An Apple (II) for Teacher – Creatures of Thought

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By early 1980, the Apple II, which had trailed the Commodore PET and Tandy/Radio Shack TRS-80 at first, had become a remarkable success, with a great deal of help from Personal Software’s VisiCalc. The Apple IPO at the end of the year ratified that fact, minting hundreds of new millionaires. The two primary co-founders of Apple Computer, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, responded to their sudden success in very different ways.

The Founders

After his bravura performance in designing the Apple II Disk, Wozniak’s drive to contribute to Apple seems to have waned. He had created the computer he always wanted, had more money than he knew what to do with, and had a beautiful new girlfriend to distract him from the failure of his first marriage. He had never been interested in managing people or running a company: had Jobs not pulled him along in the wake of his ambition, Woz would have happily spent his career as an engineer at Hewlett-Packard. After a brutal plane crash in 1981, he spent eighteen months away from Apple. He began working again towards an abandoned computer science degree at Berkeley, and poured millions into the money-losing “US” music festival (intended to restore a sense of community after the “me” decade of the 1970s).

Woz, always the prankster, with Van Halen lead singer David Lee Roth at the 1983 US Festival. Woz appears to be drinking a soda, Roth probably not.

He meekly returned to Apple in 1983, applying for a job as an ordinary engineer, and worked on a sixteen-bit successor to the Apple II (though much of his time went to maintaining his symbolic role as an inspirational engineering hero, or even a mascot). Then he left again, for good, in 1985. The sudden fame and fortune granted to him in 1980 came as a bolt from the blue, not an expression of an inborn telos. His subsequent ventures, including a stint teaching computer skills to students in the Los Gatos School District, were marked by amiability and good nature, not a will to technological power.[1]

Steve Jobs, on the other hand, driven by an ambition to one-up himself and “make a dent in the universe” (a favorite phrase of his), went in urgent search of a second stroke of lightning. At first, he focused his attention on the design of the Apple III, the anointed successor of the II. Jobs, as Vice President for Research and Development, was involved in high-level product design decisions, but Wendell Sander, recruited from Fairchild Semiconductor as Apple’s first staff scientist, led the engineering team (the project was code-named after Wendell’s daughter, Sara). A fully-powered business machine, the III would lean into the success of VisiCalc by offering serious users everything they might ever want: more memory, a built-in floppy disk drive, upper- and lower-case text, an eighty-character-wide display, a clock chip, and backwards-compatibility with Apple II software. It was rushed to market in late 1980, to cover an expected drop in sales from the aging Apple II, and make a splash just before the IPO.

It bombed. Many explanations have been offered for this failure, but most come down to inadequate development time. Jobs’ decision to design the case before the hardware that would go in it was fully defined also contributed. The rush to cram everything needed into the case led to a circuit board with wires spaced too closely together, causing shorts from solder that bridged these small gaps; much of the initial production run didn’t work at all. The promised clock chip was not ready in time and would not ship with new computers until late 1981. These technical failures in engineering and production were expensive and embarrassing.[2]

Apple III. In addition to its other flaws, a far less handsome computer than its predecessor. [Alexander Schaelss / CC BY-SA 3.0]

But Apple could have overcome them if not for the serious flaws in the Apple III as a product: hardly any software was ready for the launch (VisiCalc was the only major application) and its backwards compatibility strategy was deeply compromised. Many users already had third-party 80-column display cards for their Apple IIs, and software designed to use them. The Apple III could emulate a II, but none of the advanced Apple III features (such as 80-column display) worked in emulation mode; the very users most eager for a better business machine would have to throw away their software to migrate. Jobs expected sales of 50,000 units in the first year, but it would take almost three years to reach that figure.[3]

Jobs had little interest in the incremental Apple III after the initial product direction was set; this was not the revolutionary computer he was looking for. And so, he moved on before the whiff of incipient failure became a stench. His next stop was the Lisa computer, then, after Apple’s CEO forced him off of that project, Macintosh. The history of these computers more properly belongs to another...