Upgrade - 625: Road to the Apple II: Computer Faire (Part 4)

Episode Date: June 25, 2026

Welcome back to Designed in California. I'm Jason Snell with Mike Hurley. We are now out of the bicentennial, Mike. No more American patriotism. That's great. It's April 1977 now. It's a different era. And we are about to go to San Francisco,

to the Civic Auditorium, where the West Coast Computer Fair is going to open in a matter of hours. Apple is there. So this is very exciting, because we don't know who's going to be there. This is very exciting stuff. We're in new frontiers.

It's a new industry. It's a new model. Nobody really knows what's going to happen. But Apple is there to show off the Apple II. However, they don't have cases for the Apple II yet. So that didn't work then. It's a matter of hours before the show. And the plastics company, again, a local Bay Area plastics company delivers 20 Apple II cases.

Apparently, according to many of the stories about this era, right to the booth. They may have delivered some of them to Apple prior, but there are other stories that they literally deliver them to the booth. Wow. And there, in the middle of the San Francisco Civic Auditorium, Apple's young employees begin installing the Apple II's parts into the cases. They made it, everybody. They did it. We used the cheaper reaction injection molding instead of the really nice ABS plastic that really should be for mass. production, but they got 20

of them that worked out. They're going to be able to use these to show on the show floor what this product looks like, and it's great. This is a company that started literally with a bunch of teenagers assembling computers in a bedroom and a garage, so they know how to put things together. It's going to be fine. So now I

compete where we are in one of my favorite movies, The Pirates of Silicon Valley, because there is a moment where they're all hurriedly trying to put computers together. And so now I have an image based on that movie of what the West Coast Computer Fair is. And I now have a sense of what is about to happen.

Yes, if you have a premonition that what I'm doing here is teeing up a complete disaster, you are 100% correct. The cheap reaction injection molding process has led to cases that are full of bubbles and defects. None of the parts fit properly. Right. Everything is inconsistent. You can't take the lid from one case and put it in another case. Yes.

It won't fit. They're paired because of the inconsistencies. Okay, team. Huddle up. What do we do? They get out knives and sandpaper. And they go to work like doing plastic surgery on these plastic cases. I guess it is literally plastic surgery.

They sand down parts of the cases. They build others up using putty or like Bondo that you use for a car. But then they look terrible. So then they have to put beige, because these are all beige. They have to read. repaint them to hide the damage. In the end, only six are in display condition. Okay.

Out of 20, but they've got six that look like computers. But that's fine, though, right? Yes. Because why do they need 20? Like, they're just showing them. All they need is an amount that they can show, which they've got. And, you know, fake it until you make it. That's what they're doing here.

They're faking until they make it. And the door's open. Welcome to the West Coast Computer Fair. It's April 1977. And if you were at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium

in April 1977, waiting in line and the doors opened and you walked in, what would you see first? The answer is Apple Computer.

They were front and center. They had the best booth. Steve Jobs is there. Brace yourself. Wearing a tie. I assume he has shoes on those. well. Yeah, yeah. I think Mike Markela insisted that everybody dressed nicely. Do we know why they

were front and center? I don't know exactly how they got the spot, but they got that spot. That was a thing that either it was an accident or it was purposeful by somebody. I don't know that part of the story, but they ended up front and center. They may have paid extra for it. Yeah. They spent some money. It depends, though, right? Because being front and center doesn't mean anything unless you have something that is impressive to see when people come in. So they hired a designer who created a minimal sleek booth design

that wasn't the generic trade show buildout and most of the booths were generic trade. You know the type, right? Where it's got like a little thing with a thing that says the name of the company printed in like black on white and there's like a curtain.

And like it's just generic, right? You can get that. It's a turnkey like you pay your money and they're like, yeah, we got a booth for you here. Apple didn't do that. So Apple's booth stands out. It's a very Steve Jobs touch, too. They hire this designer. People noticed. They come in, it looks different. It looks more professional. And the people there are dressed professionally, they have learned the lesson of the TWA flight to Philadelphia where the other company has all the great people in suits. Apple is dressed up for the occasion. They are making the, yes, they have just recently sanded all of their

computers and painted them in order to get them to look okay. But like they're giving the impression that this is a real company. So this is Steve Jobs proving to Jerry Wozniak what the 50% is for, right? This is jobs doing what Jobs does. Yeah, that's it. And people noticed Apple and they noticed the Apple 2. They noticed all six of them that were there. This event is a big deal. Not only did the Apple 2 debut here at the West Coast Computer Fair. Fair with an E at the end, by the way, with just kind of a jaunty of course thing. Ye old.

Ye old computer fair. But also debuting at the computer fair at the Commodore Pet. Okay. Jack Tremiel's cheap computer response to not buying Woz's computer. And Radio Shack, the, in a big endorsement of personal computers, by the way, Radio Shack, the electronics chain, massive electronics chain, came out with their own computer called the TRIF.

S-80. Okay. It really was, in some days, the true beginning of the personal computer era with those computers. These are like the foundational computers of the early PC era. So thousands of people, we were saying before who's going to even come to this thing, nobody really knew. Thousands of people came.

There were lines around the block. Some of the early hardware hackers of the kind of early generation said it was like their woodstock. Yeah. And the guy who organized the West Coast Computer Fair, Jim Warren, described it this way.

This is in, I think, Stephen Levy's book, Hackers. It's amazing. He said, we didn't know what we were doing, and the exhibitors didn't know

what they were doing, and the attendees didn't know what was going on, but everybody was excited and congenial and undemanding, and it was a tremendous turn on. Okay, Jim. Let's calm down a minute.

That's an all-timer quote there. But this is interesting, though, right? That like Commodore Pet, TRSAT, TRS, and Apple 2, these are names that continue to mean something all these years later. Yes. They're not the Sol. They're not the Sol, which is maybe a large portion of our audience, including me, learned about that computer for the first time and having this conversation with you.

In this podcast, yes. But the TRS80 and the pet, I know these. I just know of them. They're just something that have persisted. even though... Absolutely. Even though these companies don't really exist anymore.

That's true. And Apple does, they are at least part of law, like understood known computer law, and it is interesting that they all kind of had their coming out parties at this one event

that ostensibly didn't really mean anything, right? The West Coast Computer Fair had no lineage. And clearly, as Jim Warren says, no one knew what they were doing. but there was obviously something in the water. Something happened.

That day. That was it. That was it. It's like nobody knew, like Jim Warren says, nobody quite knew what it was or what it was going to be, but something was happening. And the fact that these three computers debuted here

is part of the thing that was happening. And the fact that all these people came, I think a lot of these people didn't know anything about it, but they thought they knew something was happening. Yeah. And that it was interesting and that they were going to check out what was going on. Yeah. And Apple made an impression.

Absolutely. So being at the fair showed that Apple was a serious player. It showed that Apple 2 was going to be a major competitor in the computing world. And good news, it also got Apple its third investor. Mike Markala encouraged venture capitalist Arthur Rock to go to the show and check out the Apple booth. And you're thinking to yourself, yeah, he probably walked up and asked and got a demo and was like very impressed. No, he tried to get to the Apple booth and he couldn't get close to it

because the crowd was big and super enthusiastic. And he was like, okay, I'm in for 57 grand, I guess. What a weird? 57,600. Okay, Arthur Rock, whatever. But still, somebody on the outside was like, I will invest in your company. This is good.

I like what I'm seeing here. That's about $300,000 today. So is this going to work? This gets portrayed a lot as this incredible triumph for Apple. But there were doubts. And I think it's worth mentioning that. Like this is not the slam dunk that I think it often gets portrayed at. Even in Pirates of Silicon Valley, actually, I think that this gets portrayed.

In Pirates of Silicon Valley, people are like tearing each other apart to try and get near it. And there's this moment where the other computer manufacturers are all peering at the Apple booths sad because nobody's coming to see theirs. That's how I remember this moment. Well, Jim Warren said he didn't think Apple was the strongest exhibitor. processor technology, the makers of the saul, had a booth twice Apple's size. Well, because they had had some success already, right? Or at least investment. I don't know if they had success. And Byte Magazine wrote a story about the West Coast Computer Fair and didn't mention Apple.

Is Byte magazine and the Byte shop, are they involved together in any way? No. No. It's just Byte. It's just... It's just computer words. Right. Yeah. So, still, Apple took 300,000, orders, pre-orders for the Apple 2 over the next few weeks. Encouraging start. Encouraging start that people might actually see the value of this thing and want this thing and that Apple might actually have for the first time a real product that regular people might want to buy.

It's a good, encouraging start at the West Coast Computer Fair. So now all that is left is to ship this thing. Okay. So the 300 orders, people aren't getting those computers. Not yet, but soon. Okay. It's almost June, 1977, and the Apple II is about to ship, and we'll tell you more about that. After the break. This is the last time. This is the final episode in our preview series of Designed in California.

Thank you so much if you've listened to the Apple II series so far. We really hope that you've enjoyed it. Obviously, you will learn by the end of this episode, though. Obviously, this is not the end of the stories about the Apple II. They will come back again in the future. Because there's a lot. The Apple II has a long storied life that I am looking forward to learning more about. I mean, in the time that we've known each other,

you've often mentioned to me, and Stephen has too, about the Apple II continuing long into the Mac's life. And so I'm excited to learn a little bit more kind of about the unkillable computer that is the Apple 2. It's true. They tried and tried and tried and they couldn't kill it. So yeah, we'll talk about that in Design in California. I want to thank everybody who's an upgrade listener who has supported our Kickstarter campaign. We really appreciate it at design.fm if you didn't know.

And if you haven't yet, I mean, the good news is you've still got a few days to do it. Also, I want to thank all upgrade listeners for their patience in us inserting these episodes in the upgrade feed. we knew, you know, again, it's like it's your pals, Jason and Mike, but it is also not the same show, and it's an extra. We're not taken away from upgrade, but it's an extra. So we appreciate your patience and having these episodes drop here. We felt like this was one of the right things to do as part of this campaign, but we also know that it's a change and it's not a permanent change. It's just for this because there will be a separate design in California feed. So don't worry about that too much, but thank you for your patience. And the other updates we've got as we move, at about 190,000 as we're recording this and hoping to get over 200,000 and lock in those live events in San Francisco and London. We already have unlocked more art.

We have Sam Hart who did the Art for Atomic Blonde, the graphic novel that became the movie. He's doing some original artwork for us for the show. We are also doubling the number of art prints in the art print level. You'll get two now instead of one. These are A4 prints on really beautiful paper. there will be one that's based on the Kickstarter art that you've already seen,

and there'll be another one that's based on some other original art, and we will sign, we will both sign the same one of one of them. We probably won't sign both of them because that's a lot of things to sign. No, I also think we shouldn't. I think it's nice to have one signed piece and then one non-signed piece, and you can choose what you want to do with them. So that's going on. So people will get more, and we're going to commission more from Sam,

and we're going to commission more theme songs from Chris Breen because we've blown through all of these goals. So you can upgrade your pledge, by the way. Like if you hear that and you're like, oh, I would like that, you can upgrade your pledge. You can move your pledges around and there have been lots of people that have been doing that. Thank you if you have upgraded your pledge for any reason during the campaign. That's still a thing that you can do. And you can look in the show notes for information if you're a member for a deal on top of that if you're an upgrade member.

But yes, anybody who already has bought at the level that includes the artwork, you don't have to do anything. You're going to get two pieces instead of one. That's just a done deal. We did it. We added to it. And then we're working on the pin design. We had a pin design that was okay. And Mike did that Disney thing where he's like, let's plus this.

This is good, but it's not good enough. I would say our pin design was very much in line with a lot of the Kickstarter, Choshkas that I get, which is like, it's fine. But it's like, they haven't done the thing yet. So it's just kind of a logo or whatever. And you're like, we can do better than this. And I think we did do better than this. And we both love it.

And yeah, I think our hope is that we're going to sign all the posters together in Memphis when we're there for the podcastathon. Trying to walk that out now. Yeah. So you can also, if you're a supporter, we may post some video of us, like signing those posters and all of that, and that'll be part of the process, too, as we continue this journey. But anyway, it's, so it's proceeding.

We've got, as we, you know, as we release this, it's a handful of days before the, the whole thing is done. Definitely still time if you want to raise your pledge or if you've been thinking about it. Our friend Glenn Fleischman tells us that some people just don't want to back anything until it's the end. Right. And then they just go in right at the end. So if you're that person, it's getting there.

It's very close now. The end is nigh. But anyway, so that's the end of our last interstitial for our last of these special upgrades where we're previewing Designed in California. All these episodes will show up in the proper designed in California feed when we launch that later this summer. And they'll also remain as upgrade episodes, which as several people have pointed out, means we are stealing a month away from the draft of the end.

ages, which I kind of like. I kind of like it. Also, we, I was looking at the future and there was a conflict that the draft of the ages was going to have with the upgrade Christmas special and the New Year's upgradeies episode. And this actually pulls it all back into, I think, November now. Nice. So we've, look, we've engineered this ourselves to save a month on the draft of the ages. So that's a good little upgrade note for us to drop here. So anyway, thank you, Mike, for going on this journey with me. Oh, come on. Thank you. Design.fm. Thank you. all for going on this journey with us. As Jason mentioned, a few more days to back the Kickstarter campaign before it closes.

And then later on in the year, this show will return as its own show. So look forward to that as well. Here's the rest of our final episode about the road to the Apple II. Welcome back to Designed in California. I'm Jason Snell with Mike Hurley. Hello. And Mike, it's Ship Day. Finally.

We have told the Apple II story. And it leads us really to the beginning, right? Like, this is the story that leads to the starting gun. And then what happens after is a different story. Yeah. Because as you've mentioned many times, the Apple one is not the beginning of Apple. It isn't the thing that made them who they became. The Apple II is what made them who they become.

Exactly. And the start of the path is getting to the starting line. And then you have to run the race. So ship day, June 1977, the Apple II costs $1,300. Okay. The equivalent of $6,500 today. That's a lot of money. It's a lot of money.

That's a lot of money. That's a lot of money. Cures were very, very expensive in these days. A $6,500 starting price, we don't have computers that cost that money today. No. No, it's one of those ways where technology has become so much cheaper, even expensive. Technology is so much cheaper than it was. It will not surprise you to learn that Apple made a computer that was more expensive than the other ones. Okay.

Like, this is always, this is always an Apple thing, right? Like Apple, Apple, Apple makes more expensive products that are better but more expensive. This is their thing. It's always been their thing. Since June 177, it's been their thing. The Commodore Pet only cost $800. And it came with a screen. The TRS80 costs $600.

That means that this, you know, it's half what the Apple II costs for the TRS80. Well, was said that the Apple II had 10 times. the capability is the Apple One. Yeah. Yeah. The other competitors didn't support color, didn't support sound, didn't have graphics, and didn't have expansion slots. And I will also say as somebody who used a first-generation Commodore pet a few times in my school, the keyboard was so bad. So in order to fit the keyboard and the tape drive in the same space, the keyboard was this little, like, metal chicklet kind of keyboard.

It was terrible. So not a great product. They got better. They did a better keyboard later, but the first one was so bad. However, unsurprisingly, I would say, the cheaper computers sold better than the Apple 2, at least at first, right? like they're cheaper they appealed to more people TRS 80 had the entire radio shack store chain to use to sell personal computers to people

Commodore used the same sales network that it used for its calculators to distribute Commodore pets but over time Apple started to crack the market Apple had more work to do because nobody knew Apple they didn't have a distribution chain they didn't have a retail outlet they had to work for it

But it grew because it had better features. It had expansion slots. All three computers used tape drives for storage, which is, take it from me. I only have vague memories of using a tape with a computer before the disc drives came in because I was really young. But it was terrible. I remember we would get this readout that would say press play on tape number one. And that was a moment where a kid like, just you wanted to cry. Why?

Because you would have to press play on the cassette tape and then wait for minutes. So it would load data for the tape to play in your program that you wanted to load. I see. Okay. So it's loading it to ROM. So you want to play a game. You want to play that dungeon crawl where you listen and hear if there's a dragon coming and you try to move and you hunt the wampas or whatever, right? And you're ready to play.

But no, press play on tape one and you've got to wait. Okay. Ages. So these all need to be better than they were. Right. That's a problem that's going to need to be solved. Waz is going to be on that one. Okay. But people did start falling in love with the Apple II.

But how? How did people find it? Like, how were Apple actually selling this to customers? Computer stores that were coming into existence, like the Byte Shop, they were trying to reach computer stores. I know that when I, you know, bought my first, my Apple 2E, I bought it at a computer called like online computers plus that was in a strip mall. and they were a computer store. So I think they were trying to reach audiences. That way they did advertising, so you could buy it from them direct,

or your local computer dealer. But they had to build a dealer network. That was a challenge. They didn't have a ready-made dealer network. And so there was an element of these companies, like dealers, also needing to spring up for Apple to be able to tap into. It's also, yeah, everything is happening. Yeah.

Is building from scratch. There were, I think there were a lot of electronics and computer shops out there that had been selling primitive computers and kits and stuff who saw the potential of these products, right? These are consumer products. They can get a, they can sell a lot of these. Yeah. Probably at a pretty good, you know, profit margin. Yeah. And to an audience broader than the audience that normally would come to their stores. So I think there's a lot of that going on as well.

Because also it's like, if you were a company that sold, say, radio parts or whatever, like Radio Shack, obviously. Yeah. But there would be competitors. They see the writing on the wall of what computers are going to be, right? So they will be looking for companies like an Apple to be able to have new products to sell because otherwise they're going to get hurt. I don't know if they see the writing on the wall so much as it's another opportunity to expand into a related area. I'm not sure they're concerned that they're. Sothering kits are going to be outmoded, even though a lot of that will happen.

That was more negative than I meant it, but just that they saw the opportunity, say, rather than the writing on the war. They see an opportunity for here's another thing that we can sell to consumers, is these computers. Yeah, that sort of fits in our ballpark because we are a more technical kind of outfit. And there are computer stores that are springing up, that that's what they do is they will sell you a computer. They'll probably sell you like a maintenance contract or something where there's a, person who will troubleshoot it for you or whatever. That's all starting to happen. It's slow and it's small.

We think, don't think of this in terms of high volume. None of these products are really high volume yet. But people do start loving the Apple 2. Right. Byte magazine that ignored them at the West Coast Computer Fair, wrote a review of it that said, I was able to turn on power and begin using the computer within five minutes of receipt, which is a rave. Huge, it's a game changer.

was built basic into the ROM, so you can like turn it on and start programming right away. You don't have to type in anything to start up. Like it's or load something off of a tape to do that part of it. And so it's a big deal. Like this is the brand promise that they're building here. Sales did ramp up. At one point,

they started to forecast they might make a million bucks in the first year of this thing, which is huge, right? Like Apple has made almost nothing at this point. things are getting interesting. And I think it's also worth stopping here because we've spent a lot of time in this series talking about the founding of Apple, right? Going back to our Apple at 50 episode

and then into this series. The Apple 2 is Apple's first product, right? The Apple 1 was was. The Apple 2 is collectively a creation of the company for the first time. Waz is at the heart of it, sure, the motherboard, his software skills as well integrating the software in. It's a huge part of it, getting basic on there. But Jerry Manoch designed that case. Rod Holt designed the power supply, which he patented like it was a big deal. And in what I think is the career

defining moment in some ways. The guy in the background pushing all of them to make the product that he felt needed to be made for Apple to succeed is Steve Jobs. In hindsight, as I worked on this story and looked at this moment,

I think this is when Steve Jobs became Steve Jobs. That he's the one who is seeing the big product picture and then different talented people, not just WOS, are putting the pieces together, but like the power supply is what it is because Jobs wanted that power supply.

The case is what it is because Jobs wanted that case. Because he had the vision for what the end product was going to be. And it was built around Waz's innovation, but it didn't stop there. Think back to Jerry Wozniak, right? Making Steve Jobs cry. Was his dad fairly, maybe, maybe unfairly,

asked what did Jobs bring to the equation? What made it worth him being 50-50 with Wozniak? Apple II is the answer. Steve Jobs is the person with a bigger vision. He's the one who's focused on the product that is going to appeal to consumers and not the hobbyists that Was is, right? Was is doing this kind of for the love of the game.

Jobs is the one who's like, now we need to make something of this. He got a bunch of talented people and got them all to row in more or less the same direction. For my money, this is the start of Steve Jobs as we know him,

is this moment of making the Apple 2 what it is. Because the Apple 2, it is not fair to say the Apple 2, like the Apple 1, is all about WOS. It's not all about WOS.

WOS is incredibly important to the Apple 2. Wouldn't have made it without him, obviously. There are more contributions to come. They're going to need, to disc drive because the tape drive sucks and Waz is going to be

the one who makes that happen. Waz is incredibly important but the point is he's not the whole picture there are other talented technical people and talented designers and a whole team that's making it happen and the person who's seeing the product as a

whole and how it will appeal in the market to regular people who would never have even thought of spending money on a computer before. That's all Steve Jobs. Yeah, because you mention it, like, the people that you've brought out, right?

So Jerry and Rod, who are new in the sense of coming to the Apple 2 and bringing in their things, when you mention these people coming onto the project, it's jobs who finds them, or jobs who has conversations with them, jobs who convinces them to come on board,

gives them what they need, gives them what is interesting to these people to come on to the project. Uses trickery to say yes. but that's what it takes at this point. Remember, this company's a year old, right? Like, they need to be able to convince these people to come along with them to build this project. And he is the person at each stage finding the right people and working with them to create this product.

Because as you said, like, if the Apple 2 was another set of chips screwed into a piece of wood, this product's just not making it. It's just not getting there. It's just not going to do it. If they would have shown up to the West Coast Computer Fair with the Apple One version 2, it was game over. Well, and like, would it have worked in a sheet metal box with a traditional power supply and a fan? Less so. You know, yeah, I think that's it. Yes, yes, but it would have been technically impressive, but it would have been less so,

and it would have been more like all of the competition. Because even though we know the product was more technically impressive and looked good, as you mentioned, it still didn't get a lot of fanfare after the fact it wasn't written about. It wasn't the early sales lead. And so even with all of the things that made the Apple 2, what made it the Apple 2, it still needed help and it still needed to be pushed along. So if they would have had an underwhelming first showing, that was it. It was done. Like the I'm sure. tens of other companies that were demoing at the West Coast Computer Fair that we have not talking about today. Yeah. And in the long run, I think the focus on that plastic computer that looks like a kitchen appliance and not a piece of industrial hardware is a reason that it's a grower, is a reason that it gets in places that, and to people who would otherwise not consider a computer because it's more humane. I think it's a lesson that Steve Jobs learns, and it's also a dream that he has, which is technology should not be partitioned off by, your technical acumen has to qualify you.

And like building something that looks like a piece of lab equipment is going to turn off everybody who doesn't have a lab coat. But a thing that looks like a cuisine art, even though it's not a quezon art, right? It's $6,000 or whatever in today's money. It's very expensive, but it's softer and curvier and feels more at home in a home or in a school and not in a metal shop or an industrial garage. And that is something that in the long run is one of the reasons the Apple II becomes as successful as it does. So, you know, we will touch on this, hopefully in later episodes about the Apple 2 and about the fact that the Apple 2, you know, we're in 77 now, that the Apple 2 exists way into the life of the Mac, right? The Mac comes in 84. But the Apple 2 continues and continues and continues into that period of time.

Yeah, Apple will have a hit on its hands and then we'll almost inexplicably repeatedly try to end its life and fail. Because it's kind of unkillable, and it's a huge part of the story. And I should also say at the end of our single episode about Apple at 50 in the very beginning that preceded this series, I ended that with a cliffhanger about Apple hiring its first CEO. And I think it's really hilarious that somehow we've gotten to the end of this series, and we haven't even reached that point. Michael Scott is nowhere to be found. And tell Michael Scott is not here.

But he will be in a future series about this because, that is one of the next big things that happens is Apple has to become a company in a bunch of ways that it isn't even now. It needs to become the new Apple. It needs some things we haven't talked about that have. Some of that has happened by the time of the West Coast Computer Fair, but I just want to spend more time with it. They have to hire a CEO. They need a new logo, right? So like the Apple logo we know has to be a part of this story.

And then the growing pains of a company that has transformed from being a hobby project in a garage to being a corporation with sales, millions in sales. What happens next? That is a story for another time.