Factually! with Adam Conover - How Computers Took Over Our Lives with Laine Nooney

Episode Date: July 26, 2023

It's hard to imagine life without smartphones, but it wasn't so long ago that the idea of a home computer was a novelty. When was the exact moment that the "personal computer" became truly "personal," and how did computer ownership and literacy become inexorably tied to our lives? This week, Adam is joined by author and technology historian Laine Nooney to discuss how the Apple II revolutionized our fundamental relationship with technology. Find Laine's book at factually.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgumSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's all right. That's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you for joining me once again here on YouTube or on your favorite podcast player

as I talk to an incredible expert about all the amazing things that they know that I don't know and that you might not know. Today, we're going to be talking about computer history. And if you're worried that this is just going to be some geeks nerding out about hardware, well, it will partially be that. But in addition to that, we are going to be telling the story about how we got the relationship that we do with computers. How did they become omnipresent in our lives? How did they end up being something that almost everybody in this country uses every single day? And, you know, the journey of a billion clicks can begin with a single product launch, but it might not be the product launch that you think. Because the story that we often

tell is that our lives were transformed by the smartphone, right? In the early aughts. But in fact, the smartphone is just the latest chapter of the story of our evolving relationship with these computing machines. Before there was a supercomputer in your pocket, there had to be a computer that anyone could use that wasn't just used by big business people or scientists with a giant mainframe. Right. We had to have our zero to one moment where the computer became truly personal. And the computer that did that was the Apple two decades and decades before the launch of the iPhone. The Apple two was a revolutionary product that changed how people related to computers as our guest today is going to explain.

But before we get to that interview, I just want to remind you that if you want to support this show and keep getting these episodes, help keep them free for all the people around the world who listen to them and watch them, please support the show on Patreon. You can head to patreon.com slash adamconover.

Just five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad-free, plus you can head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Just five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show ad free. Plus you can join our community. We would love to have you there. And if you like standup comedy, please come see me on tour this year. If you live in Buffalo, Baltimore, St. Louis, or Providence, Rhode Island, I'm going to be coming to your city. Head to adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates and to see where else in the country I'm going. Now let's get to today's interview. My guest today is Lane Nooney. They're a historian of technology and a fascinating writer, as well as an assistant professor of media industries at New York University and the author, most recently, of The Apple II Age, How the Computer Became

Personal. I know you're going to love this conversation. Please welcome Lane Nooney. Lane, thank you so much for being on the show today. Thank you for having me, Adam. Okay, so look, I grew up in the 80s and 90s. I remember when I was a kid, the computer lab in my elementary school was full of these weird, slightly old computers. I knew they were slightly old at the time. They had green, like, phosphor displays or whatever. We mostly used them to play the Oregon Trail and get our wagon stuck in the river over and over again. Calk or Ford, caulk or Ford, I would always caulk. Fording was a bad idea. Little did I know when I was a little kid using that computer that not only was I using one of the most important technological innovations of the century, but I would be here on my own podcast talking about this very model of computer some 30 years later.

Why did you write a book about the Apple II and what was so important about it? So the Apple II is maybe one of the unsung personal computers of the moment that invention really arises in America in beginning, you know, in the late 70s and through the early 80s. For me, trying to tell the history of computing, particularly of personal computing, I wanted a lever, right? There's so many different types of computers. There's so many different ways that people use them. And the Apple II was this sort of what I call an optimal historical object. It was a computer that was so widely used in both workplaces, homes, and as you mentioned, schools, there was so much software made for it that in the diversity of everything that people did for it, I could really produce a portrait of all the different ways that people used computers. all the different ways that people used computers. So while the book is called The Apple II Age,

in many ways, it's more about the software that was produced for the Apple II rather than the hardware itself. Ah, and that does make sense to me because at the time, like, you know, every computer lab also had that box of floppies right next to it, or the computer teacher, or maybe just the English teacher who was a nerd had a box of floppies and be like,

you gotta check this out. You know, you got to play number munchers and then your mind would be blown or whatever it was, you know. And there were like, it was like a treasure box of all these strange and wonderful things you could do with the computer. But hold on, there were computers before the Apple II

that one could buy and bring into one's home, right? And there were computers that, you know, look today far more like the computers that we use today. You know, like for instance, the first Macintosh like has more in common in terms of its user interface with the modern Macintosh than the Apple IIe or Apple II or Apple IIe does. So what is it that made that one moment so incredible with the Apple II? What was the special feature of that computer that caused this to all come together? The Apple II is released in 1977.

And that's a really special year in the history of computing because it's the year that, you know, that's really the first year that personal computers become commercial products. There's two other really important personal computers that get released during that year. There's the TRS-80, which was RadioShack's computer, which anyone who remembers an Apple II might also remember a RadioShack computer. And it's incredible, by the way, that RadioShack, the company that by the time I was old enough to know what it was, just sold remote control cars and batteries and then became a joke and now no longer exists, actually played a foundational role in computer history. It's like often forgotten just this brick and mortar store.

So the, the TRS 80 was actually the most popular personal computer when it first came out, it sold more than the Apple did. And, and it would do that basically up until about 1980. And that was when the Apple started, Apple started to be a more successful product. So you've got the Apple II, the TRS-80, the Commodore PET, all of these released in 1977.

And that really becomes identified as the year that personal computing is put on the shelf for an American consumer. And then from there, this whole kind of industry basically takes off overnight, right? There was no precedent for what anyone was trying to do in this industry. No one had ever sold software. What did that mean for software to be sold in a store? What did it mean to own a store that sold computers or software to a consumer public? sold computers or software to a consumer public. Certainly there were businesses like this that sold computers and software like B2B style, right? To businesses and corporations. Yeah. But this idea that suddenly we were going to sell computers to people and they were going to use them in their homes or their small businesses, they invented an industry overnight. And I think

that was one of the things I really wanted to start with that story of like, how did this happen? How did software become something that we go into a store and buy, right? What's that story? And for me, I think the Apple II tells that story in a really broad and expansive way. Yeah. And let's just talk about for a second, what is the importance of telling this story? Because look, I mean, there's plenty of YouTube videos about technology history for a niche audience, just, you know, the enthusiast, hey, I'm curious about reading about any of these computers. But, you know, we're talking about it on this show because it has a, it feels like it has a broader importance. And I assume that's why you wrote about it. So what is the importance of doing this history? Absolutely. So a lot of the technology

stories that we might get on YouTube or on a computer documentary, or we might find on the internet are, are really narrow in a lot of senses. They're kind of about the hardware. They're about the primary inventors. They're about schematics and how, you know, how,

how much memory did it have? You know, how, how fast was the computer? And to me, I'm like, you know, knowing the fact that Steve Jobs

helped design the Apple II doesn't tell us anything about why the Apple II was important, right? It doesn't tell us anything about how culture changed. And so what I wanted to do with this book was attempt to tell that story. How did people's lives become computerized? And that's a story where you have to look at something besides the hardware itself or the famous quote unquote pioneers or these boy geniuses who wrote the software, made the hardware. You have to look at how did people use this stuff? What sold? Why did people buy it? What kind of purposes were people trying to figure out how to let a computer into their life? What did that mean circa 1980? Yeah, that is so cool. And I really connect with that because

a little bit of history for me is, you know, I was born in the early eighties, but my grandfather was a, uh, he was a telephone engineer. He worked for AT&T his entire life. He was really into this period of personal computers. And specifically he was fixated on Atari, which most people think of as a video game company. But he was really into their line of PCs. And he gave me, as a kid, a used Atari 800XL that was many years out of date, but he had found it in a dumpster and gave it to me. And then also gave me a bunch of cartridges, a basic cartridge, and a stack of cartridges, a basic cartridge and a stack of magazines of these magazines called Antic and Analog. And this is different from Apple, but I think it was the same sort of enthusiast market was it was people who were buying computers and

then they needed somebody to tell them, well, what do you do with it? Like what sort of fun can you have with your computer? And so these magazines, the best thing is they would have source code in them and it would be like, hey, guess what? Here's a, I don't know. You want to program a kitchen timer. You want to program a game. You want to program a, something to help you do your taxes or whatever. Here's some source code that you could type in. Here's how to save it on a floppy disk, um, et cetera. It was, it, it, you know, it wasn't like a prosumer thing. This is for average people to do, but it was this sort of like collective effort to answer the question. This technology is so cool. What the hell do we all do with it? And so I felt like I got to participate in that a couple of years late because I was, I was given it all by my, by my grandfather. It was like a real flourishing of a culture around these computers, I think is the cool thing about it. Yeah, absolutely. And so what winds up happening really quickly is that that kind of thing that

you're describing becomes a kind of computer hobbyism. But what a lot of people very quickly figure out is that owning a computer is difficult. It's annoying. It's frustrating. It doesn't live up to its promise. And I don't want to learn to program to make it useful. And I think because so much computer history has largely been told by programmers, engineers, hobbyists, people who grew up programming, people who have a lot of nostalgia about this time period. I think we forget that like most consumers, what they actually wanted was a computer. They did not have to think about it all. And that, that was the real struggle. And, and especially because computers at this time, you had to have a fairly substantial minimum competency in order to be able to operate one. But every piece of, every software manufacturer

and publisher was trying to figure out how do we make the dead easiest thing that we possibly can? Because yeah, there, there was not a vision that everyone was going to program. And most people thought it was super fucking annoying. Yeah, it's true. My grandfather was in fact an engineer and I had a little bit of that gene. I've always felt myself in between an enthusiast and a, you know, I, I, I used to code JavaScript, you know what I mean? But I'm not doing that now. Like when, when I try to figure out, I like to do hobbyist stuff with my computer, but

once I need to like write a shell script, I'm out, you know? And, and so I have my limit and so does everybody. And most people's limits are way lower than mine. So presumably I, I think then you, you must believe that the Apple two was, was some kind of answer to this question that it did hit more people than just that sort of core hobbyist programmer base. Absolutely. So in 1977, the Apple II was the most expensive of those three computers I talked about a little bit ago, but that's because it kind of had the best specs. It was really designed to be a system that was expandable. And that was built into the

engineering, the guy who engineered it, Steve Wozniak, who was a kind of brilliant, you know, a brilliant computer designer. What he wanted was a machine that, you know, you could, that could really grow with you. And so that made it really expensive at the start, which is why it sold slow. But over time, those other two systems, the TRS-80, the Commodore PET, they weren't designed with the, you'd have to replace them way too soon. And so Wozniak did this really smart thing, which was that if you wanted to expand the memory of the computer of the Apple II, you could just replace the RAM, right? You could upgrade the computer on your own. This is so funny because this is the number one thing

you cannot do with Apple products now, that they have almost entirely removed except the very high end of their range with the Mac Pro towers and stuff. You can't upgrade their systems at all. And a lot of people do feel like they need to replace their Macs every two years or so if they don't configure them correctly at the start.

Absolutely. The history of early Apple is antithetical to the Apple we understand today. Incredible. I mean, it came out of a supreme love of tinkering, of engineering, and a belief that people should be empowered to understand how their own systems work. to understand how their own systems work, right? Like the thing that Apple turned into really quickly under like, you know, Steve Jobs and the Apple Macintosh is unrecognizable from the place where that computer company started, you know?

Yeah, but Steve Jobs, you mentioned the brilliance of Steve Wozniak. And by the way, I don't want to fall into the great man trap here and just talk about how great these two guys are, but Steve jobs was brilliant at something. Right.

And, uh, I assume, Oh, maybe. All right. Well, what was his role in this story?

That is that, I mean, he, he, you know, for a person who I've been around for the Apple two and the Mac and the iPhone and the iPod and all this, it,

it must show that there's something to it, right? So how do you tell his role in the story? What does he do? So Steve Jobs is, in terms of his role in this story, the talent that Steve Jobs had was in trying to figure out how to commercialize the talent of Steve Wozniak. And I think that should really be understood as what Steve Jobs' role is. And I think that that should really be understood is what Steve Jobs' role is. Everyone from that period agrees he was not a superb engineer. He did not have a significant role in engineering the machine itself. He actually went, you know, he actually disagreed with Wozniak on some key elements. He lost those battles about things like

the number of expansion ports that were going to be on the system and he was dead jobs was dead wrong and the reason this machine was a success because was because wasniak got his way i love this one one of the things that the probably the key role that jobs played uh was that he was responsible for the industrial design so the look of the case he cared a lot about what the machine looked like in a store. Right. Like, and, and I mean, I think that's a, that's something that makes sense to anyone who, you know, kind of loves the look and feel properties of Apple products. I can picture it under my, like, you know, the experience of putting my hands on it as a kid, it like has stuck with me as a piece of industrial design.

Yeah, so he hired a guy named John Maddock to do that, to engineer the case, the kind of plastic shell for it. And it was a very innovative piece of design as well because the Apple II, I don't know, you probably never got to do this if you used one in school, but you could just lift the lid right off.

There were no screws, right? There were no bolts. You could actually take the lid off and put your hands inside your own machine. And that was all part of Wozniak's design. But yeah, Jobs was- That is a tinkerer's machine. That is truly for tinkerers. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And that was a big part of why so many, uh, so Wozniak also kind of released a lot of the documentation for how to make software for the machine. So that led developers to the machine. Um, Apple never tried to take kind of third-party royalties or to interfere with the development of a third-party software market. And so that attracted developers to the machine. Right. Again, unlike today, where now they lock down the app store, you need Apple's approval

to release anything for their computers or phones. And they're going to take a 30% cut no matter what, right? Regardless of whether they had- But back then, it was like, hey, do you want to start a software game company in your garage and make software for our computers? Go nuts. And a lot of people got started that way, created a flourishing in that way. And so that's what makes the Apple II really popular. They attract a ton of developers. And so there's basically, by 1982, the Apple II has the largest software library of any computer on the market. I think it's around 2000 pieces of software, which is a lot, you know, in 1982, ownership was still in the single digits for personal computers at that time.

And that was what gave the system so much longevity. And it was also where you could see the widest array of possible uses were made available for the Apple II. And that's kind of my argument is that this machine is special because it showed us everything that people either did or imagined they might do with a computer. So what sort of things were people doing? I mean, and what was the difference from before the Apple II to after? How did our uses of computers transform because of this? I mean, so there kind of were no uses of computers before this, right? I mean, and Apple allowed you to kind of do the most because it was such a robust machine. But the way I divided my book was I look at these different categories of software that

emerged in the late 70s. And then I look at a specific case study for each. So business software becomes a thing. And so this is where we get VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet. Right. If you use Excel or Google Sheets, what you have to thank is a lineage that goes back to 1979 when the first automatic spreadsheet or digital spreadsheet or digital blackboard is invented. And VisiCalc is often called, forgive me if i'm wrong but i believe it's often called the first killer app for computers period that this at the idea of a

spreadsheet at all of this sort of very malleable adjustable calculator that you can use to make any formula you want be calculated people were especially business people were just like holy shit i gotta have this right away it was like a craze yeah the the killer app hypothesis is you know the argument that uh this was the software that sold the apple 2 you know historians can debate the exact accuracy of that i mean it's it's it's it would have uh what do I want to say about that? It probably increased, it probably sped up the adoption of the Apple II by some period of time. I suspect that it would have happened no matter, you know, it was probably likely to happen no matter what. But it was the case that VisiCalc attracted a class of people to using a computer who never

would have before, which was white collar businessmen. They had no interest in owning a computer. What they wanted was what VisiCalc could do. And they would walk into a computer stores and they would just say, I want a VisiCalc machine. They didn't even know it was an Apple. They didn't care. What they knew was that there was one computer that ran this one piece of software and they had to have it. One of the funny accounting things they would do is basically buy a desk that had a $10,000 computer sitting on it so that they could write it off against their businesses. So what other, I mean, so I, I think you feel probably that visit Calc was important. Maybe it did not make or break the entire computer industry as sometimes promoted, but what were the other uses that people were buying Apple twos for at this time that, that

emerged? So, yeah, you have business, you have business software, you have game software, which is really about highlighting the novelty of what you can do with a computer. You have software like utilities that are programming languages, stuff for the hardcore hobbyists who want to learn how to maximize their use of their computer. You have home software. Do you remember the print shop? Did you ever use that in school? I do remember the print shop. Is this, well, you tell me, but I think I know what it is. What do you think it is? I think it was the thing where you could print out the big banner that said happy Halloween that the, that the, the, the, the guy who ran the computer lab could print out and then they could put in the entryway to the elementary school.

Yes, yes. And it had like a pumpkin and a bat. That was one of the most successful, iconic pieces of software ever released in the 1980s. It's totally been forgotten. I wrote a whole chapter about it. I dug up the two guys who made it. I was like the first,

I had to track them down almost quite literally to find these men. They had just disappeared. Wow was like the first, I had to track them down almost quite literally to find these men. They had just disappeared. And, you know, education software, that was a huge thing. There was so much anxiety in the 1980s about what is the role of America in the global competitive marketplace? Are we being competitive enough? Especially with Japan, there was a lot of Japanophobia during this time, a lot of anxiety about other nations' kids lapping US children. And the idea was that the computer was going to make our children more competitive, right? There was a hole in that. Word processors also, I don't write about them much in the book because other people have written work on word processors, but that was also a huge area of consumer interest.

I mean, to go from writing on a typewriter, a manuscript on a typewriter where you can write it once or, you know, you got your whiteout or maybe your ability to remove some of the letters or whatever. But you're basically writing in a single string to being able to random access, go to any point in your document and insert new text. Just that changed the way people were able to write access, go to any point in your document and insert new text, just that changed the way people were able to write, to have that ability. Typically, if you were a male executive, you weren't on a typewriter anyway. You were handwriting everything, giving it to your secretary and she would type it. Or dictating. Yeah. One of the funny things was that typing was considered secretarial. So when, when, when men bought computers, one of the things they had to buy alongside of it was typing instruction software because none of them knew how to type. They thought like they, they understood typing to be a kind of women's

labor. And so there were all these guys who like suddenly had to learn how to keyboard, uh, because they had never learned that as a skill before. It's also very funny that typing is something to even, it's even funny to think now that typing is something that we have to teach because now everyone just types all the time. Um, uh, but I remember being a kid and being in that Apple two lab and we, they made us practice typing tests and I thought it was stupid because I already could type because we had a computer at home, blah, blah, blah. But you know, you're doing the home row and everything. And like, lo and behold, thank God they taught all the kids how to type because it's all,

it's literally all anybody does all day now is type. I mean, are they still taught how to type? I'm not sure. It's like, did they all swipe now? I don't know what's going on. We might know already. I just want to return to the print shop briefly because that piece of software, completely iconic, first of all, because they would print the banners on the,

the printer was part of the very important, was part of this revolution. The fact that first of all, you could type something on your computer and then output as many copies as you want right in front of you is like a big deal. You know, desktop publishing and all that. But also just the fact, first of all, that the printers went e, e, e, extremely memorable and that the paper was connected. Why don't we have this today? What they had back then was the paper would come in a giant sheaf

and they would all be connected like an accordion. And so you could print out a hundred foot long banner. I can't buy. Where can I get that paper today at Office Max? They don't make those printers anymore. What have we lost? I think you can order it kind of off market from China. I think it still exists somewhere, but it's not easy to find.

But we all had the power in the early 80s to print out a 100-foot long banner anytime we needed one, and today we have lost it. And I think we've gone backwards. Do you agree? I think the loss of the print shop banner is a grave disappointment. Incredible.

Well, on that note, let's take a really quick break. We're going to come back and talk a lot more of the incredibly fun history of the Apple II with Lane Nooney. talk a lot more of the incredibly fun history of the Apple II with Lane Nooney. Okay, we're back with Lane Nooney. So, I mean, tell me about like what made the Apple II so easy to use for people? We're talking again about the difference between the enthusiasts and the public and how businessmen who didn't even know how to type were buying these machines. Was it really that big of a revolution in usability for the average person?

Certainly, that really depended on your software. And so whether or not your computer was hard or easy to use depended on how well made your software was. And Print Shop is a great example in this. One of the most frequent comments about the Print Shop, if you go back and read reviews from 1984, is how many people talk about how you never had to open the manual. Wow. That the software was intuitive, that a piece of software made in 1984, you just put the disk in, the whole thing came up, and it taught you what to do. came up and it taught you what to do. And that was that it was this, it was this play between,

okay, you're going to have all of this creative potential, but you're also going to be really constrained. We're going to put you on a rail. You're going to choose things in an order. You're going to choose out of a limited set of options. And all of these things are going to, you know, you're going to get these choices one by one. This isn't a free for all. This isn't Photoshop. This isn't page maker, right? You know, we're going to, we're going to get these choices one by one. This isn't a free-for-all. This isn't Photoshop. This isn't PageMaker. We're going to show you step-by-step how you make that banner, how you make that greeting card for grandma, how you make that sign. And that was maybe one of the first times I think you could legitimately talk about something like user-friendliness relative to using a computer. But that was really all in the software. And like who came up with that? I mean, you're talking, you know, Wozniak was like

the, the ultimate tinkerer, right. And jobs was at best a clever marketer. Um, and they weren't telling the print shop guys what, you know, what kind of software to make. So what, what is it about the Apple II or about this moment that caused that change to occur where previously, I mean, people were typing into command lines and programming BASIC and interacting with computers in much more complicated ways? Well, I think by 1984, you actually had way too much software in the market. There was a big market crash that would happen after 84 because there was basically a huge bubble that hit. Everyone was producing too many products. There was way too, the speculation about how big the market was going to get was way, way,

way out of whack with reality. And so you knew that if you wanted to sell something, you couldn't just like churn out some kind of unbugged crappy piece of software anymore. You had to cut through a lot of noise and new users that the, basically the, the newer the user, the less tolerant they were to complexity. So to expand the market, you had to make things simpler. And so the two guys who designed the print shop, uh, they were at the time, a gay couple, Marty, Marty Kahn and David Balsam. They, they met in San Francisco in the late, I think early, the late seventies or early eighties. Hell yeah. And, and Marty Kahn was a, he, you know, worked as a graphics programmer. And he,

but he also had experience as a visual artist he used his computer to make computer art uh some of the first computer art ever made for personal computers in fact wow what kind of art did he make like what what form did it take kind of like um it was kind of like 3d modeling stuff a little bit psychedelic you know but it was all of it was printed out just on these big sheets uh and sometimes he would paint them in it felt he sent me a bunch of it uh printed out just on these big sheets. And sometimes he would paint them in. It felt, he sent me a bunch of it. There's, there's images of some of it in the book, but it's very, it's very classic kind of like, you know, like a, what do they call that? The, the like figure, the 3D figure eight or the Taurus, right?

These like common 3D modeling shapes that he was, he was trying to work with. But on an Apple or on a very early computers, that's really cool. Yes, yes. And so what they wanted was they wanted a piece of software that would create connections between people. That was really their goal. Their original prototype was the idea that you would be able to create a little interactive or a kind of visual

experience on your computer, save it to a disk and give it to your friend. And their publisher, Broderbund, was like, this is cool, but it requires everyone to have the same piece of software. How often, you know, like if everyone has to have an Apple II in order for this to make sense or to work. And someone at Broderbund basically asked them, what if you could print this out? What if instead of this thing being stuck to a screen, what if it became a physical experience? And I think that was a radical transformation in the idea.

And what they were lucky about was that these two guys, David and Marty in particular, were good enough programmers, good enough at graphics, that they could actually pull that off, that they could figure out how to design the system to do that. And usability was their number one goal. It was like, we want a child to be able to use this. As you remember, early reviews, there's one that just says, this is not a game. And the reviewer's being sardonic because she's like,

it feels like a game. That's how fun it is to use this program. Ah, that's amazing. Uh, and by the way, I, I love hearing some of the, uh, some of the queer history of early computing too. It's not often told enough. Um, and that's, that's such a cool dimension to that story. Uh, but let's talk about games a little bit. My favorite topic, because look, I'm a, I've been playing video games my entire life. And there are these two interesting parallel tracks of video games in the 80s of personal computer games and then, you know, Nintendo style console games that eventually converged and split. It's like such a cool way to follow it. Tell me about.

But this is certainly a period of incredible flowering in games where people were discovering new ways that you could play with a computer. How important were games to the Apple II and what new discoveries were made at that time? I mean, one of the things that if you do an analysis of sales, it's like nobody bought a computer to play games. That's not what they told each other. Everyone who owned a computer bought games. And so they were no one's primary rationale, right? You couldn't substantiate the cost, right? Computers were way more expensive than a game console, way more expensive than having a video game arcade addiction, playing

Pac-Man down at the arcade every day. They were really expensive, complicated hardware. But everyone found a reason to own a little bit of game software. And every publisher, even VisiCalc, even their publisher originally also released games. Everybody also released games because games were not used, they were consumed. And so there was this ravenous kind of appetite in the market to, to, for whatever you could find next. Yeah. You always need a new one. Yeah. You always, right. As soon as, cause either you get bored or, um, a lot of what is happening is that every single person programming game software is trying to figure out how to outdo the person who just released

something else. Right. So it's, so it's in games where I say that like one of my, one of my theories is that game software is really the only kind of software whose whole goal is to try and manipulate the limitations of hardware. Like the, the real,

the, the kind of spirit of a game is to make a computer do something it shouldn't be able to do yes and that that that holds true even today oh yeah i mean when people talk about the new zelda game which i am still playing after 100 hours a lot of it is like how the hell did nintendo get this piece of hardware from like basically 2015 to run a perfect physics simulation with all these moving objects that you can combine in any way. It never glitches out. Everything is physics interactable. You're playing it and you're like, I cannot, this is, this must be the best programmers in the world who did this. And, but that's exactly the same thing as someone looking

at, you know, an early PC going like, how can I squeeze a couple extra colors out of this or squeeze just a little bit of, you know, a little bit extra firepower. How do I, how do I put graphics on a text adventure? Right. How do I solve that problem? How do I make those graphics color? How do I make them interactive? How do I make a sprite? How to, and, and, and then how can I do many of those things maybe at the same time? And so it's in games that you get these marvelous feats of kind of virtuosic engineering, right? Because it's not just about trying to get a product to do a thing or to be useful or fit on the floppy disk. It was about a culture of young programmers dominantly trying to outdo one another. There was a tremendous amount of gamesmanship. There was also one of the most popular kind of quote unquote genres was arcade ripoffs.

In the very early years, kind of 1980, 1981, a lot of the games that were released were programmers looking at what their favorite arcade games were and trying to make a perfect knockoff and they you know there there would be all of these different kind of you know whether it was uh you know a donkey kong like or a galaga like or a space invaders like uh it didn't take long for atari to come after a bunch of these companies by 81 uh they. They were definitely filing lawsuits trying to get them to knock this off. So that dried up pretty quickly. But it's also in computers, we get types of games that you can't get on a console

or an arcade, right? Games that are kind of, you get the role-playing game, right? You get the strategy game, something like Flight Simulator, right? Just isn't suited to the economic or programming model of a console or an arcade. And so, yeah, we get unique new genres that also appear for computers. Yeah. And one of the coolest things about this period in games,

and I think about this all the time, is that, you know, by the time Nintendo, you know, in the late 80s and early 90s, that was marketed as a toy. And it was marketed to kids and almost entirely to boys. And so it was very narrow, and that sort of shaped the kind of game that was being made. But if you look at the games that came out for the PC market starting in the 80s and through to the 90s, this culture still existed, games were for all types of people. You had games made by and made for adults and for women. And, you know, you had people like Roberta Williams, you know, who created, you know, the King's Quest series for Sierra, you know, and originally they certainly included women in their marketing because computers were this sort of product for everybody. Companies like Infocom making these extremely literary text adventures where the whole appeal was like, it's like playing a novel, which is something that I love video games so much that leeched out of the culture of video games so quickly.

And it's still not really there, you know, that that games are being made for 50 year old novel readers. You know what I mean? And it's a bummer. It's a bummer. It's something that like there was there was a lot of possibility in that space of of who could make games and who could play games. It was wide open in a way it wasn't 15 years later. Yeah. It's a really funny thing about computer game history is that even though computers were coded as kind of male objects, and in many cases that kind of demographically played out that way, there was just, I think, a broader imagination of who was using them, what entertainment was. And what really kills that, it's not quite Nintendo, it's Nintendo versus Sega.

It's the hyper competitive. It's basically the first time we get a console war. And what Sega does is they stop appealing to that 8 to 11 or 8 to 12 year old demographic that Nintendo has locked down. And instead, Sega goes after a slightly older boy teenager yeah and and so that's where it becomes about sexualization it becomes about violence it becomes about video games being yeah you know it becomes about like video games being a place to escape your mom or your grandma or to get away from women which if you think about it is like so

fucked up yeah it's kind of that was literally in the marketing a whole bunch of our problems right is that like young men were sold this idea that games are where you become masculine like like you know and i think it just it grokked the culture for decades yeah and and it's just bizarre again because i also played games like king's Quest, right? One of which had like a female lead and you're a princess and you're trying to rescue the prince. And, you know, it's like a fairy tale. And these were games that I loved, right? This was like also equally... Yeah, yeah, yeah. King's Quest 4. Yeah. a direction that we could have gone maybe further in games culture and you can look at it as a path not taken or you can look at it as a path that was taken that we forget too easily um yeah but i'm curious uh you know as we as we sort of reach the try to reach the end of this interview and and uh think about this in a broader way uh there were a lot of choices that were made by people like Wozniak, Jobs, and other folks at

that time that shaped what we think a computer could be and who it's for, just as happened with video games. So what were some of those choices and what were the roads that we didn't take? Are there any possibilities that were foreclosed that, you know, we, you, you wish we might've gone down? Oh God, that's a good question. I'm, um, maybe the way that I would approach this and, and if you don't like this answer, you can just cut me, you know, but like the way that I would approach this would be kind of about, um, it would actually be about kind of the way we've, we've continued to only remember the computer as a certain kind of thing. And I think that that has actually done damage to the kinds of futures we imagine computers can make. That when we only tell the history of a computer as this thing that's about its hardware and it's

about its boy genius inventors, or it's a thing, has such a kind of limited sense of relevance, right? You know, those, those really long YouTube teardowns that are going to talk about every memory, you know, Ram spec and everything, um, that all have the same voice, you know, like there's that just computer man voice, you know, from, from these YouTube videos. Um, when we think that that's all that computing is right. Um. I've actually gotten some interesting, you know, some interesting complaints that my book is not appropriately demonstrative or praiseworthy of people like Steve Jobs. And I'm like, if you, if you think that the whole point of history is just to like praise these dudes, then actually, where can we go from there? Right? Because history

is the fuel from which we imagine the future histories we're trying to make, right? Like people, there's a reason that Jobs is a totem. There's a reason that he is supposed to be this source of inspiration. And when I think when we fail to realize what these things were in their fullest context, then we don't actually understand what made computing important at all. And then that kind of ruins our ability to create anything new, right? We just wind up on this awful treadmill that we're all living in right now. We're like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are having a cock measuring match over what, you know, like, like, like what, what's even happening here? You know, this idea that everyone has to kind of like rule the territory or, um, be in total control. And, and we just, that, that it's all about like, who's the master of the market. I don't know. It just seems like there's nothing like, like where's, where's a history of computing or of any of the social media or anything that, that is like emphasizes, I don't know, like

people's essential dignity. They're interested in collaborating and communicating. You know, we've turned these into weird stories about like men needing to one up each other or dudes being geniuses. And it's just sad because I think it, it limits what we imagine the future of technology could actually be to just a limited set of kind of narcissistic stories. Well, I mean, story is the operative word there, right? Because the sort of stories we like to tell are one man versus another man and they fight. And, you know, that's just, that's, that's mythology. That's legend. You know, that's how, that's sort of the structure of

storytelling itself. It lends itself towards that kind of story, but not exclusively that kind of story. There are other, you know, the kind of story I like is the story where we go underneath that lazy story we've heard a million times and we discover something new under there. And so what is the thing you've discovered about this time in history and about this computer? You say it's not just about the great man and it's not just about the domination of the marketplace and it's not just about the hardware. What is it about this time? Is it about, one thing I've loved hearing you talk about is the community that grew up around it. Is it about that or what is it for you i think for me it's the constant reminder that no one was demanding this like i like actually

the market like the like the the and i guess we didn't talk about this a ton in this interview but that the capital invest like that that corporate investments, basically, venture capitalists, investors, things like that, really needed a new market to take off in the early 1980s. And they spent a lot of time convincing people that computers were a thing that they needed. me that's been such a beautiful reveal on the idea that that that um in many ways these these desires were like ardently manufactured by people with core economic investments which isn't to say computers wouldn't have taken off or that they wouldn't have been important but the the kind of bubble of interest we see emerge in the late 70s early 80s is really about a set of like uh in like kind of elite investor interest kind of trying to brute force uh market potential and i i think of that every time i hear someone show you know every time someone tried to tell me the metaverse is the future or crypto

is the future or it's just like we have to stop saying that things are inevitable because they're not yeah so not and like i've got all the receipts to prove that they're not but you know but just to push back very slightly because i i absolutely believe in manufacture you know the existence of of companies manufacturing markets like that and you know when i see these new things that are being pushed like the metaverse, you know, when I see these new things that are being pushed, like the metaverse or, you know, the Apple goggles or whatever, I'm like, that's not going to improve my life. Like I'm sitting here. Uh, if I, if I buy all this shit, I'm going to be in the same position I was before. Right. I'm not excited except that back in the dawn of the computer age, I was so excited, right? Like I know that the money had to be put in, but, you know, in the early, when I think

about my early interactions with the internet, when I finally had the opportunity to get on there and like interact with people, I was like, oh my God, I can do things I couldn't do before. Now, granted, life went on, you know, before that. But so how do those things interact in your view? Yeah. So I think the internet is a separate proposition. The internet actually personal computing, when it begins in the late 1970s, it never

lived up to the promises of what it was going to do until the internet until the early nineties. And so what you, what you had basically in the eighties was this just slog of trying to find a reason to convince people that continual, cause it isn this just slog of trying to find a reason to convince people that continual, because it isn't just enough for somebody to buy a computer. You need them to buy new software. You need them to actually replace that computer on a routine.

And for most like, yes, there were people who found computers fascinating. A lot of people just didn't get it. Sure. They're like, why they needed it. They're like, great, you can print a banner. Good. Thanks for the banner.

It didn't improve anyone's lives, right? But also imagine that the position to show these to a child is to do a certain kind of political work about teaching a child about what the future is supposed to look like, right? I's a there there is a there is a kind of shaping that's happening in that moment the internet is something the internet sells the personal computer in a way that the personal computer could not sell itself yes and i think that that is that is bar none absolutely true it was but even in the 90s and this is shocking to realize even in the 90s only a third of u.s households had a personal computer yeah like like it just was never actually um it was never actually the ubiquitous it wasn't

a television it wasn't a radio right which which you know tv went from like five to eighty nine percent of u.s households in a decade yeah. Personal computing couldn't get a lock on that. Not a chance. And so I think this history has kind of undermined, I think, a lot of assumptions we have about the inherent popularity of computing that for me has been very useful in always just kind of thinking twice about what somebody wants to tell me about what the future is supposed to look like. Yeah, no, it's a good point. And you're making me appreciate, A, that I was maybe a little bit more of a nerd enthusiast, right? Who was attracted to it. And I had a grandfather who taught me how to use it,

which I'm grateful for. But also I was being worked on, that I was, my grandfather was selling it to me as it was sold to him. And of course my obsession with video games as a kid, I was drawn into the birth of this new medium, which I think is a wonderful artistic medium. I was also massively being marketed to. I subscribed to a magazine that told me about all the new games. And I keep those magazines in my house right now under lock and key because they're precious to me because

I was marketed to so effectively that being a Nintendo fan is like now part of my permanent personality. And I'm just stuck with that. So I absolutely believe I'm subject to it. But it's a really good point you raise about the internet, because I remember when did what really saved Apple, right? When it was on the brink of extinction, it was the iMac. It was and what was the iMac? What was the i? It was internet. And how do they market it? They said it was the easiest way to get on the internet. Suddenly all these people who were like, why do I need a computer? Were like, oh, I got to get on the internet. How do I do it?

And it was, this is your easiest way. That was the famous Jeff Goldblum, there's no step three advertisement, right? Yes. And so we see, again, the importance of actually not understanding how the computer works. Right. As a prerequisite. The advertising said you don't you won't need to know how the Mac works. Just buy the fucking thing and turn it on. Jeff Goldblum says it's going to work. Yes, absolutely. I mean, man, it's so fascinating to talk to you about this stuff. I mean, what other insights does this give you about how we look at technology today? You said it helps you be more skeptical of when the metaverse and other things are being

shoved down our throats by Zaku or whoever else. Does it give you any other vision of what the future of computing could look like to look at its past in this way? You know, I like to take the historian's prerogative that, that I don't have to talk about the future. Okay. Um, I, I, you know, yeah, I, I, I'm not sure there is some lesson that we're supposed to extract about like what, I don't know. I always find it odd that this is like a, uh, uh, a position we want to take about the past that it, that it's supposed to like, I don't, yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure there is some kind

of kernel in here about, I mean, I, I think, huh, let me, let me think about this for a second. No, no, I, I, can I just say, I love this answer because I was asking you to help us arrive at a final point here. And you're setting me straight that the premise of the question is bullshit, right? Like, why am I asking you about the future? Why am I asking you what grand lesson to take away? Like, the pursuit of history is its own reward here. And it's a thing that's worth understanding.

And so feel free to just tell me to go fuck myself and we can, we can end the interview. I think that our, our desire to kind of make the history about the present all the time actually kind of robs it of something sometimes. Right. And we, we, we miss kind of the point of just letting a thing be in the past and trying to understand it in the past. Are there ways, are there kind of capitalist point of just letting a thing be in the past and trying to understand it in the past. Are there ways are there kind of capitalist lessons I can extract from that? Yes. Are there new ways? Are there revived ways I think about like what is bullshit about how people want to sell us technology?

Yes. But I think there is there's tremendous like beauty and poetry and all of the little tales that are wrapped up in this computer. And I think that we can enjoy them for their own sake without needing to make them about us in a certain sense. What a brilliant answer to my question. And it gives me such excitement to dive into this book. The name of the book, once again, is The Apple II Age. You can pick up a copy at our special bookshop at factuallypod.com slash books. Lane, is there anywhere else that you would like to plug people to pick up a copy or where they can find your work? Yes, you can find my work on my website, www.lanenoonie.com. I'll have links to all of the many, many proliferating social media presences

that I have up there, my tweets, toots, threads, et cetera. And if you want to get a copy of the book, you can also hit up my publisher at the University of Chicago Press. They currently have a little promo code UCPNew, and that'll get you 30% off a copy as well. Oh my God. Go get it from the publisher and get that 30% off. Lane Nooney, thank you so much for coming on the show. Adam, thank you so much for having me. This was fantastic. My God, thank you once again to Lane Nooney for coming on the show.

You can pick up a copy of their book at factuallypod.com slash books. It supports both this show and your local bookstore as well. If you want to support this show directly, you can do so at patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Just five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad free for 15 bucks a month. I will read your name and thank you on this very program. And this week, I would like to thank Kim Keplar, Trey Burt, Mac GNG 314, Patrick Ryan, my own Avenger and Shannon J. Lane.

If you want to join them, Patreon dot com slash Adam Conover. And thank you, as always, to the incredible community that powers this show. I'm making the show with you and for you. And I'm so grateful to all of you for being a part of it. If you want to follow me on tour, once again, adamconover.net for tickets and tour dates. I want to thank my producers, Sam Roudman and Tony Wilson, everybody here at HeadGum for making the show happen. You can find me online at adamconover or adamconover.net. See you next week on Factually. That was a hate gun podcast.