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there's often a lot of misunderstandings about the Apple II Apple II nostalgia is not due to modern Apple's success. The people keeping it alive actually are

by deater 3y ago

there's often a lot of misunderstandings about the Apple II Apple II nostalgia is not due to modern Apple's success. The people keeping it alive actually are often hostile to modern Apple, never forgiving them for killing off the Apple II in lieu of the macintosh. (See "Apple II forever" or attend a Kansasfest sometime) a lot of key early gaming milestones happened on the Apple II, for a variety of reasons. One was the extremely clever floppy drive controller made by Woz. You could have actual decent sized games that would load in seconds. I know there's a lot of weird nostalgia for waiting large fractions of an hour for screeching bits to load off of tape, but that wasn't great for complex games. Don't overlook the education market, a large set of Gen-X used apple IIs at school, and there was an immense educational software market Business was big too, especially Visi-calc. It was used in much more serious ways than later 8-bit machines. To the point if you look closely at the original IBM PC you can see its design closely matches the Apple II in many ways, as that's what IBM was worried about. The c64 didn't even exist yet when that was happening. Expansion, having a machine with a case with room for 8 expansion boards of fully documented slots is so much fun for hacking compared to trying to shoe-horn things into a mass of wires and loose-connector cartridges hanging out the back of your machine. Finally cost, the II has a reputation of a rich-kid machine. Which is true, but everyone gets all excited about DOS gaming and during the DOS/PC age most PCs were really expensive as well.

WaitWaitWha 3y ago
I am an Apple ][ fan. I started off with some big iron, then discovered the ][ and rarely looked back. I dabbled with the TRS80, VIC-20, & the C64s but I came back to the ][. Apple started as open as one can expect at the time. The system was readily modifiable in all kinds of ways. I was able to build my first modem card without voiding warranty or breaking the system. The arrival of Mac was the end of that era. A new, locked down, fully-out-of-my-control environment emerged. No more easy modifications. I am not disparaging the Mac, I derogate the lack of openness.
- scarface74 3y ago
  The Mac had plenty of models that had slots and it wasn’t until the MacBook Air in 2006 that the hard drives and RAM weren’t easily replaceable.
BirAdam 3y ago
Yeah, VisiCalc + Apple ][ was the real revolution. It gave non-hobbyists a reason to buy a computer. VisiCalc sold Apple ][s and pushed most of the Apple ][s into businesses which surprised the Steves quite a bit. The next big moment for microcomputers was really the internet. There other things, but spreadsheets continued to be a big reason for computer sales until the net. I wrote more about this here: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-killer-app https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-killer-app
JKCalhoun 3y ago
> Don't overlook the education market... Overlook? I think the education market is why Apple succeeded so thoroughly.
TMWNN 3y ago
>a lot of key early gaming milestones happened on the Apple II, for a variety of reasons. One was the extremely clever floppy drive controller made by Woz. You could have actual decent sized games that would load in seconds. I disagree that the floppy drive was the reason for Apple II being so influential in early computer gaming. Being the only inexpensive, readily available early microcomputer with color support until the Atari 8-bit c. 1980 was why. >I know there's a lot of weird nostalgia for waiting large fractions of an hour for screeching bits to load off of tape, but that wasn't great for complex games. I don't disagree on the weirdness of the tape nostalgia among non-North America computer owners (and it's not even universal; the 1541 was widespread among German C64 owners, while Spectrum never got anywhere there). But even without the Disk II, I'm sure that the likes of Bill Budge and Dan Gorlin would have chosen the Apple II, if only because there was no better alternative.

by deater 3y ago

WaitWaitWha 3y ago

I am an Apple ][ fan. I started off with some big iron, then discovered the ][ and rarely looked back. I dabbled with the TRS80, VIC-20, & the C64s but I came back to the ][. Apple started as open as one can expect at the time. The system was readily modifiable in all kinds of ways. I was able to build my first modem card without voiding warranty or breaking the system. The arrival of Mac was the end of that era. A new, locked down, fully-out-of-my-control environment emerged. No more easy modifications. I am not disparaging the Mac, I derogate the lack of openness.

scarface74 3y ago
The Mac had plenty of models that had slots and it wasn’t until the MacBook Air in 2006 that the hard drives and RAM weren’t easily replaceable.

BirAdam 3y ago

Yeah, VisiCalc + Apple ][ was the real revolution. It gave non-hobbyists a reason to buy a computer. VisiCalc sold Apple ][s and pushed most of the Apple ][s into businesses which surprised the Steves quite a bit. The next big moment for microcomputers was really the internet. There other things, but spreadsheets continued to be a big reason for computer sales until the net. I wrote more about this here: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-killer-app https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-killer-app

JKCalhoun 3y ago

> Don't overlook the education market... Overlook? I think the education market is why Apple succeeded so thoroughly.

TMWNN 3y ago

>a lot of key early gaming milestones happened on the Apple II, for a variety of reasons. One was the extremely clever floppy drive controller made by Woz. You could have actual decent sized games that would load in seconds. I disagree that the floppy drive was the reason for Apple II being so influential in early computer gaming. Being the only inexpensive, readily available early microcomputer with color support until the Atari 8-bit c. 1980 was why. >I know there's a lot of weird nostalgia for waiting large fractions of an hour for screeching bits to load off of tape, but that wasn't great for complex games. I don't disagree on the weirdness of the tape nostalgia among non-North America computer owners (and it's not even universal; the 1541 was widespread among German C64 owners, while Spectrum never got anywhere there). But even without the Disk II, I'm sure that the likes of Bill Budge and Dan Gorlin would have chosen the Apple II, if only because there was no better alternative.