've hardly used apple all this is from research so I'm just interested please don't attack (and now presenting the (ICrap). This comment is not perhaps due to design or function but build quality and reliability and safety really
Thank you for making this, I really enjoyed it and learned a few new things.
Woz created the machine, Jobs warmed his hands. Greatest parasite in history ! I and C64 was better in fact, Apple II graphics was nightmare for game programmers.
In a year of 80’s or 90’s Byte magazine summarised the last 15 years of PC history by following Apple.
Great video! Those are some fine points you bring up regarding the Apple II's place in history. Woz is seriously kind to Jobs considering how much of a jerk Jobs was to basically everyone. But one thing you can say for Jobs is that he did eventually learn from his mistakes. It's difficult to say what would have happened if the IIgs had proceeded as the next generation instead of the Mac. Certainly Apple would have gained market share, would have made more profits, lost less money, over those dark years after the exile. But what about later? Would they have ever become the Apple of today without their dark night the soul? Reminds me of any number of stories told over the years, such as Star Trek TNG's "Tapestry" S06E15 where Q allows Picard to go back and prevent the Nausicaan from stabbing him in the heart, and how that deconstructs his entire life.
2:33 PCI-e is a bit more widely used than just those Microsoft-compatibles, you know.
The Apple IIgs' design was so sleek! I really miss those designs from the 80s (including the Atari ST, Amiga, Acorn and some of the Apricots).
So Jobs "invented" his "own" computer...trying to level up with Woz and his Apple II without knowing a bit of electronics. Hmm..
Pretty much. He should have left the engineering to the engineers. To his credit, he did that later when he returned to Apple. But he nearly ran that company into the ground on his first go-around.
I've always been a PC guy myself, save for the IIe and Mac experiences in grade school... but still this was wonderfully interesting and informative. Great work! I know now to thank the II line (and Wozniak) for a lot of what I love about PC compatibles.
11:45 Yes, there was “computing history” back then. The University’s first computer from decades earlier-an IBM 1130-lay in various pieces in the foyer of the Computer Services department. ACM SIGPLAN held a special symposium on the history of various notable programming languages, including LISP. So there was already a widespread awareness of what had gone before, and how it was important to preserve some of it in a museum rather than chuck it out in the trash.
It's funny when people act like computers started in the late '70s ... when, of course, there were giant vac-tube machines in the '40s ... and special-purpose mechanical computers in the 19th Century.
Mac 128K is a Countach with a 4 cylinder diesel engine and a 3-speed auto transmission. IIGs is a Mini Cooper with a V12 fuel injected engine with four spark plugs missing.
Well said thoughts on the Apple 2 Series. I was totally polarized when i first used the 2e. I was taking a beginners programming class in "introduction to Dos" I was currently running an Texas Instruments ti-994a at home (With all excessories: disk drive, tape, cartridge,synthesizer,etc.) traded my buddy A Sega Master System at the time. Anyways, in the Computer class i came across the original Apple 1 (wooded box) and next to it an Apple 2E brand new that just came in. I was young but this older kid turned it on and showed me some basics with it. (I was hooked) IBM at the time didn't interest me much, (boring/dull) I still finished my writing of a Dos program and passed the class. I played on all but the original (1) series . The apple 2c was kinda cool to mess around with but the apple 2E was the one I found in every class room and easily available at the library. When I found the Apple 2 gs "Woz edition" sitting in the back area of the computer lab... That one I think had 512 kbs or more ram. The owner who also had a fondness for the 2 gs let me play with it (i had amassed about 3000 programs by the time I stumbled upon the GS. So many fond memories messing with Apple 2 series. It's a real shame Wozniak couldn't take this to his ultimate vision. :(
Thanks for posting this video, It sure has made me think of those great times "computing" as a kid and young adult. (magical) :) P. S. I never actually owned an apple until I bought a "Tiger computer", An Apple clone. I found it at Sears clearance, But that didn't last long after Mother put all my computer stuff in the garage that cold winter. (lost everything) (All my Software was destroyed also)
Thanks for the comment - reading that last part was painful! Those Tiger computers are now worth a decent amount of money from what I understand. They were actually made by Apple, and were (if I remember right) the "last Apple II".
Yeah :( I was Devastated seeing my computer stuff sitting in the garage :( I ended up moving out and buying my first Packard Bell 486 sx 25. The one thing that stayed/resonated with me in the first years without my apple was "Is this suppose to be better?" Referring to my new purchase running Windows 3.1. I still think about it my old apple and the Ti-994a I had. Great times when I was a kid (Doctor Who on Tv) :)
Ha, I got a Packard Bell 486 SX25 after my Apple II as well :) I'll have a TI-99/4A one of these days - one of my friends had one as a kid, and it's my mission to eventually have every computer I had any experience with at all from those days. if you want to buy one again, they are one of the last common retro systems that you can still easily find in perfect shape complete in the box for $50. I'm actually holding out for new old stock myself :)
We both had very great childhoods and wonderful times playing around with these great computer systems :) As much a I would love to have my Donkey Kong (ti-994a) or Arkanoid for apple (the synth board also sounded pretty awesome playing music on the Tiger) I just don't have the time or space to set something like that up. :( I'll be glad to live through you, Posting videos on this great subject matter. :) Growing up in the Eighties, In my early teens, Is/was the best of times (God Bless America!) And Thank you again for bringing back a dear cherished memory of my youth. (feelings of that kid) :)
You may already know this but with the Ti/99 I reccomend staying away from the beige case units. Some of them have an 'updated' bios that locks out any game cartridge not made by TI themselves. SD cartridges and probably other things won't work on these models. The only way to tell if a Beige unit has that Bios is to look for the Bios version number when you power the computer on. The stainless models are much more sexy anyway IMO.
Nothing new with Jobs. He was always a hypocrite. Won't be like 1984, except closed gardens and proprietary systems at higher cost... Always astounded how the public eats up Apple BS.
It's always cute to see PC fanboys defending their 90% supremacy from the overwhelming evil power of the 5% XD
These products were totally unaffordable in Europe.
I saw a box of 800k double sided double density discs at Goodwill recently, but didn't grab them up, as I have no use for them. They were formatted for PC, but could be re-formatted for Apple. #ThriftyAV
感到對一個網上國際化事業有興趣！
I had the TRS-80 COCO2 and a close friend of mine had the Apple IIe. I was always jealous of his hardware. Maybe it was the screen and that amber on black screen for text.
Using new computers to be able to use older computers. It might seem ridiculous to some but I see the beauty in it
PC took over. I started building PC's in 1991. Offices we replaced computers with had IBM computers, and schools still had Apple computers in them. Good stuff from old times. I learned programming on Tandy's computer lol
Long live the Apple ][ 💖💖💖
Update, as of December 2019, Apple does sell a Macintosh with 8 PCIe upgrade slots.
What an asshole Jobs was... it's common sense to create a machine that's backward compatible to maintain your user base. Why in hell did Jobs want to create a completely new system? And a crappier one at that. He could've just worked with Woz and combine the features of mac + Apple IIGS. A backward compatible, G+S Mac. Not really surprised he got fired. He had his head up his ass instead of focusing on the good of the company.
Jobs was selfish. When he worked at Atari and received a bonus for reducing the amount of chips in the Breakout circuit board, he lied to his friend Woz who did all the work and only gave him a small portion of the bonus money that he received. Also, at least Bill Gates later became a philanthropist while Jobs will be remembered for the iPod (proprietary media player) and the over priced iPhone and iPad.
Interesting and informative video about the Apple II... The computer for the rest of us, as one commercial back then stated.
I have a 2c and a Dell desktop and laptop here in Hoosier Land.
I loved the Apple II. Do you remember the EAMON adventure games? I would love to play those again.
I really feel that at the time Apple screwed up when it went with the Mac.... I didn't own a IIGS but I had a friend who did and seeing it in action (playing games, digitizing sound, ect.) it just blew me away. Had the CPU not been hobbled it probably would have went toe to toe with the Amiga in some aspects.
The business asshole guys (Jobs) tend to win over the tech guys (Woz).
Interesting video. It is a shame that the 2GS did not include drive bays for 3.5 and 5 1/2 disk drives.
My first PC was an Apple IIc. I still have the original box of Wizardry with disc & manual. I loved that machine. At first we used to buy magazines that only had basic code in them & I spent countless hours typing in this code and error checking it myself to make my own games etc. I self learned basic this way. Mac in black in white blah! Nor could my parents afford one.
I ended up getting a Commodore 64 & then the Amiga 2000 in approx 1991. Sadly Commodore was the red headed step child of computers which didn't get a foothold in education or business. I always thought that Apple lost it with the Mac & then they let the expand-ability of WinTel (Windows & Intel) machines to take over not only the business market but the games/home market. People underestimate the power of the gamer community, especially back then.
I finally broke down and bought a Gateway 2000 (Cow Box lol) 386DX2-66 after I learned a game I wanted (Wing Commander) would never be ported over to Amiga. Nowadays its common that functions (CPU, Graphics & Sound) are separated out. Today its Nvidia GPU's etc, Amiga had (Agnus, Paula & Denise) back then.
I ended up doing all the first generation computer work for the USNavy & ultimately left the Navy & became a MCSE for 10+ years. My mom still thinks the best money she ever spent was on that IIc. She says it kept me out of trouble. LOL
In contrast to what you said at around 19:30, while Commodore disc drives were 'intelligent', they lacked an optical head sensor, so they needed to bang the read head the exact the same way your Apple disc drives do in the event of a disc error or something requiring a reset of the heads to a known position.
Exactly - and on the Commodore 5 1/4 drives all that knocking eventually knocked the drive heads out of alignment. It was quite a design flaw that could have been remedied by a simple switch.
I loved my apple II and my IIGS. I have one of the waz signed IIGS (allthough i did have apple upgrade the rom from the 00 to the 01 back in the day it was a free upgrade).
and yes Jobs kept the GS from competing with they mac by keeping the cpu slow and redirecting development from it. that is what made me mad at Apple and why I bought a PC.
Same here. Woz's Apple was my Apple; when Jobs started forcing his philosophy of computer design on the company, I lost interest.
Waz? W A Z?
steve wozniak sure it should have been woz but what ever. I am only human and we are prone to errors. any way my apple IIGS is one of the initial releases that was signed.
5:07
That a winner's face
12:20 "Imagine still using an 8-bit computer as your primary computer in 1993..." The truly hilarious and truly true truth is that even the 1 MHz original apple 2 will scroll its display extremely-noticeably orders of magnitude faster than even the most souped-up super-computer of today...and that is because its text buffer is orders of magnitude smaller than even 360 x 480 graphics. Svelte design, whilst a thing long gone, is an art all its own, unappreciated more and more as the years press on.
Yep had my first Computer experience on an Apple IIe and now and build PCs. I credit that more to The Waz than to Jobs.
why did they choose the 666.666 price? Anyone know?
I remember the Apple 2's...
They were seriously quite obsolete by the time I ran into them, but it's the computers my primary school had.
(to give you some idea of how obsolete they actually were, at home we had a 486 at the same time)
The IIGS though... It's like it was deliberately sabotaged to make the more expensive Macintosh look better.
Even though it seems to have been the better system.
It's also the only one of two systems I know of that uses the 65816 - the other being the SNES...
I wonder if the slow processors those systems had was nessesary though - we see with the SNES that it eventually got a coprocessor which was itself a 65816, but which ran at over 10 mhz. (about 3-4 times faster than the original SNES CPU)
This was in 1995 though. So the question remains, were those kinds of clockspeeds attainable with a 65816 when the SNES was launched? How about when the IIGS was?
(Incidentally, 65816's are still being sold - the readymade chips run at 14 mhz, but an FPGA core version was made to run at more than 200 mhz)
Anyway...
The weaknesses of the IIGS seem kinda deliberate. Which is a shame...
I own many vintage computers from the C64/128, Amiga, Atari 800, and the //e and //gs... I have been both a Diversi-Dial user and SysOp and a C64 BBS SysOp... I was so happy to hear you mention D-Dial as it seems a forgotten part of our history, thank you! Even the programmer, Bill Basham seems to want to forget D-Dial. If you ever want to learn more about that package or C-Net 64n and 128 BBS software feel free to contact me, I am happy to discuss the old days.. :)
You should be able to format a HD disk as DD. Just be sure to do it in a DD drive (Some HD disks formatted DD on a HD drive will not be readable in a DD drive)
I use to have Apple 2 e. I give to my brother. i wish still have it
so... this could have been the "default standard normal computer" instead of ibm pc if it wasn't for steve jobs.
Pretty much... Of course a lot of other things would have had to line up right, and even if that happened you could argue that it's better for Apple if it didn't. IBM themselves no longer make PCs - the clones knocked them out of the market. So I gave one side in the video, but I acknowledge that it's all in how you look at things.
When the IIgs was popular most of us used a Hard Drive, now a good option is a device that uses a CF card as a hard drive. Floppies were never that common on the IIgs, except as a way to distribute software, and many IIgs programs require a hard drive.
For nostalgia you want original common config, which included an accelerator for most people, and again a lot of software requires an accelerator.
Great video
Great video, just a note though. You mention several times that the Apple II was successful and compare the c64 dis-favorably. In fact all Apple II models sold come to about 5-6 million units, whereas the all c64 models, from the Breadbin to 64sx, C128 and 64c sold around 17.5 million. Commodore just happened to make FAR worse mistakes with the Amiga than Apple did with the Mac.
6:24 Jef Raskin. Great guy. When he was alive he would regularly answer emails and even AOL Instant Messages from regular people like me who wanted to pick his brain. RIP Jef Raskin.