Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Apple II History With Laine Nooney

Episode Date: May 13, 2023

Yes, the Apple II is maybe more historically important than the Macintosh, at least for Apple as a company. I agree with the argument my friend Laine Nooney makes in their book: The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal. Enjoy this deep dive into early Apple and PC history and then, BUY THE BOOK! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another bonus episode of the Tech Meme Ride Home. I'm Brian McCullough, as always. We're going to do tech history for this bonus episode, not even Internet history, but computing history.

But this is a story for you Apple fans out there, for you tech fans out there that I think is maybe sort of underserved or maybe doesn't get the attention it deserves. We're going to go all the way back to talk about the Apple II, not even the Macon. intosh the Apple 2. We're talking to Lane Nooney, who is a good friend of mine. They were very helpful when I was doing the Internet History podcast when my book came out. The book that we're talking about is the Apple 2 age, how the computer became personal. Lane, you are an actual historian credentialed with degrees. I always like to say I am not. I want to make that clear. But again, you were super helpful to me when I was being a, I was pretending to be a tech historian. So go ahead and introduce yourself and let's start talking about the Apple Toon. Sure thing. Thank you so much for having me here today, Brian. And I alleged to be a professional historian. You are. You have the degrees. So I'm Lane Nuni. I'm an assistant professor of media industries at New York University.

And that's the fancy way of saying that I'm a computer and video game historian. That's work I've been doing ever since I started my dissertation back in the early 2010s. Yeah, and let me flag this. Lane was on the Internet History podcast to do an episode about Sierra Online, which if you're old enough, that was a huge computer gaming company in the 80s. But, Lane, again, like that episode, this is, I jumped at the opportunity to to do this because this is right in my wheelhouse. My first computer that my family owned in 1986 was an IBM, the PS2 Model 25, but the first

computers that I ever interacted with, and let's say that this was maybe 83, 84, was the Apple 2. And then we'll get into this eventually. All of the computing that I did in elementary school was on Apple 2E's. So I'm just curious. Do you have a similar background slash experience with the Apple II? I get this question a lot, and I don't. The Apple II was not part of my personal computing history. So I'm a bit younger than you, maybe a half-step generation younger.

I did still get a computer at a pretty young age. My first computer was in 1991, and it was actually quite old. It was a Tandy 1,000, so it was a computer from like the mid-80s. Right. That would almost, it wouldn't be the exact contemporary of the two. That would have been, again, a half generation after the two. But so that's close enough, though. Yeah. So I definitely, we were using five and a quarter inch floppy disks in the early 90s to show you kind of how behind the curve we were. You know, I got it as a gift from another family member. And, you know, we lived in West Virginia at the time, which was not really imagined as a, you know, it was a small rural. town, there wasn't a lot of access to cutting edge technology. And we just sort of, you know, particularly my mom and I, who were the folks who most used or were interested in the computer, we just sort of made sense of it as we could, right? It was this kind of marvelous, interesting little space in which you could play games and make, you know, make little pictures. And I didn't

have a great sense that I was like participating in a computer revolution or anything. It was just a fun object to spend hours and hours and hours of my timeline as a kid. So it is interesting to me that, again, in the cohort that I'm a part of, the Apple 2 was the intro, even though in the 80s. And eventually, again, when I got on the PC clone side of it, that's all anyone I knew used because that's where the games were. but so many people had their first intro to the Apple 2. And what people remember about Apple nowadays because of movies and books and things like that is the Macintosh. And I do remember seeing a Macintosh very early on, but let's go into the heart of it right now in the sense that while the Macintosh is historically this icon of computing, the argument could be made at least in its initial. iterations that the Macintosh was actually a failure as a product, that the thing that

actually made Apple again in its early life, Apple, was the two. The thing that was the success that turned Apple into one of the greatest tech stocks of the early 80s was the Apple II. So can you give us just a little bit of a background in terms of the importance of the Apple II, first to Apple, but then to the early people? or computing industry? Sure. And the sort of case that you're making is exactly one of the arguments I make in the book. If we have this mental model of what the history of computing is, we tend to, and I would say both kind of journalists and academic historians,

will often attach to the Macintosh as the beginning of this personal computing moment. And I think one of the things that's really essential to my book is I make the argument that the Macintosh was, One, you're right. It was kind of an industrial failure, right? And two, it benefited from the fact that the entire industry had already formalized by the time that computer was released. And by what I'm specifically talking about here is a kind of hardware and software supply chain. So my book is really interested in this moment of tying the Apple II to the emergence of the idea of a consumer computing industry, that all of a sudden, out of nowhere, we have to, this industry that basically blows up in the span of, you know, if you're being generous, maybe seven to eight years, but really its biggest expansion is a narrow period of time of around four to five, right, from like 1979, 1980 to about 1984, 1985. It happened so quickly that there weren't stores where you bought computers, there weren't stores where you bought software,

and then suddenly there were. And how did any of that happen? How did people make sense of this entirely new commodity. My argument is that, you know, there were many computers of this era, right? There are some fans who would say this should be a book about the Commodore 64. There are other computers totally worth mentioning, the Commodore Pat, the TRS 80, but the Apple 2, as Apple's first real consumer-oriented microcomputer, they had the Apple One. That was sort of a kind of maybe proof of concept, right, that allowed them to get early investment, that then they leveraged into the Apple II and really did a commercial release around. But the Apple II would pretty quickly wind up having the largest library of software

of any microcomputer on the market. And that meant that if you were someone who wanted to understand what was computing all about, why should I have a computer? You know, you were looking at not the hardware necessarily, but what can I do with it? And the Apple 2 gave you the best range of answers, right? If you want to think about this computer as a kind of historical entry point or doorway for us to understand this moment in time, then the range of software and the range of possible uses was the biggest for this particular computer.

Yeah, so I want to come back to the third-party software ecosystem being important. So the Apple one is literally at the dawn of the microcomputer. It's for the hobbyist. It's for the homebrew computer club folks. And then, like you said, they leverage that into essentially this is their stab at doing a consumer product, which again, like the Altair and other early things, like they were still servicing the hobbyist. So was Apple two, was the Apple II innovative in that sense of trying to go for a more consumer-oriented? Or are they trying to to like split the difference or explain the strategy. Sure. So you know, you have what and I'm just going to give a chronology here and you can cut what you want. No, no, I'm not cutting anything. Give it all.

So right, we have the first kind of what would we call it? What's considered the first kind of commercialized microcomputer is the Altair 8800, you know, retro computing enthusiasts can get into arguments, about, you know, what the real first personal computer was or whatever, but that's the computing system that landed on the cover of popular electronics. It sold more than any other, and it inspired a lot of hobbyist activity, right? So computing, personal computing at its moment of origin, 1975, 1976, this is a hobbyist activity. These are guys who are dominantly engineers, and they want computing power for themselves. They want to play with it and tinker with it. And, you know, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs are out in Silicon Valley, and that's also the place where the Homebrew Computer Club starts up. And they start attending these meetings, and they realize there's something here, right?

Wozniak is a totally prodigious engineer, infinitely curious. And he kind of makes, I think, for his own, just to challenge himself, this what becomes the Apple One, which is literally just a board, right? There's no peripherals. You know, there's, it's a really, it's not a user-friendly system by any- It's just a word that you have to have the ability to hook up to other things yourself if you want to do anything with it. You need to provide your own cassette player for media storage. You need to provide your own television for video output. You didn't even, you know, it didn't even have a keyboard, right?

It was literally just like a motherboard. And, you know, they sell a small quantity of these that gives them some startup capital. But, you know, it's Silicon Valley. There's a lot of money sloshing around. There's a lot of venture capital opening up at this moment. And there's guys like Don Valentine, Mark, Marcula, who are roaming around in this system, trying to figure out who might be the next thing, right? And Mike Markola, who's, you know, an early retiree of intelligence.

I believe, winds up deciding to invest in Wozniak and jobs. And that gives them the initial capital to do a real serious redesign on what they imagine this computer might be. The Apple 2 comes out in 1977. It has immediate competition, right? Commodore has entered this market, which was a purveyor of office automation equipment. They make a consumer-facing microcomputer, the Commodore Pet. Radio Shack creates the TRS-80, right?

Radio Shack being the most prominent kind of hobbyist electronics hobbyist retail store in the country. And so they release a hobbyist computer. And so the Apple 2 comes out in this broader context where it actually has quite a number of early competitors. It was not the most popular microcomputer for folks to buy right off the bat. One, mostly, I think, because it was enormously expensive. It was the most expensive of those three computers, which are often referred to as the 1977 Trinity or the second wave of microcomputers. But what the Apple II in particular had going for it was that it was really one of the only

computers that was a really strong, that could straddle these two markets. The market of the hobbyist, which is, we want a lot of access. We want control and access to our hardware, right? We want to not just be able to code, but we want to understand, right, what's going on in the inside of the machine. And then it was also, I think accessible is a strong word, but people who didn't know anything about computers

could buy one and begin to teach themselves how to use it, right? It met the desires of these two very different constituencies in a way that neither the common. or pet, nor the TRSAD really could. Well, and also, again, there's no way to do this without referencing these sorts of things. But if the Macintosh represents the first sort of consumer product that is the modern competing paradigm, right? The Apple is also, in the sense that moving beyond the hobbyist, it does have the keyboard. It does have the sort of light brownish sort of.

of case and chassis and like, and it has like the soft around. I would make the argument that all the way through like, you know, the Packard Bells of the 90s, like it does sort of set up what computers look like when they enter people's homes. And then you're mentioning things like the ports. And again, referencing like the Jobs movie and Wozniak being like, we need the ports or whatever. So again, it looks. looks modern to our eyes, or at least modern-ish, right? But then it's also sort of in the background playing to the hobbyist where it's like,

there's so many ports, you can do anything you want with this. You can extend it, you can expand it, you can do all these things, which again is completely anathema to the spirit of Steve Jobs as the legend has grown up. So tell me about that, the sort of straddling the what we know of what consumer computing looks like today, and what still being extensible to the hobbyist was key to its success. Sure. I was just, I was referencing my own book to look up some names there. So I think in terms of that move toward a computer that looks more accessible, all the computers of the 1977 Trinity do this, right? The Commodore, Pet,

the Tierra Sadie, the Apple 2, they all have keyboards, they all have, well, actually, interestingly, the TIRS 80 and the Commodore Pet have built-in monitors and cassette drives. And this winds up becoming a really interesting limitation for these machines, because the Apple 2, it didn't come with a screen. You had to figure out, did you want to buy a computer monitor? Did you want to use a black and white television? It also didn't come with its own cassette deck. This was because Wozniak was such a hobbyist.

He was like, people who buy these machines are going to want to make these decisions for themselves, right? And that was that, you know, that that was frustrating for people who maybe wanted a company to make that decision for them. But it also allowed that computing system to have a lot more flexibility going forward. The early versions of the TRISA and the Commodore Pet, these were systems designed to be replaced. They were not really immediately expandable beyond, purchase, right? And while the Apple 2 is more expensive, its cost went down dramatically as there, you know, as, you know, kind of following that Moore's law principle, right, that it just kept costing less and less and less to make them. And they were able to soup up the general

specifications of that system without having to design a whole new computer, right? Which is why I think that you see the Apple 2 kind of start small, but grows quite big. And has a long life. Yes, and also because, right, they did the, you know, they did an early to market relatively inexpensive floppy drive, right? None of this stuff is inexpensive in, you know, 1970s, 1980s, but cheaper than anybody else's. And that kind of inherent flexibility, the fact that all you had to do was buy the floppy drive and you could plug it into your computer. And you didn't have to do a single other thing, right? The fact that you could make a decision. It just works.

It just works. You can make a decision that maybe you start out with a black and white TV as your output, and then later you switch to a color computer monitor, right? You could upgrade the machine in these ways that these other systems, you look at a TRS80, you can't even open it, right? It's not a hardware hacking machine. The Commodore Pet, if you've ever seen one opened, quote unquote, it lifted like the hood of a car, right?

You had to prop it up with a little stick. You couldn't, but the Apple 2, the lid just came off. And you had immediate access to everything inside the machine. And so this gave it, I think I call it a sort of ambidextrous quality. It could meet a lot of different people's needs because it wasn't so boxed in. And it also wasn't so focused on making a sort of narrowly conceived, you know, cheapest product on the market. I think we should do this here before we move on to things like the floppy and the software and stuff like that. Sure, sorry. No, again, I feel like we have to serve the legend, and the legend being that,

you know, this was kind of the last time that the Jobs Wozniak partnership was still a functional partnership. Yes. But also you could make the argument that this is Steve Wozniak's masterpiece. Totally. I've heard that said many times before. So go into a little of that about how if you buy into the legend of these two and their partnership of genius, which was very, very limited in terms of time and in terms of the number of products. You have the Apple one and the Apple two, and maybe a little bit on the Lisa. But tell me a little bit about that sort of partnership in terms of the conception of the product and the development of the project. Yeah, you know, Jobs and Wozniak's relationship has seeded dozens of books, right? People are

obsessed with the sort of the underlying psychology of these individuals. And that was something I had to contend with, too, in putting together this book. I think what becomes very clear in an attention to the primary documents of the period is how much the Apple II would absolutely not have existed without Steve Wozniak. Like, it is a tour de force of computer engineering. The kind of economy of the circuit design, the idea of the inherent expandability, the embracing the idea of a homebrew or kind of hacker ethic at the level of the engineering design of the device itself. Jobs-

Is this also because he is free to pursue this? Because there is no one above him to be like, well, this is what we need the product to be. This is where we're- he's free to just make the computer that he wants? Yeah, in a sense, right? the Apple II sort of becomes his pet project. He has a number of things that he wants to experiment with, particularly, you know, video output was a real kind of,

I think it's under-recognized as a real passion hobbyist interest for Steve Jobs. Or sorry, as a passion hobbyist interest for Steve Wozniak. The reason he showed up at the first homebrew meeting, he alleges was actually because he wanted to talk about video terminals for computing systems, right? as he was interested in microprocessors or the first microcomputer. So he brings a lot of just, he wants to solve engineering puzzles, right? And he brings that kind of ingenuity, especially at this moment before there even really is, yeah, they had a company, but what were they going to do? There was not really anyone providing oversight. And Wozniak was just an incredibly industrious,

extremely creative thinker. He also benefited from growing. growing up in an environment that cultivated and reaffirmed that. And he grew up in the place that had the largest population density of computing engineers, probably on Earth. So he was able to learn these skills from a very young age, and he continued to apply them forward. As for Steve Jobs, just about anybody who knew Steve Jobs didn't consider him much of an engineer, but he had a certain knack for trying to turn other people's skills. into his own benefit, right? We see this early in the blue box story between Wozniak and Jobs,

right? Where Wozniak creates this device for phone freaking, and Wozniak is just sort of making it for kicks. Jobs immediately, he wants to, he wants to, let's say, quote unquote, commercialize this. He wants to sell them on a gray market to students at Berkeley, right, and try to make extra money. We see this kind of tension between them of jobs often, coming in to commercialize or commoditize Wozniak's technical instincts. It's not really clear that Wozniak had a lot of desire for that kind of side of the business himself. And I think where you see that come across is that, you know, Wozniak designs this phenomenal microcomputer and he engineers it, Jobs designs it.

So Jobs took it as his personal mission toward the industrial design of the device. He hires the, I believe he was a former HP industrial designer, Jerry Mannock, who winds up creating that really iconic beige chassex that has those kind of beautiful tilted edges around it. And, you know, in Manick's own estimation, he considered the design conservative. His idea was that we want this device to look innocuous and to feel like it can fit in as part of a kind of broader set of domestic life. You could speculate that Jobs for all of the ways he was immature, especially at this point in his life, might have been mature enough to know that, you know, the legend of jobs is that, well, I know what the product, the platonic idea of this product should be. He might have been mature enough to know that he didn't know what the platonic ideal of the computer was. He just knew that Wozniak might. And so he maybe let Wozniak do what Wozniak was going to do and then put his spin on top of it and sort of ride the Wazniak horse as far as he thought it could go.

I think there's a lot of different ways we could interpret what was going on there. Psycho-analize, yes. Yeah. It's, which in some cases is not necessarily the business of a historian, but also, jobs didn't have any other choice. It's not like Jobs could have designed this thing himself. Right, right. And Wozniak was adamant, particularly about the things like how many expansion ports this machine was going to have. Wozniak was not going to back down.

And, you know, at some point, jobs, it's not, jobs couldn't step in and do that work. Right. So he had to work under the conditions that he had, right? Once, you know, once Apple really becomes a company and then there's a lot of other different people to bully, and he has more authority and control and power, then I think you see some of these power struggles really shift in terms of their dynamics. But when it's just the two steves, one of them has to fold and it becomes the one with lesser talent in the arena of the discussion. So we've mentioned this already. We've been talking about slots, ports, and things like that. One of the things that was also key to this was this is the computer that helps mainstream the floppy disk, which is also ironic because Apple is the company arguably that killed the floppy disk and other physical media and drives and things like that.

But here's the other thing that doesn't fit the narrative of the legend is, as you mentioned, think very early on, there was a period of time when Apple had the largest software ecosystem of any platform of this computing era. Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but if I remember, Microsoft was the number one software vendor to Apple for a period of time. That was from my research, you're looking like I might be getting that wrong, but from what my memory of that? I'm trying to figure out like, when you say, vendor, what do you mean? I mean, they were in terms of sales, like the number one software.

So they did all the languages. Remember, before they were an operating system vendor or at the same time, even long after, their primary business was doing languages and things like that. So I think that they were the number one producer. Again, it's been a decade since I researched my book. So let's move past that. But let's say that the point I'm trying to make here is, that what we can't say is that, again, not fitting the narrative of what we know of Apple,

the Apple 2, in large part, was successful because they allowed people in the software realm to create for this platform. And that was the thing that helped sell the system. Yes. That is, so a comparison here is useful. So, you know, as a comparison, we can look at something like the TRS-80 that was released by RadioShack. RadioShack's position was that if you wanted software sold in their stores, you had to go through RadioShack, right? And so even though the TRS-80, I believe, had the highest sales volume most immediately as a system, they wound up, I think, inadvertently throttling the amount of software that could be produced for it, it was such a struggle to get software into the retailer, right?

The Apple, too, because they, you know, one, they weren't a storefront, right? And then they weren't, they did a pretty decent job fairly early on documenting the internal schematics of the computer so that people could program for it. And that they, so by making that information accessible to programmers, it gave them advantage in terms of producing software for that particular machine. Apple didn't, you know, there were no kind of royalties on these programs unless your software was actually going to be published through Apple. No 30% take. No, there was no, there was no roadblock. But also, but also you're describing, I'm not saying they invented this, but this is the

developer evangelism. This is why we have WWDC. Again, doesn't fit the narrative that, they're so open to people doing whatever they want, but at the same time, it does fit the narrative of the Apple we know, which is, please, developers, we love you, come build for our platform. Yeah, the difference being the Apple 2 was not a walled garden, right? It was a really, really rowdy party. And Apple was not, there was, and there was no ability for Apple to put any kind of retailer, you know, price check,

checks on anything that was going on. Or any gatekeeping whatsoever. No, it was like, here's a thing, make stuff for it. And the range of answers that people invented for what should I do with a computer was, it really reminds me in some sense of like, maybe not early iPhone store, but like, you know, maybe a couple years in when you just see this, there's just all of this stuff being made. And it's not clear that any of it's useful or that it's the fart apps or the pouring the beer. apps? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. What any of, is it useful? Do I want it? Is this helpful? You know,

in the, you know, there's all sorts of great examples of this in the early software world where there's things like, you know, digital address books. And it's like, you want to retype everyone in your address book? Or recipes. I think you and I have talked about this before. Like, that's the classic ad is like, well, look, if you bring this into your home, you can store all your recipes on it, right? Yeah, stuff that just makes no sense and is super tedious to actually do. But I think that rather than treating those things as historical novelties, we can look at them and really say people were trying, throwing everything at the wall to try and figure out what is a machine like this good for to me as a person. And that was a way that no one had ever been asked to think about computing before. Computing did not exist as an individually, as an individually owned.

product at any prior moment in time. And so how do we get people not only understanding how this thing works, but wanting to adopt it into their lives? I think if there's another mythology we can talk about, it's the idea that people saw personal computers and they had some sort of revelation and they were like, I must have this, right? This is obviously a thing that I want. That's totally not true. People were ambivalent. They were scared. They were uncertain. Computer phobia was a diagnosable sort of concern or condition that dated back to the 1960s and went up through the 1990s. There was a tremendous amount of work that the culture industries, whether you're talking about journalists, marketers, entrepreneurs, right? Industry analysts, talking heads on news shows

had to do to convince people you should buy a computer. This is maybe going to break the sort of linear progression of the history here, but I can't help but think of all this stuff when I was reading your book, and I want to bring it into VisiCalc, because I can't help but think of all of this stuff in terms of the current AI moment, where we're clearly entering a new sort of paradigm of computing, and you've got the fear, you've got the what is this good for, you've got the people throwing everything against the wall. So I'm going to use VisiCalc kind of to go down this road because, so again, the legend is that VisiCalc is the program that sold the Apple 2 that gave people an unmistakable use case, but also, and again, through the lens of the current AI moment, with something that didn't exist before this computer paradigm, right? So I'm going to leave it open-ended. Tell me whatever you want about VisiCalc.

Actually, here, is that true? Did the VisiCalc sell the Apple 2? So, you know, better historians than I have sort of disproven what's called the killer app hypothesis, the idea that the release of VisiCalc, quote-unquote, sped up the computer revolution. Maybe we should say that VisiCalc is considered to be the first spreadsheet, the first concept of this. So on the one hand, you know, be wary of hyperbolic claims. On the other, you're absolutely right that VisiCalc was something that people could see that made sense in terms of its immediate applicability, right? And so VisiCal had a number of things going for it.

There were pre, you know, there were kind of, you know, versions of sort of digital spreadsheet kind of software that existed on, you know, for mini computers and things like that. But the idea that you could own it, right, that you owned, you had that access to computing power. No longer was it going to be throttled or managed through your company's data processing system. And certainly, you know, this also meant you didn't have to do all of those calculations by yourself. That was an absolute revelation, especially for the Wall Street set, right? When they got turned on to VisiCalc, the anecdotes of, you know, guys from Wall Street walking into computer stores saying, I want to buy a VisiCalc machine. And what that meant, it had to mean, I want to buy an Apple 2 because the Apple 2 was the only system at that moment in time that had the necessary specs to run a program as complex as VisiCalc.

Right. And so it eventually would wind up selling more copies for the IBM PC than it would for the Apple 2. But in that early 1979, 1980 moment, it makes a huge difference that the Apple 2 is the only computer, VisiCalc works on. On top of that, VisiCalc really comes, you know, it buoys all these emerging ideas about a kind of new entrepreneurial wave that's going to happen in the United States, right? That now you as a business person or a small business person or a consultant or a contractor can be in total control. of your own financial management, and in particular that you can see it transform on screen. That was the thing that was so wild to people, was that if you changed a value in one of the, you know, columns or rows in VisiCalc, everything else updated. And it did so automatically

right before your eyes. And the marketing rhetoric was really about that instantaneous, magical quality that VisiCalc seemed to hold for people. something something current AI moment. Yeah, yeah, it is, you know, it isn't dissimilar to when you, you finally kind of figure out how to talk to chat GPT, and you sort of begin to piece together, oh, this is how to engineer a prompt, okay? And then it spits out something that actually saves you time.

I mean, I've had that moment with chat GPT, and it does, even if you understand how it works, it does have that quality of magic. that I think some of our earlier, more recent, you know, claimed, you know, tech innovations didn't. I don't think crypto ever got there. I don't think the Metaverse ever got there, right? They didn't have those magic moments that I do think seeing something like VisiCalc on screen did. And I think that ChatGBTGBT is also kind of running away with Madly right now.

Right. And like that's, again, I'm playing to my own priors and things I've said on the show before, but like, in a new compute paradigm shift, it is that magic of, oh, this is something that I wasn't able to do before, and I will never do it any other way again. You know, and you hear that when you talk to young software developers for using co-pilot and things like that. Let me, this is a little, this is me asking you to be speculative,

but is there anything that you can take away, or that you think about in terms of the computer becoming personal, which again, we'll reiterate this at the end, but, or that moment where it's like, I need to buy a visi-calc machine because I never want to do my job without this tool again. Is there anything in your research as a historian that, like, are there parallels in terms of, because we're at another throw everything against the wall and see what sticks moment, just like the Apple 2 is, are there any parallels for adoption? For people where they're scared of it,

but then they're like, you know, but this works. And I'm thinking of the Google moment in search. I'm thinking of sort of the eBay moment in terms of trusting strangers online, the Napster moment in terms of like bringing media online. online, in a moment where the computing paradigm shifts, are there any parallels? And that's an unfair question. And I suck as an interviewer. But any thoughts that you have?

Oh, that's a tough question, right? I think that there is, I think one of the things that studying this history, here's two observations I'm going to make. And we'll see if either of them answer your question. Good. It's not a question. So any, we're free associating like you're in therapy right now. So anything that you, yeah.

I mean, I think you might be in therapy right now. You might be right about that. One of them is that no one knew they were changing paradigms when they did it, as far as I can tell, which is it always makes me really suspect when someone, when someone shows up with a new innovation and they're like, I've changed a paradigm. Dan Brickland and Bob Frankston did not real, I think they knew they had a great product, but it also solved a problem they were never trying to solve, right? They originally wanted to develop VisiCalc for a mini computer.

They were interested in going after businesses. Their publisher talked them in to producing VisiCalc for a microcomputer. And for them, that was just a change in technology. They were like, all right, you're our publisher. will program it for this Apple II thing. What they didn't think about, or what wasn't immediately obvious to them, was that the smallness, the intimacy,

the ownership of the microcomputer would become the condition of possibility for all of these people just being able to go in and have access to forms of financial speculation that had been kept away from them by the virtue of the way their businesses were organized, right? This is why, VisiCalc suddenly becomes the desirable software for speculators, right, for stockbrokers and things like that,

because suddenly they could do all these calculations themselves, right? Brickland wasn't necessarily trying to solve that problem. Early advertisements for VisiCalc focused on a whole range of uses, financial only being one of them, but financial wound up becoming the most important. I think it's a similar thing if you look at, I think another landmark product we don't talk enough about was Pritch Shop, which I have a chapter dedicated to- I was going to get to that next. So let's do that. And so Print Shop was another kind of paradigm shifting piece of software.

And I think that it's creators, David Balsam and Marty Kahn knew they were making something fun. I don't think they couldn't have foreseen how much people wanted to be able to do something with their computer. So point one is I think that paradigm shifts happen for a lot of reasons that aren't really or solely about the innovator or the technology. It's kind of about where the technology is at a certain moment in time. I think my second point is one of the things I've learned is that essentially a lot of times the level of financial investment in these technologies is so high, they will not be allowed to fail.

And so there does seem to be, there's always early adopters, right? And then there's kind of people who can be convinced about the usability of a computing system or something. But eventually these changes just get rolled out whether somebody likes it or not. Particularly the personal computer was rolled out at the workplace first. It actually was very slow to find at-home adoption. And in a workplace, right? And I've written about this in other contexts, but where computing, personal computing became,

was most highly implemented, was in labor like data entry and word processing. And those were, that was low wage. secretarial work. Those women did not have control over what kind of tools they used. And, you know, this was all about executives in rooms making promises to each other about how the computer was going to improve efficiency or allow these women to do more output, right? And whether or not that ever proved true kind of wasn't as important as two men in a room making a deal. And then at a certain point, you just become forced to use a computer. This was how my mother knew about computing. She was a secretary. And so she was made to use one as part of her job, which was why she was the person in my

household who knew how a computer worked. And my stepfather didn't, right? And so I think that... I'm going to... Because I got a bunch of personal stories to tell, but I think my dad left his corporate job and became a teacher, because when computers came in in the early 80s, he couldn't adapt to it. Yeah. And this is also something to think about our current moment. It can be a generational thing where it's like, if this is the new way and I can't hang with this, then I'm sort of like a washout for whatever this new paradigm is, you know? Yeah. And it's at a certain point, I think the financial urgency of how much money gets wrapped up in

this kind of speculation of how much funding gets pulled together for it winds up overtaking or can at large enough scale sort of overtake adoption if there is enough early adoption. if there is enough early adopter and I would say medium adopter interest, right? Obviously, this doesn't always work, right? And I think that, like, you know, kind of the fizzle out of, you know, the metaverse is an exact, is exactly a version of this. Although that's a technology we've allowed to fail over and over again for 30 years. Right, right. It's always right on the verge and it will be forever until it actually does

a breakthrough. Yeah, maybe. Let me, let me, in the interest of time, let me, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, indulge me again for the personal thing, but I think this is important again for bringing it back to the computer becoming personal and the new paradigm and what you can do with it that you couldn't do before. Okay, you're a kid in the 80s, and you have a birthday party, and if you have a dot matrix printer, you have print shop, you can create a banner that says, happy birthday, Brian. If you need to send grandma a birthday card or whatever, you can design your own and you can write you.

your own thing. So again, going through the AI lens, like if my kids can create their own avatars for Roblox and things like that, or create their own world or their own write a story or whatever, like this ability to do what is essentially desktop publishing in your house, as basic as a dot matrix printer was, that was something that functionally did not exist for normal people in their house since the printing press was invented by Gutenberg. Yeah, so print shop had a number of kind of qualities of novelty to it. And one of the major ones was that it made what happened on a computer material. And I think we, you know, it might be easy to forget how important that was at a moment when computers were still really new, right?

When most people's idea of what a computer is, is like, oh, it's this like typewriter with a screen. And it's like, no, actually, you can make something physical in the world. And I think that was a kind of soothing or comforting idea to people who were, to folks especially who were anxious about how is the, you know, what is all this digital stuff? How are computers going to, you know, change what work looks like or, you know, that they're always in control? This was the print shop was really interesting piece of, you know, UX is how I talk about it in the book. it was an extremely constrained program. A lot of art programs at the time required you to give you kind of unlimited options. It was like opening up Photoshop.

You're like, what do I do? Right. And that was overwhelming. And the idea that Marty Kahn and David Balsam had was actually, let's take options away. Let's give people a limited number of things they can do, right? Which is how you get the core templates of the banner, the greeting card, letterhead, and the sign. as the four main objects you can make with print shop. And then you're going to just be able to do mostly the same things to them, right?

You're going to pick a border, you're going to pick a font, you're going to pick a picture, and then you're going to write some text. And for some interesting reason, that extremely constrained set of options felt like a flourishing of creativity to lots of people, right? And so people took those constraints and they were like, what can I make with this, right? How can I endlessly put together all of these different, let's say visual and material forms

to create something that's expressive of me and my needs, right? In many cases, I don't think you could make the argument that, you know, it wasn't more efficient, it wasn't simpler, you could go and buy grandma a greeting card, right? No one was using this program because it was cost effective. It was, I think, people felt like, they were able to express their personality through a computer when computers had really, I think, been understood as sort of unifying or bureaucratic or sort of hegemonic technologies that were

going to, you know, the IBM strategy of, you know, everything looks the same, right? I mean, this would become the marketing appeal that Apple would adopt, you know, with the Macintosh and going forward, which is that we're not like every other computer company. We care about your creativity and your ownership of an Apple is a personal expression of your own individuality. Yeah, it's the personal expression that the personal computer makes possible, which is, again, I feel like also something that jobs learn and latched onto and then, you know, rode to great success. In the interest of time, I'm going to try to cram in here the Apple 2E and Apple's education strategy, which again,

the most computing that I did until about third or fourth grade was on Apple 2E's in classrooms, because if you were privileged enough to be in a certain community in certain areas, the Apple 2E was what every school had. So can you tell me a little bit about the 2E specifically, but also just Apple's general strategy towards the education market? Yeah. I'll, you know, I touch on this about. bit in a chapter I have on education software, although that's mostly a consumer-facing chapter.

The systems by which Apple was able to enter into the education system are deserving of their whole own book. Apple was aggressive about getting contracts to become the de facto kind of computer provider to schools, right? There was an kind of intimate understanding, I think, that the company had that put your brand in front of generation after generation of children. And chances are if you as a child know how to use a computer, what might, what computer might your parents buy, right? It was those kinds of logics, right? That wouldn't you want to buy the computer that your kid is also using at school?

And, you know, all the computer companies of this period would try, we're trying to do kind of educational deals and discounts and things like that. but oh god i want to reference um we don't have to talk about it i mean apple became prominent in this regard because they became the computer microcomputer contractor of choice for the minnesota educational consortium when they switched from being timeshare focused to going into personal computing and what that did you know the minnesota educational time sharing system had produced tons and tons of software. Again, it becomes a software story. Was that where Plato came?

Weren't they out of Minnesota, too? Plato was in, was... Okay, don't worry about it. Don't worry. I'm sidetracking us. But I'm pretty sure that Oregon Trail came out of Minnesota. Yes, yes. So Oregon Trail, right? Oregon Trail, which was originally a text-based game, right? What the consortium kind of sets itself to begin doing is converting all of that software from from working on their time-sharing systems to working for the Apple II. And so Mex becomes this massive purveyor of educational software

that is all designed for the Apple II very early. You can imagine the knock-on effect, right? If you're a school, you know that buying a computer isn't enough, you need software. Oh, what platform seems to have so much software already made for it? Oh, the Apple, you know, the Apple II does. And so these kinds of arrangements between the hardware and the software, software all become overlapping, and it's really about building brand recognition for kids.

The incursion of personal computers into schools in the early 1980s was wild. It went from like 14 to 84 percent in the span of less than half a decade. That's interesting because again, and I knew this, but I just read it in your book, that the penetration to the home, even as late as the mid-90s, is what, 25? to 30 percent? Yeah, about a third of you with... And so, again, if you're of a certain community of a certain age, you're going to be... You just said 80% in schools?

I think around 84, yeah. Okay. So there's a certain generation where it's like, this is your exposure to computing. Yes. It's an Apple 2E in your elementary school or your middle school or whatever. And by the way, those things were still in those schools into the early 90s. Yes. I mean, you know, schools did figure out really quickly that, you know, computers require, they have a lot of personal computers have a lot of built-in costs.

And funding, having the money to update an entire computer lab, right, which so many schools kind of rushed to build in the late 80s and early 90s, that was really cost intensive, right? So computers and schools kind of had a longer shelf life, sort of because they had to during these times. unless you had the privilege of going to schools in wealthy economic areas. Lane, let's wrap this because you've been so generous with your time, but you and I both have a hard out coming up. So not to put words in your mouth, but the contention of the book, it's in the subtitle, is that the Apple II is the inflection point for computing, becoming personal.

So make that argument for me. Give me the thesis on how and why that is. So how much do I want to shill this? Shill. I mean, one of the things I say in the book is that the Apple II is, it's not the star of the show. It's the light that illuminates the stage. It's a perfect historical object for studying the thing that made computing personal, which was all the different things people dreamed of doing with it.

And that came alive in software, understanding why that software was relevant, how it was able to work, how it was made, bought, sold, distributed. You have to understand everything about the technology of a system like the Apple II. And the Apple II was able to produce so many completely unique and outstanding examples of what you could do with a computer because of the technical specifications of that system. But as I say, as I wrote in the book jacket, what it turns out is that the rise of personal computing isn't a story of hackers. It's a story of users, right? It's about people who, you know, want to play and print and calculate. It's about people who actually don't want to know the intimate details of what's going on inside their computer. They want an interface for experiencing a kind of computational future, right? So that is. And, um, that is. And, um, It's also, I would say, it's also a historical artifact because you and I were talking offline about nostalgia.

And I dealt with this in my book for like the first website or first social network, maybe for people listening that they adopted as their social, whether it be Tumblr, whether it be, you know, whatever. I think for each of, for modern life, each of us can have that first device or that first computing thing that is like the thing that we make our own, that we form our identities with to a degree. In the 70s and 80s, it was like the bands and like the posters we put on our walls of our childhood bedrooms or whatever. But so much of, it's not just nostalgia, but so much of what, thinking about modern technology and technology history is about now is understanding the formative things for certain cohorts and

certain generations. And the further back you go, the more foundational that is to the technology industry itself. So I think it's, that's why I jumped at this because I think the Apple 2 is undersung in terms of being that. Absolutely. I think there's maybe one last point I want to make, which is that we almost exclusively tell the history of computing or technology generally as a story of often, you know, insider access, right? As a story of conflicts between personalities or these idea of, you know, light bulbs that go off over people's heads and they have brilliant technological ideas. But in a funny way, this book came out of a source of frustration that that doesn't actually. tell you how a paradigm changed. That doesn't tell you how people relate to a technology. Like, asking a thousand questions about the psychology of Steve Jobs tells us nothing about why

people bought computers. And so this book really comes out of a desire to try and answer that question. And that means we have to leave aside certain mythologies or focuses to say, what were everyday people doing with these machines? And that is part of the reason that we have to tell a software story alongside the hardware story of this absolutely incredible machine known as the Apple II. As you just heard, Lane Nooney is, I would argue, the most brilliant and accessible person working in technology history, computing history today. I am proud to call them my friend.

Lane, again, the book is the Apple II age, how the computer became personal. Is there anything else you'd like to plug or talk about? I think this is going to come out after your book launch at the Computer History Museum. Anything else you want to tell us, please share? Oh, God. What does someone usually say during this part? Well, it used to be back in the good old days, you'd share your Twitter account or something like that, but between now and with this episode airs, who knows?

Yeah. You know, here's hoping that Twitter still exists by the time this goes to air. You can follow me at Sierra underscore offline. That's my most publicly visible presence. My website is lane nuni.com. There you can find reviews of the book, links to buying it either from the publisher. You can find it on Amazon, lots of places to pick it up. Yeah, and I have an advanced copy.

Let me say, the reason I think Lane is so brilliant is they're so readable and accessible. And the book is like that. This is not dry history at all. This is, if you want to understand, again, how technology gets adopted, becomes personal. Check out this book. It's great. Lane, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you.

That's a hell of a compliment coming from you, Brian. Thank you very much.