GoKawiilWhen you think of Apple, you probably think of the iPhone, or maybe the Mac, or perhaps you’ve got fond memories of the iPod. But Apple’s 50-year run of creating tech products that people fall in love with — sometimes a lot of people, sometimes just a hardy few — would never have happened if it weren’t for a product and platform that’s been gone for decades.
Apple would never have made it if it weren’t for the Apple II, the company’s first hit product and the first one to generate the amount of devotion we’ve now come to expect from fans of Apple’s products. Their slogan was, and still is, “Apple II Forever!”
1977 Apple II advertisement Macmothership.com
Let’s go back to the dawn of consumer tech: the 1970s. The first personal computers emerged in this era, but they were largely sold as DIY kits. You’d buy a circuit board, separately buy all the chips and other elements required to assemble the computer (switches, keys), and put the whole thing together yourself. Apple’s first computer (the Apple I, designed by Steve Wozniak) was sold this way, too.
The first computer made by Apple Computers Inc. Most home computer users in the 1970s were hobbyists who designed and assembled their own machines. The Apple I, devised in a bedroom by Steve Wozniak, Steven Jobs and Ron Wayne, was a basic circuit board to which enthusiasts would add display units and keyboards. Photo by SSPL/Getty Images
In 1976, the owner of an early computer store, the Byte Shop, surprised Steve Jobs by suggesting that Apple would sell more computers if they came preassembled. Apple also experimented with wooden cases that you could put all the bits inside. Jobs quickly realized that Wozniak’s next design could reach a much bigger audience if it was packaged as a consumer product complete with built-in keyboard and set about figuring out how to make a plastic case for that preassembled computer.
Released in 1977, the Apple II was a beige plastic computer with an included keyboard. You had to plug it into a monitor or television, which you could stack right on top. The computer itself cost $1,298 (the equivalent of $7,000 today) — monitor sold separately. It felt more like a real product than anything else the personal computer world was churning out.
These were very primitive machines. The Apple II could generate rudimentary color graphics, but you ran it and programmed it by typing commands. You’d either get results, or if you missed a keystroke, error beeps combined with a response like ?SYNTAX ERROR. You could type in computer programs or load them in by attaching a cassette tape player (the same as you’d later find in a Sony Walkman) and pressing play, which would translate a digital whine recorded onto the tape into a runnable program.
Instructor Sally Waisbrot teaching Jonathan Schoor during a session at ‘Computer Camp East’ in East Haddam, Connecticut, July 16th 1981. A television set at back is functioning as a display for the Apple II computer. Photo by UPI/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Apple sold enough of those initial Apple II models to get some momentum, but loading programs by cassette was slow and miserable. Something needed to be done, so Jobs found a company that made a 5.25-inch floppy disk drive. Rather than use the supplier’s design, Apple arranged to buy them half-assembled for a deep discount. Wozniak then designed a new, cheap, elegant controller board for the drive that outdid the supplier’s design — a dazzling engineering achievement that also happened to benefit the bottom line. By June 1978, Apple had the most affordable disk drive on the planet. More importantly, it was now much easier to write and save programs — and to buy and sell software. The Apple II software world exploded, which led to even more computer sales. The company’s revenue grew 640% in 1979 and 230% in 1980.
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