00:00:33 ◼ ► At $1,298, it includes features you won't find on other personal computers costing twice as much.
00:00:42 ◼ ► Welcome back to Design in California. That was from Apple's introduction ad for the Apple II.
00:00:49 ◼ ► And finally, on today's episode, we're going to talk about the Apple II and what it offers.
00:00:59 ◼ ► Hi, Mike. We are back in time to finally tell the story of what Woz has been working on.
00:01:10 ◼ ► All right. So one of the threads I wanted to follow, obviously, is the development of Apple
00:01:14 ◼ ► and the relationship and the business, but I have been alluding to the fact that in the background,
00:01:23 ◼ ► And I thought for this episode, we could talk a little bit about that process of what Woz was doing and how the Apple II came to be.
00:01:31 ◼ ► Because throughout the story we've been telling about 1976, which is built around Apple using the Apple I design to create a product they could sell,
00:01:48 ◼ ► And just as the work that he had done building a video terminal had crystallized his work building the Apple I, where he's like, oh, I could take the computer and the video circuitry, put them together and have a computer that had video circuitry on it.
00:02:02 ◼ ► Oh, yes, yes. For this, it was also the case that display innovations drove the work on the Apple II because Woz wanted colour.
00:02:13 ◼ ► Some PC makers offered colour add-on cards, but Woz wanted to make a computer that could offer colour right out of the box.
00:02:22 ◼ ► He wanted you to be able to plug his computer into a colour TV, which keep in mind, colour TVs weren't even that common 10 years before.
00:02:36 ◼ ► Why then? Why did they do that? People were just excited? They wanted to upgrade their TV to a better TV for that time?
00:02:42 ◼ ► They wanted to upgrade their TVs. But if you've ever wondered, which you probably haven't, but I did, why all those characters on Star Trek wear brightly coloured uniforms?
00:02:50 ◼ ► The answer is because NBC wanted to advertise that they were putting their shows in colour, so they had a brightly coloured Star Trek.
00:03:01 ◼ ► I guess, like, kind of in the way that people will upgrade their television for the Super Bowl or something like that.
00:03:09 ◼ ► It's the exact same motivation. And look, Walter Cronkite was in colour. It's just that the vision from the moon was not in colour. But Walter Cronkite was in colour.
00:03:18 ◼ ► Considering they shot the moon landing in a TV studio, you could have used colour, you know what I mean?
00:03:25 ◼ ► OK. This is not an ahistorical podcast, but it's a historical podcast. So Wallace says, you know, colour TV. It's great. I want colour computer. Out of the box.
00:03:35 ◼ ► His big breakthrough, technically, involved taking advantage of the fact that he was going to integrate the video side and the computer side into a single hole. So remember, the Apple One, he was like, OK, I got this terminal that will connect to, like, the ARPANET.
00:03:47 ◼ ► It's just a dumb terminal, but it's a keyboard and a TV out. And he's like, and I have a computer. It's like, oh, I can put them together. But it was still sort of like both things were together on the circuit board.
00:03:56 ◼ ► For this computer, he's going to integrate it all into a whole. And then he has a real leap of imagination where he realizes that unlike all the computers that had been built before the personal computer, which were shared systems, personal computers were personal.
00:04:17 ◼ ► They had single users. And this is an important technical understanding. People are slow, way slower than microprocessors. Even microprocessors in 1976 are way faster than people, right?
00:04:31 ◼ ► So Waz created a ticking clock that let his computer switch between using memory to draw on the screen and executing commands on the microprocessor.
00:04:44 ◼ ► OK. So the computer moves so fast that it can very efficiently draw a line on the screen and then do some work and then draw a line on the screen.
00:04:54 ◼ ► He literally uses the display itself via his expertise in designing display circuitry as the ticking clock.
00:05:02 ◼ ► When the computer is drawing one line of the display, everything is focused on drawing that line.
00:05:08 ◼ ► In the interval, when that line is not being drawn and the display is going back to draw the next line, because that's how these things work, is they're like a line at a time firing off and you fill the whole display and you do that every 25 or 30 times a second, right?
00:05:39 ◼ ► So the ticking clock is the lines of the display, not the frames of the display, the lines in a frame on the display.
00:05:50 ◼ ► But again, megahertz, kilohertz, megahertz, like these are thousands of cycles a second, way faster than a human being or a TV.
00:06:01 ◼ ► So this is a leap never made before because so few people were designing personal computers.
00:06:07 ◼ ► So the computers that were being designed were being designed with the principles of computers of old.
00:06:25 ◼ ► And people have argued, and I think it is a decent argument, that this defines what a personal computer is.
00:06:32 ◼ ► The idea that it's a merging of a computer and display output in a single user environment where you can switch between what's on the screen and what processing needs to be done because you're not a microcomputer.
00:06:59 ◼ ► That the computer is, even at this stage, already faster than the, say, as you said, like 30 frames a second that would be needed to draw on a screen effectively, right, if we're boiling it down.
00:07:12 ◼ ► So he has worked out that the computer is moving so quickly that it is able to do more processing within the time period of where it's waiting for the television to catch up with it, essentially.
00:07:24 ◼ ► So he's able to kind of do so much more in the Apple II itself while waiting in between the moments where it needs to draw upon the television screen.
00:07:38 ◼ ► I mean, the 6502 processor that was used in the Apple II runs at a little bit over a megahertz.
00:08:24 ◼ ► The breakthrough is that the display is part of the process of being a computer instead of it being a thing the computer offloads to.
00:08:37 ◼ ► He makes sure that the Apple II's video circuitry runs at exactly four times the speed of the standard TV frequency, right?
00:08:46 ◼ ► So they're going to do it a little bit more than you originally thought because they have to do not just 15,000, they have to do 63,000.
00:09:02 ◼ ► But what he realized is the way that NTSC video works, by dropping pixels at specific times in the cycle, quarters of a time of the cycle, the dots come out red, green, or blue.
00:09:22 ◼ ► If you think about all of this, like this is a cathode ray tube, you know, being drawn on by a gun.
00:09:30 ◼ ► And he's hacked the way it draws on screen to be able to get red, green, blue combinations thereof in order to do color.
00:09:39 ◼ ► So this kind of breaking it down into these parts, it highlights now when we go back to PC76, why people were so blown away when they would see this thing operating in a hotel room.
00:09:52 ◼ ► Because now we're understanding just how different this was to the things like the soul.
00:10:00 ◼ ► And if you recall, the origins of the Apple I were Waz looking at somebody else's computer circuit board design and saying, I could design that with fewer chips, right?
00:10:13 ◼ ► And that has benefits to the computer, to the heat, the energy, the speed, the efficiency, and the cost to make it.
00:10:27 ◼ ► Because the Apple I was really those two devices in one, the chips from the TV terminal and the chips for the computer, he's going to make one integrated thing.
00:10:44 ◼ ► He also is working on adding support for sound and having a speaker attached to the computer because the Apple I was silent.
00:11:14 ◼ ► But just to be clear, other computers in this era, if you wanted to program on them, you had to do something like turn them on and then load off of a tape the operating system, which would be like BASIC programming.
00:11:26 ◼ ► Or in some of them, you had to just turn them on and then type in the operating system for half an hour, and then you could use it.
00:11:34 ◼ ► So this is going to come literally, if you turn it on, you could just start typing in programs because it's in the read-only memory BASIC programming language.
00:11:42 ◼ ► As Waz told, I believe, David Pogue for his Apple First 50 Years book, it wasn't just twice as good.
00:12:02 ◼ ► Waz wanted the Apple II to come with eight expansion slots, which would allow people to add all sorts of functionality to the computer after the fact.
00:12:10 ◼ ► We can't wait to see what you do with it, to coin a phrase, because it could be anything.
00:12:15 ◼ ► Things that Waz thought about but thought, I can't put that in every one, but people who need it could add it after the fact.
00:12:22 ◼ ► I think anybody who knows anything about Steve Jobs, the guy who never wanted buttons or switches on anything, was opposed to expansion slots.
00:12:36 ◼ ► They thought about this, but Waz won, and he was absolutely right, because those slots opened up the enormous potential of the Apple II.
00:12:49 ◼ ► Waz told Walter Isaacson in the Steve Jobs biography, I knew that people like me would eventually come up with things to add to any computer.
00:12:56 ◼ ► So he really is thinking of this as a platform for other people to build on top of, which was another great insight and is why he was right to fight jobs on this.
00:13:10 ◼ ► Like if we jump forward in history, because I, again, like this is just not something that I experienced.
00:13:16 ◼ ► So like, I can't think of what, you know, you have eight slots on the Apple II, what would go into them over time?
00:13:22 ◼ ► So the Apple II didn't come with a floppy disk drive, and we'll be talking about that later.
00:13:33 ◼ ► You run it through a little door in the back, and then the floppy disks sit there, and then that's how you use the disk drive.
00:13:46 ◼ ► That was taken care of, although you could, I think, buy a display card and add maybe a different kind of, like an RGB display or something.
00:14:05 ◼ ► Like for a while I was doing, as a teenager, I did some contract work for a local company doing data entry for a database they wanted.
00:14:15 ◼ ► You could get a CPM card and put it in there, and you could basically reboot the Apple II into CPM and use WordStar and use a database and all these programs that didn't run on standard Apple computers.
00:14:36 ◼ ► So all sorts of stuff like that that you could think of that were for specialized or general interest.
00:14:41 ◼ ► I think there was an 80-column card at one point, which basically you could, instead of the original display, was 40 characters across, but you could take it up to 80.
00:15:00 ◼ ► This is the thing that now almost seems obvious to us, which is he created an accessory market.
00:15:06 ◼ ► And the accessory market, by creating that platform, helped the Apple II be more than Apple ever anticipated it could be, because people could build on top of it.
00:15:20 ◼ ► Over the series so far, we've spoken about the importance of the future of computing being that these things would sit inside of boxes, that they were designed to be all in one.
00:15:35 ◼ ► So why don't we take a break now, and when we come back, we can look at what was this case, and how on earth did they get there?
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00:19:09 ◼ ► To this day, Apple tries very hard to sell computers without fans, even though fans are very good
00:19:20 ◼ ► Well, back in the 70s, computers that were in cases, not out in the open air, needed fans.
00:20:01 ◼ ► As Steve Jobs put it, he was a chain-smoking Marxist who had been through many marriages
00:20:20 ◼ ► He tells the Steve Jobs kid a very high hourly consulting rate to build the power supply.
00:20:56 ◼ ► Stories go that he recognized early, like, what motivated Waz and did a lot of managing up,
00:21:07 ◼ ► And I think Waz probably had respect for Rod Holt because he was not only older, but an
00:21:22 ◼ ► So I think Rod Holt ends up being a good counterbalance for Waz saying, you know, you can't do it that
00:21:38 ◼ ► for somebody like Steve Jobs, who might not know some of the technical details and might
00:22:05 ◼ ► Switches the power off and on thousands of times a second, which allows it to remain cooler.
00:22:10 ◼ ► Steve Jobs said later, that switching power supply was as revolutionary as the Apple II logic
00:22:28 ◼ ► But I have good news for Steve Jobs, wherever he might be today, in whatever dimension he
00:22:56 ◼ ► But for the Apple II, this is the big moment is that that power supply, which does run cool
00:23:10 ◼ ► But yes, especially if you put a lot of cards in there, it got kind of hot in there and
00:23:28 ◼ ► Key person and having the analog engineer on the team, filling out a part of Apple's product
00:23:47 ◼ ► Which leads to a bunch of other stuff, like more efficient use of memory and fewer chips.
00:23:57 ◼ ► The way that he has worked out how to kind of have the processes draw and process, draw
00:24:11 ◼ ► It's all thinking about the fact that these devices run so fast that you need to change
00:24:37 ◼ ► Well, I guess it's that funny thing of the Apple II sitting in between the existing technology
00:24:44 ◼ ► So it's faster than a TV, and it's faster than electricity in a way, but it doesn't require
00:25:10 ◼ ► So the Apple I lesson, it was supposed to make it easier for hobbyists to build their own
00:25:14 ◼ ► Then Paul Terrell at the Byte Shop funds to make it a project to assemble motherboards.
00:25:32 ◼ ► He was also undoubtedly influenced by the Sol, which he saw in Atlantic City in its metal box
00:25:53 ◼ ► And what Jobs told his biographer, Walter Isaacson, is my vision was to create the first fully
00:26:00 ◼ ► We were no longer aiming for the handful of hobbyists who like to assemble their own computers,
00:26:08 ◼ ► For every one of them, there were a thousand people who would want the machine to be ready to
00:26:45 ◼ ► We view it as the Apple I happened and they did that and then they made the Apple II and
00:27:09 ◼ ► They're productizing Apple I a little bit, but Waz is building Apple II and Jobs is starting
00:27:17 ◼ ► So Jobs knew, and this is one of those things that it's like, it's almost intuitive to Steve
00:27:25 ◼ ► It's one of his special powers, that how a product was marketed and packaged determined how it
00:27:32 ◼ ► was received, which is, by the way, why Apple is a leader in product packaging and sweats
00:27:38 ◼ ► those details to this day is because Steve Jobs understood how a product is marketed and packaged
00:27:43 ◼ ► is how it's going to be received. So he asked Ron Wayne, the guy who had 10%, the tiebreaker,
00:27:49 ◼ ► and designed that Isaac Newton logo to design a case. But Ron Wayne was like, let's be realistic
00:27:55 ◼ ► here and created something that could be made in a metal shop. And it like had a plexiglass cover
00:27:59 ◼ ► and like a roll top door, like an old desk that slid over the keyboard. And Jobs was like, no,
00:28:04 ◼ ► no, no, no, no, no. That's not what we want. Jobs, meanwhile, is thinking about this a lot. He's
00:28:09 ◼ ► thinking about consumer products, right? Because computers are not consumer products at this point
00:28:20 ◼ ► So Steve Jobs is going to department stores. He's paying close attention to how consumer appliances
00:28:27 ◼ ► are packaged. One of the real star products of the 70s was the Cuisinart food processor.
00:28:34 ◼ ► Plastic case. Just iconic Hewlett-Packard calculators. Iconic plastic cases. He's like,
00:28:46 ◼ ► Is this the first kind of evidence that we have of Jobs kind of considering the Apple II to be more
00:28:56 ◼ ► Yeah. I mean, it is kind of a wild leap, right? All the computers of this era, it's like the Saul
00:29:03 ◼ ► or what Ron Wayne had designed, something you could make in a metal shop. They're cheap and industrial
00:29:15 ◼ ► less like a Cuisinart and more like a washing machine, right? And Jobs thought that sent the
00:29:21 ◼ ► wrong message. Sheet metal is for heavy appliances. It's for your dishwasher. It's for your refrigerator.
00:29:26 ◼ ► It's too industrial. He wants it to be something that would fit in a living room or a kitchen,
00:29:32 ◼ ► which is why he's going to department stores and thinking about home appliances and kitchen
00:29:38 ◼ ► appliances, which leads to the Cuisinart. So Jobs needs another designer because Ron Wayne's not
00:29:43 ◼ ► going to do it. He pitches a guy named Jerry Manok, 33, so older than Jobs and Wozniak.
00:29:49 ◼ ► Used to work at HP, just went freelance. We know what that's like. You're picking up work.
00:29:55 ◼ ► You got to pick up work. He meets Manok at the Homebrew Computer Club. Manok, sort of doing a
00:30:03 ◼ ► similar thing to Rod Holt, is like, well, I'll do it, but you got to pay me in advance.
00:30:10 ◼ ► Just, I don't know. You know, you have the money here. And it actually sounds like in the end he
00:30:18 ◼ ► Jerry Manok did. And he designed what is the Apple II case. He designed a low plastic case
00:30:25 ◼ ► with a removable lid you pop off that offers just enough space, just enough headroom to fit in those
00:30:32 ◼ ► expansion cards. It's compact. It's got rounded edges. It's designed more like a kitchen appliance
00:30:38 ◼ ► than a piece of industrial machinery. Manok actually thought that it should have little
00:30:42 ◼ ► handles, recessed handles on the side so you could pick it up. And Steve Jobs is like, no,
00:30:46 ◼ ► no handles. And then Jobs suggests that they chrome plate the interior of the case so it looks awesome
00:30:58 ◼ ► I really like that. It's like, oh yeah, so you want to open it? Great. Well, what if we made it
00:31:04 ◼ ► Shine, really shiny inside. If you look under the motherboard, it's shiny. Just a genuinely
00:31:12 ◼ ► Because there is that thing, right? Of like, what is the Steve Jobs thing of like painting the other
00:31:17 ◼ ► side of the fence? Yeah. Or it's what his father said of the idea of the back of the piece of
00:31:22 ◼ ► furniture that's against the wall should look as beautiful as the part that's facing out.
00:31:25 ◼ ► Which is still, like, it's still a nice idea, but the chrome plating might be a step too far.
00:31:30 ◼ ► Like making it look good inside when you open it is one thing, but chrome plating it is something
00:31:36 ◼ ► completely different. No, it's bananas. Just totally bananas. So keeping in mind, Ron Wayne was like,
00:31:41 ◼ ► you'll make it in a metal shop. Jerry Manok's design requires, it's plastic, it requires complexity on a
00:31:47 ◼ ► whole other level, which is probably why nobody else is doing it in this period. It needs to be
00:31:52 ◼ ► made with injection molding. Injection molding is you melt ABS plastic and then inject it into a metal
00:31:58 ◼ ► mold. The mold itself costs as much as $100,000, which is about half a million dollars in today's
00:32:04 ◼ ► money. And it will take months to make that mold. Yeah, because it's worth noting that molding like this,
00:32:11 ◼ ► which I assume at this point it was being done in America, which is not where you would have
00:32:15 ◼ ► this done today. Yeah, this is all, it's going to be done in the Bay Area, right? Like this is a local
00:32:22 ◼ ► product and this is at a time when that stuff is available at your local plastics company, basically,
00:32:27 ◼ ► right? But even today, if you're making something like this in Asia, you're doing a similar thing.
00:32:31 ◼ ► You're having a mold made and it's very expensive. The tooling on making a mold is very expensive,
00:32:42 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. Okay. The problem is Apple doesn't have this kind of time. It is now early 1977.
00:32:47 ◼ ► The Apple II is going to be ready. They're going to show it at the West Coast Computer Fair,
00:32:53 ◼ ► which is a big new trade show in San Francisco in April. They do not have time. It's a matter of
00:33:02 ◼ ► weeks, but they have to do it. This is their coming out party. Everybody's decided this is the moment
00:33:20 ◼ ► They had decided that this was the big coming out moment for the computer industry and they needed
00:33:25 ◼ ► to be there. They're feeling the pressure, I'm sure, from the competition and this is going to be their
00:33:29 ◼ ► moment, but they have left it too late. And I mean, look, once again, I'm going to point out this is a
00:33:34 ◼ ► company that less than a year before was funded by the founders selling a van and a calculator. Okay.
00:33:43 ◼ ► They have Mike Markala now. There is some adult supervision. There is some funding, but it is not
00:33:50 ◼ ► a well-oiled operation. This is less than a year into Apple. They're kind of flying by the seat of their
00:33:56 ◼ ► pants here and they've gotten to this deadline, but they're not going to be able to make a case suitable
00:34:03 ◼ ► for a mass produced product the way they want it in the timeline because the mold is going to take too
00:34:10 ◼ ► long. So they go to plan B, which is a process called reaction injection molding, which is faster
00:34:20 ◼ ► and cheaper. It uses a mold that's a lot easier and cheaper to make than a metal one, but it is less
00:34:27 ◼ ► reliable. That's why you wouldn't want to use this. You'd want to use injection molding if you could,
00:34:33 ◼ ► and not this reaction injection molding, which is like a cheaper process, but it's cheaper and
00:34:39 ◼ ► So now they have a path to being able to produce, I guess, a handful of models to be able to display
00:34:48 ◼ ► it at the West Coast Computer Fair to sell directly to sell to buyers. Who is the West Coast Computer
00:34:56 ◼ ► Nobody knows. They've never held one before. The people who are doing it have no idea whether it
00:35:04 ◼ ► will just be homebrew computer club nerds, whether it will be a little broader, or if, I mean, what if
00:35:11 ◼ ► like every person who's interested in technology in Northern California or California or the United
00:35:16 ◼ ► States says, this sounds really exciting. I don't know much about computers, but let's see what's
00:35:26 ◼ ► So in our next episode, which is the final episode in the season of The Road to the Apple II, the Apple II