A look at the History of Apple Computer: From Garage to Glory (1976-1993)

fate it's funny how fate works one day you're graduating from high school going to college to pursue your dreams only to get expelled for hacking the college's Mainframe computer feeling disgraced and ashamed on the trip back home funny thing how fate works if it worked for that fateful day one of Technology these most iconic companies would not have been born let's take a look at the history of Apple's 8bit [Music] computers the story of Apple Computer really starts in the 1950s Steve wnc was born in 1950 in San Jose California and was raised by his mother Margaret and his father Jerry who was an engineer at lock heat Martin a few years later in 1955 Steven Jobs was born his childhood was much different his parents Joanne and John were students at the University of Wisconsin at the time Steven's father was of Syrian descent and was Muslim and that didn't go well with Joanne's father but the two fell in love and shortly thereafter Joanne became pregnant they decided together to perform to close adoption and Joanne flew to San Francisco to have the baby during the adoption process Joanne and John wanted the adopted parents to be college graduates but as the search went on two candidates that were not college graduates promised they would send the baby to college these two were Paul and Clara jobs and baby Steve was was adopted in 1967 the jobs moved to Los Altos California to put Steve into a better school district he started attending Homestead High School in 1968 W graduated from the same high school that jobs was going to but at the time the two Steves did not know each other in 1968 W started attending Colorado University and studying their new computer science major computers always interested was and he was a huge Star Trek fan and this only added to his fascination getting his degree in computer science and electrical engineering was a dream he was fulfilling but on one faithful day the always joking and curious was got caught hacking the college's Mainframe computer system in 1969 he was expelled from CU and came back to California he enrolled in the dianza college in serpoo and then transferred to the University of California Berkeley in 1971 that year for an engineering project W and a young friend of his bill Fernandez built a computer that they called cream soda it was a simple machine consisting of TTL logic and a 8bit microprocessor really just chips and switches and LEDs it was named after the Craigmont cream soda they drank from a local Safeway Fernandez's dad was mayor and had the paper come out to do an article about the computer while at the house taking photographs a journalist stepped on a cord and shorted out the computer destroying it much to the dismay of w shortly after this W was hired on by hula Packard to work on their mainframe computers ironic right around this time jobs was attending Homestead High School when he started there he was more of an introverted kid that was more into Electronics but started getting into the Arts and the hippie Stoner counterculture of the time as he stated it was the first time I got high I started to listening music a whole lot and I started to read more outside of just Science and Technology Shakespeare Plato I love King Lear he befriended Bill Fernandez and the two were both interested in computers and electronics Bill wanted to introduce the two Steves because of their shared interest in technology they were introduced and jobs came out to visit w at Berkeley about once a week during that summer jobs got a summer intern job at HP and they became close friends then they met John Draper or better known as Captain Crunch back then long-distance phone calls were charged by the minute and a way to cheat the system was found the phone company's switches were controlled by tones if the right tone was played at 2600 htz you could make free longdistance calls in the late 1960s Draper found a toy whistle that came in a Captain Crunch cereal box that could produce these tones this was really the first form of hacking it was called phone freaking and it fascinated was was started to make an electronic version called the blue box it was a device you could connect to the phone line to make a call and it automatically provided the signal with the right timing to almost work 100% of the time was always the prankster as a joke one time called the Vatican and asked for the pope saying he was Harry Kissinger job saw an opportunity in the blue box and wanted to start selling them this was the first time W and jobs created a product together to sell although highly illegal it showed what could be done between the two one time they almost got caught with the devices when they got pulled over by the police but the cops had no idea what they were and let them go now it was jobs' senior year of high school and he was really getting into the Arts so much so he joined the theater club and did Lighting and Sound this is where he met chrisanne Brennan the two started dating and using drugs such as LSD together jobs was quoted talking about a pivotal moment in his life using the drug while in a wheat field it was the most wonderful feeling of my life up to that point after he graduated from homestead Chris s and him rented a house with a friend until he left to Oregon to read college in September of 1972 jobs dropped out of college just after one semester he stated he didn't want to burden his parents with the cost but he also didn't tell his parents that he dropped out he stayed for the next semester truly living the counterculture lifestyle but he was convinced by the president of the student body to sit in on some classes during this period he was living off recycled Coke bottles getting meals at shelters and sleeping on his friend's dorm room floors in 1973 jobs came back to California and got a job working at aari Al alorn hired him on he was hired by Al alorn and that afternoon he came into my office as though that was the right thing to do I said hi what's up he says I think you've got a really awesome company awesome he's he uses that a lot and uh and he said uh I think that uh uh everything is pretty good but I've seen your soldering connections and they're really crappy I said well let let's fix them and he says I will so I put I put Steve on the engineering night shift which there wasn't one but it turned out that I was being a little tricky because I knew he had a really good friend Steve wnac who was actually a lot better engineer than than jobs was and so I got two Steves for the price of one while at Atari job saw a prototype for a new game that was not working correctly and confidently he said that he could make it more elegant with less chips Nolan made a deal with jobs for $100 for every chip that he eliminated in in the design jobs really had no idea how to do this but he knew someone that could he called up W and over a few late nights at Atari W created the game Breakout Jobs made a deal that he would pay W half the money the design eliminated over 50 chips from the TTL design Atari Engineers had come up with jobs received $5,000 for his achievement but he told was Atari only gave him $700 meaning was only received $350 for his work which W didn't find out about till a few years later in 1974 jobs really started getting into Hinduism jobs and a friend named Daniel katki traveled to India to visit Guru Nim Koli Baba and a drug induced spiritual Odyssey that lasted for 7 months until he came back to the United States and lived at the all one Farm commune with his longtime girlfriend chran and Kodi all practicing Zen Buddhism job's returned to California and his job at Atari in 1975 so one day Steve comes into my office and says uh I I I'm going to go to India to visit my Guru well wow okay well good luck right if you get work and uh so he goes off well he's going to go off to India but we had a problem we were selling these games International now and when you'd sell them to Germany let's say in this case it was Germany so I explained I said hey Steve I got a deal for you I'll send you to Germany for free and all you have to do is work one day with these guys and then you go to India after that it's got to be cheaper to get to India from Germany than it is here he says great I'll do that Steve goes over he doesn't even own a suit and and he goes over there and they're shocked they're all business people proper German and Steve is anything but and to make matters worse he solved the problem and then he goes off to India 3 months after he left for India uh I one of my Engineers came in Ron Wayne and said uh Hey Steve's back I said Steve who Steve Jobs oh yeah I remember him yeah well bring him in so Steve walks in and I wish I'd taken a picture he had saffron robes shaved head Barefoot Hari Krishna you know and wow and said he had a trip in India and he gives me a baba ramdas book be here now and says can I have my job back I go sure you got your job back and then at that point he and was had this stupid idea for a home computer Steve Jobs offered me founder stock in in apple and I said I got enough wallpaper but I'll take a free computer with it I had taken the stock during all this W was still working at HP but in 1976 he dropped out out of Berkeley to pursue a career at HP in the calculator chip division always the prankster and entrepreneur Wasa also ran a call-in joke service callers would call his toll number and pay to hear the joke of the day once jobs got back was andh him started to hang out once again one of the places they went together was The Homebrew Computer Club there different computers were shown off and displayed for people to share their interest trade parts and purchase computers wasen jobs wanted to create their own computer they watched and learned from the different kits that were being shown they started to design their own computer W initially wanted the computer to run the Motorola 6800 8bit CPU but it was still too pricey at $17 per die when MZ released the 6502 in 1976 for $20 W had his CPU W spent his days working at HP and his nights in his apartment developing what would become the Apple computer a initially he designed the computer to use the 6800 CPU but later changed the design to use the 6502 when it was released but this meant changing the code to work on the new CPU a true genius W explained it it was a simple process to convert the 6800 base system to the 6502 the 6502 and the 6800 are very similar tips but the 6502 had a performance upgrade giving was even more to work with with writing the source code but there was one problem since W worked for HP as an engineer under his employee contract anything he created was HP property so he showed it to the HP suits and they pretty much laughed at it saying who needed a computer in their house and also saying there was no market for a personal computer since HP didn't want it the computer was theirs on April 1st 1976 the Apple company was formed with w jobs and Jobs's former coworker at Atari Ron Wayne jobs wanted Wayne because he was an older businessman that Banks and investors would like he took a 10% stake in the company but this didn't last long Wayne sold off his share of the company back to Apple for $800 2 weeks later he explained his departure because of a previous business venture that went South and cost him thousands of dollars that gave him cold feed on Apple but during his time at Apple he designed the first logo and the instruction manual for the Apple computer they showed it at the home brew club and it was a success we had absolutely no idea what people were going to do these things when we started out uh matter of fact the two people it was designed for was was and myself because we couldn't afford to buy a computer kit on the market so we liberated some parts from hula Packard and Atari and uh worked on a design for about 6 months and decided that we would build our own computer so we built one and uh as was up till 400 in the morning for many moons and we got it working we showed some of our friends immediately everybody wanted one and it turned out that it took about 40 hours to build one of these things and about another 20 3040 to debug it and we had a lot of friends that worked at similar companies who could Liberate the parts also and we found ourselves spending every spare moment of our time helping our friends to build computers and it was just getting to be a a tremendous drain on our on our lives so we got the idea one day that that we could make a printed circuit board uh without the parts in it sell these blank printed circuit boards to our friends and probably cut the assembly and debug time down to you know 5 10 hours so w sold his hp6 calculator and I sold my van and we got 1,300 bucks together and we paid our friend of ours who is this uh PC board layout person 1,300 bucks to do us a layout and decided we'd sell printed circuit boards at twice what it cost to build them and hopefully recoup our calculator and transportation at some later date so that's what we did and I was out trying to Pedal PC boards one day and walked into a bite shop the first bite shop in Mountain View and uh Paul Terrell the then owner of the bite shop said uh he would like to take 50 of these computers and I saw dollar signs in front of my eyes and but he had one catch which was that he wanted them fully assembled and tested ready to go which is a new twist so we spent the next 5 days on on the phone to Distributors and convinced the electronics parts Distributors around here to give us about $10,000 worth of Parts on thin air just on enthusiasm so we got the parts and we built 100 computers and we sold 50 of them for cash and 29 days paid off the Distributors and that's how we got started the part of the story Steve failed to mention is during this time Apple was being ran out of Jobs's parents's garage since they didn't have anywhere near the amount of computers built that the order required they needed help in producing that amount of board boards for the bite shop order so they hired on Bill Fernandez and Daniel koty to help out when they brought the completed Apple A's as they were known at the time to the bite shop the owner Paul Terrell had made a deal for the complete computer not just a motherboard but a computer with a case a keyboard and a screen jobs had to talk him into honoring the deal saying that he could make more money selling the individual Parts himself with the motherboards since Terrell had the supply of parts and the store this gave jobs the idea for their next computer a computer with an awesome modern case and a built-in keyboard was saw this as an amazing opportunity to improve on the Apple's design they continued to sell the Apple 1 and computer stores at a price of $666 66 in all 200 Apple ones were produced and $175 being sold the money was good but not enough to design their next computer however W started designing improvements on the Apple a computer including adding a cost efficient color composite signal from a glitch in the NTS signal he engineered he also included more RAM integrated some of the TTL logic bringing the chip count down and included Apple basic on ROM this is when the first big-time disagreement between jobs and was happened W wanted to add eight expansion slots and Mak it an open computer to the user jobs wanted two slots one for the disc drive the other for a modem and it was supposed to be a closed system it got into a pretty bad argument when was said go get himself another computer and jobs knew was was serious and agreed to the E slot Open System since coming up with the idea of a new Apple computer jobs was busy trying to find investors being turned down all over the place jobs contacted Nolan Bushnell he suggested jobs contact Don Valentine Valentine was an interested either but he suggested he call Mike marula marula came to Apple headquarters Jobs's parents's garage and saw the production of the computers he saw great potential in the fledging company and invested $992,000 in apple out of his own Pockets while securing $250,000 in a line of credit he also requested W quit his job at HP which he did in November of 1976 with the investment made and a line of credit things started to roll fast on January 3rd 1977 Apple computer became Incorporated jobs also had another demand for the system he wanted it quiet since it would be in a case along with the power supply he didn't want a fan running to cool it traditional power supplies at the time could not do this but a switching power supply could he needed someone to design it he hired a former Atari cooworker Ron Holt for $200 a day jobs hired a freelance designer Jerry mano to design the case jobs was assistant that the case be of modern design but he didn't want it to look like a computer he wanted it to look like it fit in a house like an appliance but an awesome looking one in February marula hired on Michael Scott to be the first CEO of Apple computer incorporated from high technology the computer store introducing Apple 2 the easy to operate home computer just hook it up to your TV to create dazzling color [Music] displays or you can balance your checkbook kids can teach themselves arithmetic or the family can invent their own Pawn games the possibilities are endless it's called Apple 2 the personal computer see it at high technology the computer store on April 16th 1977 the Apple 2 was debuted at the West Coast computer Fair people were flocking to see the Apple Booth to see the computer passing booths of mits IBM and commodore their main competitors at the time it was a huge hit and they started taking orders that day Apple even secured a contract to supply computers to a Japanese Manufacturing Company only problem was like the Apple 1 it didn't have enough Apple 2s to fulfill the orders this is when things really started to take off production moved from Jobs's parents garage to actual Factories at this time Apple ran a promotion to Apple 1 owners to trade their boards in to get a discount on a new Apple 2 a lot of boards were traded in during the promotion and destroyed by jobs with only 82 of the 200 made known to exist today making an original Apple 1 computer one of the most valuable computers in the world it was also at this time that Apple started the change specifically with jobs was had stayed the funloving joking engineer the jobs was changing and to the amazement of his close friends he started wearing business attire a huge change from the smelly hippie that could only work the night shifts at Atari a few years back by 1978 due to the success of the Apple 2 Apple started designing its successor the Apple 3 they wanted to quickly get it to Market to stay ahead of the competition IBM the design team was led by Wendell sander but soon Steve Jobs got involved in the a IC design of the computer it was his idea to eliminate air venting and fans for cooling to make the computer quiet this along with other design faults caused massive quality issues with the Apple 3 when it was released W was quoted saying that the design team was led by marketing and not by Engineers leading to the issues of the Apple 3 all the while W was busy designing an upgraded model of the Apple 2 the Apple 2 plus this model would come standard with 48k of memory expandable up to 64k with 16k language card due to the 6502 processors only being able to address 64k which was already taken up by the 48k of ram 12K ROM and 4K of addressing IO the language card had to be Bank switched to be addressable to the system this allowed the user to load integer basic into the language card to be able to switch between integer and applesoft basic with just a command also Apple's first disc drive the disc 2 designed by W was released around this time jobs was informed his longtime girlfriend chrisanne which was working in the shipping department at Apple was pregnant with his child jobs venly denied this stating it was not his and she had to be sleeping around which was not the case this was really the beginning of Jobs's mental spiral downward that would eventually see him Ed from Apple two theories that revolve around why this happened one due to him being a foster child and not having his real parents to raise him and it has been brought up that his heavy drug use earlier in life may have been a contributing factor but to him he could not be bothered with the distraction of being a father after utterly being embarrassed by jobs croan left Apple to have the baby at the all-in-one Farm commune in Oregon with no support from the millionaire jobs in May of 1978 chran gave birth to a baby girl jobs work with croan to come up with the name Lisa all while denying she was still his I'm here with an average American homaker with her own Apple personal computer Jill do you use your Apple for household budgeting and actually I'm working in Gold Futures well you could probably put a lot of recipes in there m and you can do Trend analysis generate bar graphs are you really a homemaker of course so apple is the appliance of the 80s for all those pesky household chores I also own a small de [Music] Mill in June of 1979 the Apple 2+ was released and the original Apple 2 was discontinued with the launch of the Apple 2 plus it expanded to other regions like Europe and Japan with the introduction of the Apple 2 Euro plus and the j+ Apple produced another version of this computer under license with bell and how a black Apple 2 plus with added AV capabilities and marketed as AV Equipment by this time W was already working on another improved model of the Apple 2 which would later become the Apple 2E also in 1979 jobs W and the head Engineers of Apple visited the Xerox Park Campus to check out a new computer design it had a graphical user interface and used a device called a mouse the computer was a Xerox star Xerox made a deal with Apple to sell the technology to them for $1 million of Apple stock the technology from this was used in Apple's first gooey based computer the Lisa which was named after Jobs's daughter although he denied it for years saying that it stood for logically integated software architecture but in later years he confirmed that it was named after his daughter jobs then moved on to the Lisa team computers have always scared me I I grew up believing that only scientists and Engineers could understand them then I started to work with apple personal computers and I learned how easy it is to use one you can do sales forecasting and general bookkeeping and even Financial charts and grass see frankly at the moment I have no reason to do all of these things but who knows show business being what it is I might Apple the personal computer by 1980 the Apple 3 which was deemed by jobs as not the successor to the Apple 2 but an enhancement of it for the ultimate hobbyist computer was released but unlike the Apple 2 this computer was strictly marketed towards business and education and not the home user the cost of the unit was staggering between $4 to $8,000 for the unit in 1980 which is between 14,000 and $331,000 in today's money for One desktop computer this priced out the average home user cost and issues with the hardware were coming to the Forefront one of the main problems with the system is the lack of ventilation and fans the system overheated causing solder joints to come loose during operation and crash the overly priced computer Apple's official fix for the problem was get this to pick the computer up off the table 2 in and drop it onto the table to receip the chips inside no joke this is what Apple sent out to Apple 3 users as an official fix this did not bode well for the new computer or Apple's customers for all its worth the Apple 3 was a great upgrade from the Apple 2 on paper it had a 1.8 8 MHz certech syy 6502a CPU and came with 128k of RAM and had a hard drive in development due to the issues the computer was having Apple went back to the drawing board and fixed the issues plaguing it in 1981 they released the Apple 3 revised Edition this computer fixed the quality issues of the original and gave the computer the ability to be upgraded to 256k of ram Apple also started replacing customers faulty original Apple 3 units later in 1981 Apple introduced the profile a 5 mbte hard drive for use with the Apple 3 in February 1981 was was piloting his beachcraft airplane with some friends and crashed on takeoff his three passengers and himself were injured in the crash W took the brunt of the impact with serious facial lacerations missing teeth and head trauma for weeks W had anterior grade Amnesia a condition that doesn't allow the brain to make new memories was had no memory of the crash he took aiva absence from Apple to go back to school for an engineering degree he said at the time it was like a reset button was pressed in his head and he just didn't enjoy design and Engineering at the time of the plane crash W was one of the lead Engineers on a new computer project which would become the Macintosh at this point jobs was pulled from the Lisa team and reassigned to the Mac project during his leave W went on to fun and create music festivals this was not very lucrative and he came back to Apple in 1983 during W's absence Apple's first CEO Michael Scott was replaced by Apple's biggest investor Mike marula in 1981 marula really didn't want to be put in his position and was quoted as saying he would only stay for four more years at Apple that didn't prove to be the case as he stayed with apple until 1997 serving in many different roles with the company the last version of the Apple 3 was the Apple 3 plus which was released in 1983 it came with 2 256k of ram included a real-time clock and a redesigned keyboard and it had an interlace Video Port but the damage had already been done due to the early quality issues in the price point of the computer the Apple 3 went on to sell around 120,000 units in total and was discontinued in 1985 losing Apple over $60 million in the process it was Apple's first commercial failure with the ill- fated 16bit Lisa having an even shorter lifespan being discontinued in 1986 big changes were coming to Apple in 1983 Apple replaced marula with John scoy this move was encouraged by jobs he even personally talks scolan into leaving PepsiCo as their CEO by saying do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world this is a move jobs would soon regret while all this was going on W and the Apple 2 team were ready to release the Apple 2E an enhanced version of the Apple 2 plus this computer featured a redesigned keyboard with a built-in repeat function full cursor Keys open and closed Apple Keys a new lowercase asy character set it also came standard with 64k of RAM and implemented an auxiliary slot which was used with the 80 column card to increase the memory of the computer up to 128k with bank switching and gave the computer the ability to display in 80 columns also they integated a lot of the TTL logic that was on the board for a smaller chip count and greater [Music] reliability to reaffirm its commitment to this winning product Apple has enhanced the Apple 2 to meet consumers and dealers broadening expectations about personal Computing Apple has taken the Apple 2 refined its design and added some some of the most popular features available on personal computers the result is the Apple 2E a personal computer that is more reliable and easier to use in fact it's the most personal computer the Apple 2E was released in 1983 and became the most successful and longest lasting Computers Apple produced with the help of the education sector apple found their way into almost every school in America raking in the cash for the company the Apple 2 Team should have been rewarded for bringing in so much cash to Apple but this is not what happened jobs was still working on the Mac project and had started to divide the company the Apple 2 team against the Mac team bitter infighting within the company started with the Apple 2 Team not getting any accolades for their work even though they were bringing in at least 85% of the profits for the company after the Mac launched in 1984 the board members were starting to take notice of the monster that jobs had created with an apple look what the computer Wizards at Apple have come up with now it has the power of these two computers a built-in dis drive it can run over 10,000 different programs you get everything you need to hook it right up to your TV you can even add a mouse introducing the Apple 2C now comes the real magic you can take it home for under $1,300 also in 1984 the Apple 2C was released it was Apple's first portable computer portable being used Loosely here this was basically an apple 2E and a smaller form factor it came with 1208 of RAM and 80 column mode built in it also had a Serial Port but lacked any expansion ports the first Apple not to be expandable they also upgraded the 2C with the Apple 2C Plus in 1988 the first upgrade was the addition of the 3 and 1/2 in floppy Drive instead of the 5 and 1/4 in drive that came on the standard 2C the last change was putting the power supply unit inside of the actual computer itself instead of having the external brick in 1984 the Macintosh launched a much fanfare but was not the success that jobs had anticipated and the apple board had its doubts about this was due to multiple issues such as the cost of marketing and parts all of which really came down to decisions that Jobs made during the development by 1985 the Apple 2 and Mac inviting at Apple had come to a head was felt as if the Apple 2 team was not appreciated and nor was he he was quoted saying Apple has been going in the wrong direction for at least 5 years and apple had become the bane of his existence and he missed the fun of the early days W Departed the company and sold most of his stock when he left Apple with low sales of the Macintosh the Apple 2 versus Macintosh inner fighting the loss of their most brilliant engineer was the board was looking for a way to get rid of jobs then the final blow came with Microsoft's introduction of Windows jobs had basically given Bill Gates and Microsoft the keys to the Macintosh to develop software Ford trusting Gates Microsoft reverse engineered Mac OS and turned it into their own Microsoft Windows with all the blunders job had made it was time for a change jobs got wind of this and tried to Stage a takeover of Apple but failed miserably at this point he tried to resign but his resignation was denied the board put it to a vote in September and approved his resignation leaving to form next Incorporated with the departure of Apple's Founders the story of the Apple aits doesn't stopped there production of the Apple 2E continued with the Platinum Edition it had a few more upgrades to to it like the addition of a number keypad to the keyboard dad just a second Martin hey mom come on be out in a minute hey and you're not fa I'm busy Martin I don't care I'm coming in don't you dare an apple 2gs can do over 10,000 things for your computer maybe even teach him to share but the biggest upgrade was the design that started by W before he left the company a computer that used the WDC 65c 816 16bit CPU but was Backward Compatible to the 8bit Apple 2E this became the Apple 2gs it either sold as a new computer or you could send your Apple 2 and have them swap out the motherboard back plate and the p PSU and turn it into a 2gs in 1991 the Apple 2 card was introduced giving the MATC color classic and the Mac LC Computers Apple 2 compatibility really it was an Apple 2 running on a card allowing the use of the Apple 2 joysticks paddles and disc drives the Apple 2E was finally discontinued in 1993 when John Scully was replaced by Michael Spindler as CEO marking the end of the 8bit error for Apple from 197 7 until 1993 Apple sold over 6 million Apple 2 computers making it the bestselling computer made by Apple game over man it's game [Music] over fate

Channel: Retrogamer Gen X

Views: 613

Keywords: apple computer, apple one, apple II, apple III, steve wozniak, steve jobs, woz, apple computer history

Id: LZUnNI3IT9M

Length: 36min 52sec (2212 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 01 2024