The seed is sewn
In the summer of 1976, the first “homebrew computer shows” consisted of weekend hobbyists who had constructed kit computers out of the first publicly available microprocessors and memory chips. Up until that time, “mini-computers” were comprised of logic circuits and soldered transistors. Now there were microcomputers, whose logic was represented digitally with a kind of chip we hadn’t seen before: ROM (read-only memory). The fellows making these machines were the ones who were good with soldering irons.
The following summer, the volume producers had joined the party. For most, their time of glory would be short-lived: Ohio Scientific (OSI), Cromenco, Processor Technology. There was a hobbyist electronics company that realized just in time that if it didn’t jump in, history would run right over it: Radio Shack. And then there was a calculator company from Europe whose name we would hear for a while: Commodore.
There was this maverick designer fresh out of Motorola named Chuck Peddle, who had a deal going with Commodore. He’d show up at computer shows with a wooden barrel full of processors that worked exactly like Motorola’s more expensive ones, but had different pinouts to avoid lawsuits. While he’d co-opt with Commodore for full-scale designs, he’d sell processors like candy bars for $25 a pop. (A friend of mine would buy his defective ones and make them into jewelry.) One hobbyist, a guy from HP, realized he could burn a design using Peddle’s 6502 that looked from a distance like an OSI, but could run programs he’d conceived for HP’s design with the Motorola processor, the 6800.
Sure, Steve Wozniak could solder chips to a board, but frankly that wasn’t his great talent. He was perhaps the greatest machine code programmer of all time, blowing Bill Gates clean out of the water. What Woz wanted wasn’t to thrill hobbyists with his soldering skills. He had ingenious ideas that would enable high-end language interpreters conceived for much bigger systems to run on a $25 8-bit processor, making all kinds of scientific applications available to the everyman. Which is why he named his system for Sir Isaac Newton, not the Beatles. His buddy was a born salesman, a guy who seemed to have the knack for making folks want something they couldn’t quite understand.
Apple comes home
“I was in high school,” my friend and fellow technologist Carmi Levy tells me. “We had two Apple IIs in the biology lab. They’d always seem to stick them in the back of the lab because that was the only space for them. They cleared out all the science equipment from two stations at the back of the lab, and they stuck them there. They had power and they had room, so off they went. And there was no rhyme or reason, no plan. They just plugged them in and let us figure out for ourselves how they worked.”
See Carmi’s discussion with CTV News Channel anchors on the passing of Steve Jobs.
Today, Carmi is one of Canada’s most recognized faces and voices on technology issues; when CTV News Channel wants context on a major event in tech, they go to Carmi.
In the late 1970s, Carmi’s high school was about ten miles from his house. That meant every day after dismissal, he’d have about 90 minutes to kill. He spent that time getting a real education, manning the computers in the biology lab. Correction: not all the computers. There was a Commodore PET there, but it didn’t have color and, besides, it looked like the robot sidekick from some cheesy ’70s sci-fi show. Carmi and his first set of colleagues manned the Apple II.
“We’d all gather around the Apple II and teach ourselves how to program, and we’d all take turns, it was very democratic. No one took more time than they were absolutely allowed, and it was magical… I loved that you booted right into BASIC. I realize that the world has moved on, but I’m sad that the development tools today are not as visible as they were back then, when they were an integral part of the experience, and in order to get the most out of the machine, you had to program it. Today, that’s not the case, and I kind of miss that.”
Apple goes to work
The first great consumer software industry evolved around the Apple II. By the summer of 1979, they were no longer hobbyists. While the other major brands were looking for ways to control this emerging channel, Apple let the community grow and flourish – a move uncharacteristic of the company in later years, with different models.
Radio Shack’s TRS-80 was the faster machine. It didn’t need an expansion card to produce 80 columns, and it had a complete set of Tandy-branded software available in-store. But the Apple II had color, and the fact that it was expandable with plug-in cards gave a boost to software companies that would otherwise get lost in a sea of floppy disks sold in zip-lock bags. By bundling its CP/M operating system with an expansion card for the Apple II that included not only memory but a stand-alone CPU (the 8 MHz Zilog Z-80), Microsoft sold its first consumer product under its own brand.
The race was on to legitimize the home computer as a business machine. David Strom, ReadWriteWeb’s channels editor, was already in the software business.
“I was the development manager of a small vertical market software company,” David tells us. “It was selling a $6,000 package to electric utilities to help with their generation capacity planning. That job was previously done with six-figure mainframe simulations. We had written it for the Apple II, and my job was to port it over to the IBM PC.”
The most commonly sold Apple IIs at that time had 48K of memory. The PC had 64K and built-in 80-column color graphics, plus the IBM brand name. Still, it had a viability gap to make up for. In an era before software was taken seriously as a legitimate product (businesses didn’t understand why you couldn’t just copy it), PC software didn’t appear to stack up against Apple II software bundled with expansion cards you could hold in your hand.
“Our program required additional memory,” says David. “At the time, the IBM PC came with 64K and we needed like 200K. We were worried that no one was going to buy our product because of this, and at one point we considered including a free RAM expansion card with the software to induce sales. Of course, all this software was on a single 5 1/4-inch floppy disk.”
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