Apple II - Apple's most important computer (new edit)

[Music] the history of Apple is filmed many times over use a full story but more often than not modern retellings of Apple history usually goes something like this Wozniak jobs garage stuff happens yada yada yada McIntosh jobs is fired then the earth cooled and the dinosaurs came Jobs returns iMac iPod iPhone iPad Jobs dies the end but let's rewind a bit because these modern jobs centric history's gloss over what's easily the most important product and era in the company's history and really in the entire industry's history the Apple 2 in fact these days you're likely to hear the Lisa given as many lines in an average book or screenplay as the Apple to know what Lisa stood for flex the computer the Lisa you know what it stood for I'm talking about the Apple 2 which is not just a crucial part of this company's history it is a crucial part of the history a personal computing but the Lisa was always a footnote a failed experiment that's now given extra weight because it was Steve Jobs first pet project and it has direct ties to the later Macintosh the Apple 2 was a huge success with a 17-year run in fact it was the world's first successful personal computer and it showed the way for literally every single machine that came after it Apple got there with the brilliant and innovative scheme of backdoor marketing through schools my junior high school in high school like many schools across the u.s. were fully stocked with Apple 2 and 2 plus machines bought by the school district at a steep discount call it the McDonald's marketing plan hook them while they're young kids like me would beg our parents for Apple twos because we knew them and our parents felt good buying them thinking that they'd help us with our schoolwork an entire generation of Apple 2 users was created out of thin air in the early 1980s the Apple 2 was primarily designed by woz around a 1 megahertz maus 6502 cpu and originally came with 4k of ram a cassette interface and basic in ROM fairly impressive specs for 1977 made all the more so by the fact that the 2 was a finished kit unlike most other computers of its time including the earlier Apple 1 it did not need assembly by the end user these specs were augmented by 8 total expansion slots a design idea still in practice used today though ironically only an IBM pc-compatible desktops but these slots were integral to the amplitude success just as woz argued they would be because they allowed new and even previously unknown peripherals like floppy and hard drives modems printers 80-column cards Ram upgrades graphics and CPU accelerators mice game controllers and more to be connected to the system extending the life of both individual machines and the to line in general over the years the 2 was upgraded several times first to the 2 plus with extra RAM and a revised basic then to the 2e with even more RAM the addition of lowercase characters and a streamlined internal design to cut costs the 2e alone remained on sale for 11 years itself being upgraded to the 2e enhanced and finally the 2e platinum with extra Ram yet again revised cosmetics a new keyboard and an upgraded 65 co2 microprocessor that it shared with the more compact to see I'll have more on that machine later but by the early 80s the overall architecture of the system was really starting to show its age this week sound and graphics capabilities compared to even its 8-bit competitors the Apple 2 had no dedicated graphics or sound hardware it's baked pretty much everything in software with 16-bit systems from both Atari and Commodores newly purchased a media division on the horizon that featured both impressive CPUs and separate graphics and sound Hardware Apple knew they needed a successor to the two in fact they knew it way back in 1980 but flubbed with the release of the business-oriented Apple 3 which had a propensity to overheat and loosen the joints between the motherboard and various connected components a problem woz blamed squarely on jobs as demand that the system had no fans this led to Apple's most infamous support advice to end users ever pick up your machine and drop it needless to say this was Apple's first major failure and the three was discontinued leaving the less powerful two lines still on the market jobs and team lead John couch then took a stab at a two successor with the Lisa designed from the ground up around the same motorola 68000 chip that would power the Amiga and Atari ST it landed with a similar thud in 1983 though mostly due to its $10,000 price tag by most accounts the computer itself was elegant and innovative though it did have a propensity for exploding batteries the Lisa was the first Apple computer to ship with a graphical interface an idea that the entire industry was convinced would be the future of computing while Apple beat its main competitors to market Amiga Atari IBM and Microsoft were all working on similar graphical environments for their respective machines at around the same time Apple needed a real working solution fast and not one that would cook itself to death or cost as much as a new car by the early 80s two competing visions at the company had taken hold woz still leading the Apple 2 team had been working on an upgraded 16-bit version of the two for years and he finally found a design that provided both true 16-bit capability and full backward compatibility by utilizing a WDC 65c 816 cpu this design could run almost all original Apple 2 software natively and at either normal or accelerated speed while at the same time providing the power and memory addressing space required to run a 16-bit graphical environment this computer would also have vastly upgraded graphics and sound capabilities in fact a 10 Sonic ES 5503 sound chip set the standard for years to come jobs meanwhile wanted a clean break some have argued that what he really wanted was to consolidate control of Apple which he couldn't do as long as woz as Apple 2 made all the money forced off the Lisa team after its disastrous debut he turned to a fledgling project that had been stashed in the back rooms at Apple since 1979 the Macintosh this project initially led by Jeff Raskin was intended to turn the home computer into an appliance a simple intuitive machine which power both unseen by hand mostly inaccessible to the end-user Jobs drank the kool-aid on his concept and became its lead evangelist believing it the successor to both the to line and the Lisa and betting the future of the company on it as well as his own now it's worth pointing out here that despite his reputation for thinking different Jobs was actually thinking very traditionally here in the late seventies and early eighties the common was you have a computer on the market for a few years discontinued it replace it with something completely different think about it the Commodore vic-20 was replaced by the c64 which was then replaced by the Amiga the Atari 8-bit line which actually had a similar run to the Apple 2 was eventually replaced by the Atari ST and so it would go for the Apple 2 jobs thought it had been on the market for quite a few years at that point and he thought that the company just needed something totally new now Wozniak had a different idea and his thinking was actually pretty innovative at the time his thought was that you could keep upgrading a computer line basically indefinitely as long as you kept it backward compatible and that would let you continue building up a software library a group of accessories that always worked with every system and it would continue just growing your install base this was unique thinking at the time really nobody had tried this IBM had not showed the way forward yet they would later but Apple could have done this first Apple could have just kept extending the to line forever and that was what was niak wanted to try to do but Jobs for reasons that are really known only to him wanted to stick with the traditional method of releasing an entirely new system every few years and that's how we got the Macintosh the Mac would be introduced before the new 16-bit Apple 2 GS but John Sculley by then Apple's CEO knew that the to line would remain Apple's cash cow for at least the next few years initially the Mac was positioned as kind of a low-end business machine a cheaper and friendlier alternative tie beams PC with no colour graphics and only rudimentary sound it was actually the serious machine in Apple's lineup I'll be at one designed to be less intimidating than IBM's monster PC 2 office managers worldwide was is TGS the GS standing for graphics and sound was initially positioned as the computer for everything the Mac wasn't home entertainment creativity and education if you'd like to know what experts are saying about the new Apple 2 GS got a 32 voice bouncer for digital synthesis q56 can motherboard with one negative sentence yes check out the saw to become super high-res colleges sixteen two processes two point eight nine o'clock the Apple two Gs elevator simply speaking to the most powerful couple to me but while the tui had made some inroads in real business applications that was now the realm of the Macintosh introduced in 1986 the two gs initially outsold the Macintosh by a large amount despite the power struggle with an apple that led to its CPU speed being artificially capped just to keep it from cannibalizing Mac sales Jobs did not want the 2 GS to be too powerful as it already had multimedia capabilities that far exceeded those of the Mac and would for years as well as full backward compatibility and the expandability that the 2 line had always been known for in other words it was a true continuation and clear successor to the 8-bit two line whereas the Macintosh was an all-new direction in the end jobs got his way Apple put most of its resources in the late 80s towards the Macintosh and the 2gs was discontinued in 1992 with no upgraded model to take its place ironically it was the 8-bit only tui that stuck around until 1993 mostly as a low-cost option for those who needed to run older software a tui expansion card for macintosh then served as a bridge between the two platforms until 1995 essentially putting a full-blown tui inside a compatible Mac but Apple saw the initially much more powerful 2g s as redundant in the face of the Mac which by then was considered the future of the company now I glossed over the to see a bit and that's because this was the first computer I ever owned and I'm here to show it to you now the to see was released the same year as the Mac and it has a similar computer as appliance design no slots what's in the box is what you get but it was basically equivalent to a fully kitted 2e at the time and it had all the ports you'd normally use the slots for in a 2e already it also cost a lot less which is why I ended up asking for one from my parents I thought they could afford whereas the tui was still a bit out of our price range I never planned to use it for as long as I did so I assumed I eventually just get a 2e anyway or the rumored Fuji s if it ever happened Apple expected to sell a hundred thousand of these machines per month but they actually sold that many in a year the 2e continued to be the series workhorse which surprised the company and jobs most people really did want expandability I got my to see in 1984 brand new although there was no concept of computing history back then so all I kept of my original packaging is the manual and of course the monitor and computer itself both a bit horrifying to me in terms of condition I try to take better care of my stuff these days I know this is my machine because I actually etched the phone number of a girl I liked into it kids incidentally neither the computer nor the monitor have been exposed to really any sunlight ever so all this yellowing you see was caused by heat in my attic just over the last 10 years I used this machine continuously for over eight years imagine still using an 8-bit Apple - is your primary computer in 1993 the keyboard which was originally light clicky and comfortable to type on is now gritty and heavy and worn out both the switches and the rubber mat underneath have made it impossible to type on over the years let's turn it on and see what happens I periodically take this computer out of the Attic to play some games and last time I did it was dead there are various things I could look into fixing but instead I used this as an excuse to get myself the machine I've always wanted a two gs I do plan to revisit this later it's my first computer and I do want to fix it maybe I'll make another video out of it but here is my two gs it's a little yellow - and it has a cracked power receptacle and a scratched up monitor but it works my machine is a Rama one the second commercially released ROM revision there was a ROM double zero and some of these had Wozniak stamped signature on them but these are not that rare and that roms a little buggy mine came with the matching monitor mouse and keyboard and both dual five and a quarter and three and a half inch drives this was the first Apple two that really supported three and a half inch and you really only need them for 16-bit to GS specific software basically this machine is as fully loaded as a to GS back then typically could have been although all TGS is at the time came with a ram upgrade card that could be populated with up to one megabyte and mine only add the stock 256 K now I've made a couple of upgrades to the machine myself first I upgraded the RAM to 4 megabytes more than most people would ever need on a 2 GS and way more than any software that they would expect to see there's still a cottage industry of people making new hardware for the TGS and RAM upgrades now come in both 4 & 8 Meg varieties for not much money at all I honestly have no idea what advantage eight Meg spies you over 4 Meg's but 4 Meg's is really nice for running the GS OS to 2 GS is native graphical environment with 256 K you can still run any 8-bit Apple 2 software and even a lot of 16-bit games that can boot from a floppy but I had never been able to experience GS o X at the time so I really wanted to try it out I've also added a floppy EMU which I'll be doing a separate video about many vintage computers now have devices like this that act as a floppy or hard disk emulator and allow you to run programs from sd card a really handy blend of new and old technology the Apple 2 actually has several different options for this but I'm using the floppy EMU and I like it a lot I don't really use my actual drive as much at all anymore although I do still have a lot of my own software on disk and I do like the feel of actually putting a disk in a drive and hearing its spin occasionally so let's fire up GS OS and take a look at what it can do I'm actually going to boot from floppy because while it's entirely possible to run it from the floppy emu one of the limitations of the device is that you can't really use it alongside of reel three and a half inch drive due to the twos daisy chaining rules so installing software that you can use in GS OS once you've booted into it is kind of a pain it requires the use of a PC running a program called cider press and a lot of back-and-forth trial and error to get programs to run correctly but booting off an actual floppy lets you just run whatever else you have on floppy I'll explain all this in a little more detail when I do the floppy EMU video it gets a little granny now the 2gs uses 800k double-density floppies which are kind of an adventure in themselves they're not easy to find anymore there are a couple sites online where you can get new discs but I bought mine on eBay you just have to be careful and make sure you're actually getting 800 K double density double-sided discs I've just been writing and overriding mine as I get new stuff to try out I just have the 110 pack to write a two gs floppy disc I use a program called a DT Pro that allows me to transfer data from my PC to the two GS via a null modem cable it runs as a server on PC and a client on the Apple 2 and it will write disc images too floppy that you keep stored on PC I'll put some links to these things in the video description below now here we are in GS OS which should look familiar to Mac users especially early Mac users it looks almost exactly the same as the original Mac OS and includes familiar features like the finder trashcan etc the big difference between the original Mac OS and GS OS is the GS OS runs in color it also runs pretty damn slowly but that's because jobs neutered the CPU you can easily see how this could have progressed over time into the exact same operating system that the Mac OS became but with full backward compatibility Apple wouldn't have had to start completely over with all new software there were accelerator cards available for the two GS that make it faster than it was ever meant to be but these are incredibly expensive even by modern standards the best-known of these is the transwarp GS but good luck finding one for less than $400 the last few I saw actually went for more than 500 to me that's just insane I'd really love to have one of these to experiment with but the whole point of running a machine like this these days is nostalgia and fun it's not a race but the Apple 2 market has really blown up over the last decade or so and I'm just guessing it's the result of modern Apple fans with too much disposable income discovering Apple 2 stuff that they never experienced so that's all the stuff that two GS can do that was new to me when I got my system only a few years ago but most of my Apple 2 software dates to the 1980s some of it I even wrote myself in computer science class I still love to break out my old claw peas every once in a while most of which are horrendously mislabeled and play what's really on this disc I found some real buried treasures in the last couple years including Bank Street writer based journal entries I wrote as a stupid rebellious angst-ridden teenager stuff I probably wanted to forget in my 20s but that I'm happy to have back in my 40s here's a stack of either completely unlabeled or at least poorly labeled discs like everyone else in those days I was terrible about labeling my discs and often I would label or at least write on the sleeves and not on the labels themselves who knows what any of this means I sure don't but we're going to find out what's on some of these right now let's just take a look given the failure rate of five and a quarter inch disks over a thirty five year span there's an element of Russian roulette involved every time I put a disc in the drive whenever I check another batch the chances of hearing that awful Apple two disc error noise seem to be a bit higher so I've been backing up my important stuff via ADT Pro in case you're wondering and I always did that infamous and irritating noise is caused by Apple's drives forcing the heads to return back to the first track of the disk Commodore and Atari both made drives that were really computers in their own right they had built-in controllers with their own CPUs and they knew where the drive head was on a disk that's why they were so big and expensive but Apple drives were dumb this was a conscious decision by Steve Wozniak to keep the cost down and the size of small as possible the computer controlled the drive but it didn't know where the head actually was only where it was commanded to be so when there was an error if island' repeatedly command the head back to the first track of the disk of a failsafe resulting in that horrible noise I do have a bunch of store-bought software - some of which still works and even a small collection of still boxed games including the original leaders who Larry - likewise original John Madden football yes it was an apple - game before it appeared on any game console the original test drive and a couple of really interesting strategy games which is a genre the Apple to excel that in a way none of its competitors did I was disappointed that my boxed copy is ancient art of war at sea no longer work - the last time I tried it but oh well such as life with five and a quarter inch discs I've downloaded a replacement to sd card but my boxed copy will never be complete again so what can you still do with an apple - well technically you can still do all the things you originally put it run a BBS or a D dial an early chat room or an AE wares site or maintain a database or word processing or any number of other things it's a VBS the functions computers had at the time don't suddenly stop working and believe it or not there are still people doing all these things using Apple tools across the country you can even get an apple - on the internet using Ethernet but for most people I think the real practical appeal of the Apple - these days like any vintage computing system is going to be it's games now I grew up with the Apple 2 so I've grown to know and love its quirks and foibles where the c64 and Atari 8-bit would sing the Apple 2 would be stuck with awkward beeps and bloops where those competitors would have big beautiful sprites the Apple 2 would have flickering weld Nan sprites in most ways if you're just looking for a retro computer to play games on the Apple probably isn't the best choice it did have the biggest software library by virtue of its popularity and longevity so that's something but nobody really has time to play 20,000 games anyway if you're just looking for the best versions of the most popular games you're probably not going to find them on the Apple - I didn't want to admit that in 1986 but I can admit it now to be Apple 2 has something that its competitors of the era don't and that's a place in history as the basis for the success of a company the likes of which humankind has literally never seen Apple is now the biggest technology company in the world and that Plamen simply would not have been possible without the Apple to the Apple to made apple all the money it took to keep the company afloat during the leanest of the Macintosh years those 17 years of success subsidized more than a decade of failure by the Mac until Jobs was finally able to turn things around with the iMac and more notably the iPod and that's something the Atari 8-bit and Commodore Square just can't lay claim to and honestly there's just something about using a computer that you know had such an impact I mean there are people out there to collect IMAX and hey I don't judge anyone else's collection but the iMac had basically no lasting impact on the industry I mean you don't see a lot of other manufacturers making Bondi blue transparent computers running the Mac OS these days do you but the Apple 2 is just I mean it's the computer whether it's an original to a 2 + 2 e 2 C or 2 GS when you're using one you can feel the way it defined an entire industry and you can see its influence absolutely everywhere in every little hardware design decision and in all the software that you can run on it regardless of whether it was the most powerful system of its time it wasn't it just immediately feels like the definitive home computer of the 1970s and 1980s in the same way the IBM PC was the definitive office computer of the same era well the 1980s at least the Apple 2 feels like it should have been just the start of something why didn't it do what the IBM PC did before the IBM PC did it it should have and probably would have if not for the hubris of one man who was frankly just too young and inexperienced to be making such decisions but despite that the Apple 2 lives on it's greater than the sum of its parts more than just a computer it's something to be studied thought about taught in schools as both a case study and business success and a cautionary tale of how to squander it you

Channel: Modern Classic

Views: 239,160

Rating: 4.8951745 out of 5

Keywords: apple ii, apple ][, apple iic, apple iigs, apple iie, apple ii plus, apple ii+, apple history, computing history, vintage computing, retro computing, steve wozniak, steve jobs, macintosh, john sculley, apple lisa, personal computers, computer history, apple macintosh, floppy emu, adt pro

Id: DYwPL2czMu4

Length: 24min 22sec (1462 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 03 2017