In 1977, three new microcomputers appeared on the scene that broke free from the industry’s hobbyist roots: the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80. Much later, in the 1990s, journalists and historians began reverently referring to this group as “the Trinity.” Though all three machines had different origins and different trajectories (Apple, for example, appeared in 1978 to be an also-ran before rising to eclipse all of its rivals), the distinctiveness of the 1977 generation of computers is not merely a retrospective imputation by later writers. The hobby journalists of the time recognized that with the Trinity, something like an “appliance” computer had arrived on the scene, “a clean break from commercial and hobbyist computer systems requiring technical skill and dedication from their operators into a consumer market where no qualifications are required of the customer.”[1]
Three factors were required to join this holy ensemble: the technical expertise to design a capable and reliable microcomputer, a nose for the larger business opportunity latent in the hobby computer market, and the capital resources to produce, market, and sell thousands (or even tens of thousands) of computers per month. Most of all it required a certain measure of daring, a willingness to a take a leap in the dark.
After all, the transformation of the microcomputer hobby into a large-scale commercial enterprise came as a surprise to most outsiders. In 1977, the established mainframe and minicomputer makers remained cooly aloof from the microcomputer business. Clearly, computer enthusiasts had found in the Altair and its successors a fascinating gadget to occupy their spare hours. It did not necessarily follow that these toys had anything to do with the “real” computer business, any more than model rocketry had to do with putting a man on the moon. In a la of the leading minicomputer makers, Hewlett-Packard and Digital, were offered ready-made micro designs by computing-loving engineers within their ranks (Steve Wozniak and Dave Ahl, respectively), but both rejected the idea, unwilling to pursue a fringe market that seemed to have nothing to do with their business.[2]
Even many of the hobbyists themselves didn’t believe that the market for a home computer would extend much beyond the existing circle of electronic hobbyists and computer enthusiasts. But a few people with access to deep pockets (not necessarily their own) smelled an opportunity in the microcomputer, and decided to pursue it, and those people formed the breaking edge of the second wave of personal computers.
The obvious place to start to tell the story of the second wave is Apple Computer: not because it is, retrospectively, the most well-known of the three, but because it had the deepest roots in the first-wave hobby community. Commodore and Tandy were well-established companies, dragged into the computer business almost against their will by internal agitators who believed fervently in the idea of the personal computer. Apple was founded by and for hobbyists. If not for the fickle whims of fate and the chutzpah of Steve Jobs, it would have met a quiet demise in total obscurity, like so many other hobby computer companies of the day.
Apple Computer
The story of Apple Computer (later, simply Apple) continues to fascinate because of the company’s massive economic success and cultural impact (first in the early 1980s, then again in the twenty-first century), because of its meteoric rise from humble beginnings, and because of the vivid and contrasting personalities of its two primary co-founders: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. No other topic I will cover in this series has a comparably extensive literature: all of the known details of the early years of the two Steves and their company could fill more than one book (and have). Here we can note only the most important highlights.
What became the first Apple computer began as an anonymous circuit board, the product of an intense burst of creative energy by Steven “Woz” Wozniak. Wozniak’s engineer father moved his family to Sunnyvale, California, at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, in the late 1950s, to take a job at Lockheed. The younger Wozniak developed an early fascination with electronics, and he came of age in the perfect environment to feed and reinforce that fascination: a suburban neighborhood teeming with engineer dads on every block, who had bins full of parts and minds full of expertise to lend to the eager young gadget enthusiasts who roamed the sidewalks.[3]
By the time Woz graduated from high school in 1968, he had grown into a true electronics genius, with a level of insight and skill far beyond the typical hobbyist. He could envision a design that would produce the desired effect in the most efficient way possible, with the elegant finality of a mathematical proof. Socially isolated, he lived an inward life of imagination, spending every spare moment at home and in school sketching designs for electronic systems. His social awkwardness dwelled side-by-side with a love of pranks and juvenile humor: in his early twenties he ran a Dial-a-Joke service out of his home that played pre-recorded Polack jokes from an answering machine.[4]
His high school electronics teacher gave Wozniak the opportunity to make weekly visits to a nearby corporate computer center, and he learned about minicomputers from the trade literature at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). Like many other young men of his generation, these brushes with computing got him pining for his own computer; unlike most of them, he decided to do something about it. In 1971, while a student at University of California, Berkeley, he built a home computer with the help of a younger friend, a high school student named Bill Fernandez. This “Cream Soda Computer,” named for the beverage that fueled its creation, was roughly similar in character and capabilities to the Kenbak-1 sold by John Blankenbaker that same year: a very basic processor, a tiny memory, and a handful of lights for output. Meanwhile, Woz continued to pore over the brochures and manuals for dream machines like the Data General Nova minicomputer, and to work out schematics on paper for minicomputers of his own design.[5]
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