11 ms·

Microcomputers – The Second Wave: Toward a Mass Market

74 points by cfmcdonald 1y ago

zabzonk 1y ago
Just thinking how, shall we say "svelte" Woz looked in the first photo, compared with the "portly" (but cheerful and brilliant) look of later years.
- andrehacker 1y ago
  Silly remark, but talking about "Svelte", I can't parse the picture with Mike Markkula: the Apple II in the front is not exactly a small computer: it is a full size keyboard with several inches of space between the keyboard and the edges so either I don't understand the basics of perspective or this is a scaled down model, no ?
  - Gracana 1y ago
    Odd perspective, I guess? Here's a different angle: https://techland.time.com/2012/04/16/photos-the-apple-ii-turns-35-2/photo/appleii-markkula/ https://techland.time.com/2012/04/16/photos-the-apple-ii-tur...
andrehacker 1y ago
Great article. It’s wild to look back at 1977/1978 and realize how suddenly the personal computer era exploded into the mainstream. The PET, TRS-80, and Apple II all hit the market within months of each other, and while hobbyists had already been tinkering with machines like the Altair, IMSAI, KIM-1, and Apple I, this was the moment computers truly became “consumer” products. From a technical perspective, the timing made sense—there was a foundation of microprocessor-based systems and a growing community of enthusiasts. But for the general public, it felt like computers went from obscure to omnipresent overnight. They were suddenly on TV, in magazines, featured in books, and even depicted in movies and shows. That cultural shift was massive. For many of us, it marked the beginning of having computers in our homes—something that’s never changed since. I appreciated the article’s attention to detail too. The bit about the TRS-80 monitor being repurposed from an existing product (with a "Mercedes Silver" color to boot), and the PET’s sheet metal casing being a practical choice rather than a design one—those are the kinds of behind-the-scenes decisions that rarely get spotlighted but say a lot about how fast things were moving back then.
K0balt 1y ago
It’s truly remarkable to me that in the late 70s/early 80s it was considered that programming your own computer in basic was not something that required special skills or technical ability. It just goes to show how far out expectations have dropped, with basic human ingenuity and capability for expression having been crippled by reliance on increasingly advanced automation with increasingly simple interfaces. Humanity is not going to fare well in the world of pervasive synthetic intelligence with simple language interfaces. I fear we will see an unprecedented dumbing down of the population, a new “dark age” perhaps.
- Jtsummers 1y ago
  > It just goes to show how far out expectations have dropped Those computers were vastly simpler, and many weren't connected to any kind of external network (or the networks were, again, vastly simpler). It's like the difference between a Model T era car (many people possess the technical ability to maintain them, even today) versus a modern car. It's not that we expect less of people today, we've just produced something much more complex so what it even means to understand or use a computer has changed, because it's not the same thing as 40-50 years ago. If I threw an Apple II level computer at someone today, I'd expect as much from them as throwing the same computer at someone in 1980 (actually more, they'd have more foundational knowledge than a random person in 1980 would have).
  - HankStallone 1y ago
    Also, as programming languages have gotten more powerful, I think they've gotten so they require a particular kind of mind to work with. I could teach anyone with a little interest and aptitude to program in BASIC 2.0, because there aren't any hard concepts. Variables are global, there's no recursion, no objects, not really even functions, just subroutines. So you've got looping and variables, just enough to let you do some calculations and put things on a screen. Pretty simple. Also, my Commodore 128 came with a System Guide in which over 100 pages were a pretty solid BASIC instruction and explanation of every command. So if you bought one of those machines, there was a good chance you'd at least tinker with BASIC. You had to learn a couple commands just to use the thing, after all. Moving to something modern, even a language that's considered easy to learn like python, you very quickly get into more complicated concepts. That seems to have created a situation where the easier and more powerful we make programming for programmers, the more it gets out of reach of anyone else. Though there are still languages specifically for learning (like BASIC), so that doesn't have to be a problem.
sbecker 1y ago
> “ Three factors were required to join this holy ensemble: the technical expertise to design a capable and reliable microcomputer, a nose for the larger business opportunity latent in the hobby computer market…” I think the same opportunity exists now in the hobby robot market.
- ChuckMcM 1y ago
  Okay, that made me chuckle. As someone[1] who has also predicted the opportunity for hobby robots based on my experience with home computers. And yet that has really never materialized. I mean there are common household robots today, things like Roombas and robot lawn mowers, but the whole "app" ecosystem, a robot that can do lots of different things, Etc. is still not in the cards. Part of that has to do with how insanely hard vision to inverse kinematics is, "fuzzy logic" was going to fix that before, now "AI" is the buzzword of choice, but realistically you need a lot of things to go right to make this work. Back in the day we had everyone in the club set some goals for their robot, mine were simple; on voice command, have my robot go to a special refrigerator, get out a cold Diet Dr. Pepper, replace it with one from stock, then bring the cold one to me, where ever I was in the house. Even allowing for a lot of customized environment to support the robot that is a really high bar today (much less in 1998 when I was thinking I'd have it working by the early 2000's) End effectors, vision, custom fridge that an open electonically on demand with structured storage to hold beverages in pre-specified places, etc etc. I could probably get a lot closer. Of course my eldest child could do that at 3 years old without any programming at all and no custom engineering of the appliances. So some things seem effortless for people are really challenging for computers. [1] I was President of the Home Brew Robotics Club (hbrc.org) for 10 years around the turn of the century (after Dick Prather had been President for 10 years and before Wayne Gramlich became President for 10 years :-)
  - microtherion 1y ago
    In 1977, a company named Quasar Industries demonstrated a household robot claimed to understand a vocabulary of 4000 words and capable of vacuuming, washing dishes, and teaching the children of the household French. It would ship within the next two years, at a cost of $4000. Some CMU graduate students attended one of the demos, and discovered two people discreetly loitering in the background, one doing the "speaking" of the robot, and the other remote controlling it. Luckily in today's more advanced times, we have Optimus shipping any day now, which definitely has never been teleoperated at any of its demos…
iberator 1y ago
I never used or even seen those computers, yet from pure curiosity I picked up 6502 CPU(Apple 2, Commodore 64, NES) assembly as a hobby project. Its surprisingly easy, even for dumb person like me. Great learning tool if you dream of building your own CPU architecture:) Try it!
- dspillett 1y ago
  > yet from pure curiosity I picked up 6502 CPU(Apple 2, Commodore 64, NES) assembly as a hobby project. I cut my programming teeth on an Acorn Electron (a somewhat cut-down BBC Micro) then later a Master128. The fact that the BASIC ROM included a decent multi-pass assembler was great for learning the deeper workings of the machine and such things in general. Being able to easily mix BASIC and assembly provided good lessons wrt choosing where optimisations were worth bothering with and where you should just stick with BASIC to save dev time. Those machines were also based around variants of the 6502.
  - forinti 1y ago
    As well as mixing Assembly into BASIC, BBC BASIC allowed you to use its internal routines from Assembly. You could, for instance, use the floating point routines. So the BASIC ROM was not a lost 16KB of address space if you were only using Assembly.
    - dspillett 1y ago
      Aye. The graphics primitives, and just about everything else, too. A lot of thought went into making those machines conveniently programmable which made them great for both learning and tinkering. Though the main two reasons I had for assembly were faster maths loops and graphics (via direct access to screen memory including, on the Master, the shadow screen for double-buffered drawing), so neither of those parts where sometime I called much.
  - cmrdporcupine 1y ago
    This was the most annoying thing about the Commodore machines, frankly. Lack of out of the box tooling for working in 6502 assembly. I had a VIC-20 and quickly hit the limits of its BASIC and started having to POKE 6502 machine code to RAM to do useful things, by reading opcode tables for the processor -- because growing up my parents simply could not afford to go buy me an assembler cartridge for the machine. Was always jealous of people who had that available to them, and that it was built into the BASIC of the BBC machines is pretty cool. Even the monitor program built into the Apple II was superior.
jnaina 1y ago
Surprised the Atari 8-bit series was left out. It was arguably one of the first home computers designed with an appliance-like philosophy, rather than the typical open, hobbyist-oriented design of its time. Features like ROM cartridges, the Atari SIO serial bus (which even influenced the design of USB), multiple joystick ports that doubled as input for external switches or sensors, and support for smart peripherals like disk drives and drawing tablets set it apart. I still have my Atari 800 — it was my first real step into learning 6502 machine language.
- andrehacker 1y ago
  The Atari 800 came a bit later (1979), the 3 discussed all were introduced in 1977. 1979 was also when the TI-99/4 came out which eventually became popular when the price was dropped below cost.
MomsAVoxell 1y ago
There is a .. "new Wave" (?) .. happening around microcomputers associated with that era .. in the modern context. I think the reason this article has impact, is that this 'new Wave' of microcomputers is tangible, visible, and not just on the horizon but happening every single day, in a kind of quiet revolution/resurgence of platforms once considered 'outdated', suddenly becoming relevant again. You can still use these machines - this holy trinity of computers still get regular software made for them - and as platforms, there is a resurgence happening. The ZX Spectrum Next. The myriad FPGA-based consoles that allow full access to entire "retired architectures". The Apollo A6000 'next-gen Amiga' .. all of these new 'hobbyist systems' fulfil the original need that the 'trinity' systems proposed. There are, literally, hundreds of different ways to get a modern reproduction of the 'second wave' systems. So I imagine a day, in the not too distant future, that really useful applications are released for the 'next-gen 8-bit hobby microcomputer' systems. Put a well-fitted Apple II environment in a wrist-watch, and watch the devs arrive .. ;) By way of example, I have in my (admittedly extensive) retro computing collection, an Oric-1/Atmos system that was used consistently, every single week for 40 years, to record motorbike club membership details, statistics, visit logs, and so on. For 40 years that system was doing its job as an on-site membership database and fuel log. That it was offline and only physically accessible was a feature, not a bug. I think there are plenty of other places that the modern, new-school 'retro-' microcomputers can find their setting - just a little bit above embedded, perhaps, side-wise to the mobile, and very definitely competing alongside desktop in terms of active user experience. Not to mention, all the 'new retro consoles' are an awesome market for games and entertainment, of course ..
- HankStallone 1y ago
  It'd cost me about $10k to replace the stack of Commodore equipment I gave away to a scrap dealer 20-ish years ago, if I bought it all used now. But I'm still tempted to start, maybe with just one or two pieces.
  - microtherion 1y ago
    I recently picked up a used Epson HX-20 for a very reasonable price. It's still an amazing design, and could probably still be used for actually useful tasks.
gabrielsroka 1y ago
> the original Apple Computer (later called the Apple I) All the original manuals/ads/etc (that I can find online) called it the Apple-1 (Arabic, not Roman). I think Woz was already working on the Apple II by the time the Apple I was released.
- cfmcdonald 1y ago
  Author here. Yes I could be more accurate here. It was called just "Apple Computer" in some contexts, e.g. this ad [0]. This manual calls it "Apple-1" on the cover [1], but "Apple Computer" in the contents. But you are definitely right that it was often called the Apple-1 in 1976 and into 1977. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I#/media/File:Apple_1_Advertisement_Oct_1976.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I#/media/File:Apple_1_Ad... [1]: https://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/apple.applei.1976.102646518.pdf https://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/apple.applei.19...
  - gabrielsroka 1y ago
    > on the cover And in the schematics towards the end of the manual
  - gabrielsroka 1y ago
    see also https://www.apple1registry.com/en/soft.html https://www.apple1registry.com/en/soft.html, etc

74 points by cfmcdonald 1y ago

Just thinking how, shall we say "svelte" Woz looked in the first photo, compared with the "portly" (but cheerful and brilliant) look of later years.

andrehacker 1y ago
Silly remark, but talking about "Svelte", I can't parse the picture with Mike Markkula: the Apple II in the front is not exactly a small computer: it is a full size keyboard with several inches of space between the keyboard and the edges so either I don't understand the basics of perspective or this is a scaled down model, no ?
- Gracana 1y ago
  Odd perspective, I guess? Here's a different angle: https://techland.time.com/2012/04/16/photos-the-apple-ii-turns-35-2/photo/appleii-markkula/ https://techland.time.com/2012/04/16/photos-the-apple-ii-tur...

andrehacker 1y ago

Great article. It’s wild to look back at 1977/1978 and realize how suddenly the personal computer era exploded into the mainstream. The PET, TRS-80, and Apple II all hit the market within months of each other, and while hobbyists had already been tinkering with machines like the Altair, IMSAI, KIM-1, and Apple I, this was the moment computers truly became “consumer” products. From a technical perspective, the timing made sense—there was a foundation of microprocessor-based systems and a growing community of enthusiasts. But for the general public, it felt like computers went from obscure to omnipresent overnight. They were suddenly on TV, in magazines, featured in books, and even depicted in movies and shows. That cultural shift was massive. For many of us, it marked the beginning of having computers in our homes—something that’s never changed since. I appreciated the article’s attention to detail too. The bit about the TRS-80 monitor being repurposed from an existing product (with a "Mercedes Silver" color to boot), and the PET’s sheet metal casing being a practical choice rather than a design one—those are the kinds of behind-the-scenes decisions that rarely get spotlighted but say a lot about how fast things were moving back then.

K0balt 1y ago

It’s truly remarkable to me that in the late 70s/early 80s it was considered that programming your own computer in basic was not something that required special skills or technical ability. It just goes to show how far out expectations have dropped, with basic human ingenuity and capability for expression having been crippled by reliance on increasingly advanced automation with increasingly simple interfaces. Humanity is not going to fare well in the world of pervasive synthetic intelligence with simple language interfaces. I fear we will see an unprecedented dumbing down of the population, a new “dark age” perhaps.

Jtsummers 1y ago
> It just goes to show how far out expectations have dropped Those computers were vastly simpler, and many weren't connected to any kind of external network (or the networks were, again, vastly simpler). It's like the difference between a Model T era car (many people possess the technical ability to maintain them, even today) versus a modern car. It's not that we expect less of people today, we've just produced something much more complex so what it even means to understand or use a computer has changed, because it's not the same thing as 40-50 years ago. If I threw an Apple II level computer at someone today, I'd expect as much from them as throwing the same computer at someone in 1980 (actually more, they'd have more foundational knowledge than a random person in 1980 would have).
- HankStallone 1y ago
  Also, as programming languages have gotten more powerful, I think they've gotten so they require a particular kind of mind to work with. I could teach anyone with a little interest and aptitude to program in BASIC 2.0, because there aren't any hard concepts. Variables are global, there's no recursion, no objects, not really even functions, just subroutines. So you've got looping and variables, just enough to let you do some calculations and put things on a screen. Pretty simple. Also, my Commodore 128 came with a System Guide in which over 100 pages were a pretty solid BASIC instruction and explanation of every command. So if you bought one of those machines, there was a good chance you'd at least tinker with BASIC. You had to learn a couple commands just to use the thing, after all. Moving to something modern, even a language that's considered easy to learn like python, you very quickly get into more complicated concepts. That seems to have created a situation where the easier and more powerful we make programming for programmers, the more it gets out of reach of anyone else. Though there are still languages specifically for learning (like BASIC), so that doesn't have to be a problem.

sbecker 1y ago

> “ Three factors were required to join this holy ensemble: the technical expertise to design a capable and reliable microcomputer, a nose for the larger business opportunity latent in the hobby computer market…” I think the same opportunity exists now in the hobby robot market.

ChuckMcM 1y ago
Okay, that made me chuckle. As someone[1] who has also predicted the opportunity for hobby robots based on my experience with home computers. And yet that has really never materialized. I mean there are common household robots today, things like Roombas and robot lawn mowers, but the whole "app" ecosystem, a robot that can do lots of different things, Etc. is still not in the cards. Part of that has to do with how insanely hard vision to inverse kinematics is, "fuzzy logic" was going to fix that before, now "AI" is the buzzword of choice, but realistically you need a lot of things to go right to make this work. Back in the day we had everyone in the club set some goals for their robot, mine were simple; on voice command, have my robot go to a special refrigerator, get out a cold Diet Dr. Pepper, replace it with one from stock, then bring the cold one to me, where ever I was in the house. Even allowing for a lot of customized environment to support the robot that is a really high bar today (much less in 1998 when I was thinking I'd have it working by the early 2000's) End effectors, vision, custom fridge that an open electonically on demand with structured storage to hold beverages in pre-specified places, etc etc. I could probably get a lot closer. Of course my eldest child could do that at 3 years old without any programming at all and no custom engineering of the appliances. So some things seem effortless for people are really challenging for computers. [1] I was President of the Home Brew Robotics Club (hbrc.org) for 10 years around the turn of the century (after Dick Prather had been President for 10 years and before Wayne Gramlich became President for 10 years :-)
- microtherion 1y ago
  In 1977, a company named Quasar Industries demonstrated a household robot claimed to understand a vocabulary of 4000 words and capable of vacuuming, washing dishes, and teaching the children of the household French. It would ship within the next two years, at a cost of $4000. Some CMU graduate students attended one of the demos, and discovered two people discreetly loitering in the background, one doing the "speaking" of the robot, and the other remote controlling it. Luckily in today's more advanced times, we have Optimus shipping any day now, which definitely has never been teleoperated at any of its demos…

iberator 1y ago

I never used or even seen those computers, yet from pure curiosity I picked up 6502 CPU(Apple 2, Commodore 64, NES) assembly as a hobby project. Its surprisingly easy, even for dumb person like me. Great learning tool if you dream of building your own CPU architecture:) Try it!

dspillett 1y ago
> yet from pure curiosity I picked up 6502 CPU(Apple 2, Commodore 64, NES) assembly as a hobby project. I cut my programming teeth on an Acorn Electron (a somewhat cut-down BBC Micro) then later a Master128. The fact that the BASIC ROM included a decent multi-pass assembler was great for learning the deeper workings of the machine and such things in general. Being able to easily mix BASIC and assembly provided good lessons wrt choosing where optimisations were worth bothering with and where you should just stick with BASIC to save dev time. Those machines were also based around variants of the 6502.
- forinti 1y ago
  As well as mixing Assembly into BASIC, BBC BASIC allowed you to use its internal routines from Assembly. You could, for instance, use the floating point routines. So the BASIC ROM was not a lost 16KB of address space if you were only using Assembly.
  - dspillett 1y ago
    Aye. The graphics primitives, and just about everything else, too. A lot of thought went into making those machines conveniently programmable which made them great for both learning and tinkering. Though the main two reasons I had for assembly were faster maths loops and graphics (via direct access to screen memory including, on the Master, the shadow screen for double-buffered drawing), so neither of those parts where sometime I called much.
- cmrdporcupine 1y ago
  This was the most annoying thing about the Commodore machines, frankly. Lack of out of the box tooling for working in 6502 assembly. I had a VIC-20 and quickly hit the limits of its BASIC and started having to POKE 6502 machine code to RAM to do useful things, by reading opcode tables for the processor -- because growing up my parents simply could not afford to go buy me an assembler cartridge for the machine. Was always jealous of people who had that available to them, and that it was built into the BASIC of the BBC machines is pretty cool. Even the monitor program built into the Apple II was superior.

jnaina 1y ago

Surprised the Atari 8-bit series was left out. It was arguably one of the first home computers designed with an appliance-like philosophy, rather than the typical open, hobbyist-oriented design of its time. Features like ROM cartridges, the Atari SIO serial bus (which even influenced the design of USB), multiple joystick ports that doubled as input for external switches or sensors, and support for smart peripherals like disk drives and drawing tablets set it apart. I still have my Atari 800 — it was my first real step into learning 6502 machine language.

andrehacker 1y ago
The Atari 800 came a bit later (1979), the 3 discussed all were introduced in 1977. 1979 was also when the TI-99/4 came out which eventually became popular when the price was dropped below cost.

MomsAVoxell 1y ago

There is a .. "new Wave" (?) .. happening around microcomputers associated with that era .. in the modern context. I think the reason this article has impact, is that this 'new Wave' of microcomputers is tangible, visible, and not just on the horizon but happening every single day, in a kind of quiet revolution/resurgence of platforms once considered 'outdated', suddenly becoming relevant again. You can still use these machines - this holy trinity of computers still get regular software made for them - and as platforms, there is a resurgence happening. The ZX Spectrum Next. The myriad FPGA-based consoles that allow full access to entire "retired architectures". The Apollo A6000 'next-gen Amiga' .. all of these new 'hobbyist systems' fulfil the original need that the 'trinity' systems proposed. There are, literally, hundreds of different ways to get a modern reproduction of the 'second wave' systems. So I imagine a day, in the not too distant future, that really useful applications are released for the 'next-gen 8-bit hobby microcomputer' systems. Put a well-fitted Apple II environment in a wrist-watch, and watch the devs arrive .. ;) By way of example, I have in my (admittedly extensive) retro computing collection, an Oric-1/Atmos system that was used consistently, every single week for 40 years, to record motorbike club membership details, statistics, visit logs, and so on. For 40 years that system was doing its job as an on-site membership database and fuel log. That it was offline and only physically accessible was a feature, not a bug. I think there are plenty of other places that the modern, new-school 'retro-' microcomputers can find their setting - just a little bit above embedded, perhaps, side-wise to the mobile, and very definitely competing alongside desktop in terms of active user experience. Not to mention, all the 'new retro consoles' are an awesome market for games and entertainment, of course ..

HankStallone 1y ago
It'd cost me about $10k to replace the stack of Commodore equipment I gave away to a scrap dealer 20-ish years ago, if I bought it all used now. But I'm still tempted to start, maybe with just one or two pieces.
- microtherion 1y ago
  I recently picked up a used Epson HX-20 for a very reasonable price. It's still an amazing design, and could probably still be used for actually useful tasks.

gabrielsroka 1y ago

> the original Apple Computer (later called the Apple I) All the original manuals/ads/etc (that I can find online) called it the Apple-1 (Arabic, not Roman). I think Woz was already working on the Apple II by the time the Apple I was released.

cfmcdonald 1y ago
Author here. Yes I could be more accurate here. It was called just "Apple Computer" in some contexts, e.g. this ad [0]. This manual calls it "Apple-1" on the cover [1], but "Apple Computer" in the contents. But you are definitely right that it was often called the Apple-1 in 1976 and into 1977. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I#/media/File:Apple_1_Advertisement_Oct_1976.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I#/media/File:Apple_1_Ad... [1]: https://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/apple.applei.1976.102646518.pdf https://s3data.computerhistory.org/brochures/apple.applei.19...
- gabrielsroka 1y ago
  > on the cover And in the schematics towards the end of the manual
- gabrielsroka 1y ago
  see also https://www.apple1registry.com/en/soft.html https://www.apple1registry.com/en/soft.html, etc