The first public showing of what was called the Apple II was at the West Coast Computer Fair in San Francisco in April 1977. The tiny company's dozen or so employees had worked through the night to prepare the five functioning models that were to be demonstrated. They were sleek little computers: fully assembled, light, wrapped in smart gray cases with the six-color Apple logo discreetly positioned over the keyboard. What would set them apart in particular, though, was their floppy-disk capability, which became available on the machines in 1979.
The floppy disk--or diskette--is a data-storage system developed for larger computers. The diskette itself is a thin piece of plastic, protected by a card cover, that looks a little like a 45-rpm record, and is used to load programs or to store data. Prior to the launch of the Apple II, all microcomputers used cassette tapes and ordinary cassette recorders for data storage, a time-consum- ing and inefficient process. The inclusion of the floppy-disk system gave the Apple II a competitive edge: users would no longer need to fiddle about with tapes and recorders, and the use of diskettes, as well as the simple operating system that Woz had built into the computer, encouraged other companies to write software for the new machines.
This last development more than anything else boosted the Apple II out of the hobbyist ghetto. The new Apple spawned a plethora of software: word-processing packages, graphics and arts programs, accounting systems, and computer games. The launch two years later of the VisiCalc spread sheet, a business forecasting program, made the Apple particularly attractive to corporate users.
Even Captain Crunch wrote software for the Apple II. At the time, in 1979, he was incarcerated in Northampton State Prison in Pennsylvania for a second phreaking offense. While on a rehabilitation course that allowed him access to a computer he developed a program called EasyWriter, one of the first word- processing packages, which for a short time became the secondbest-selling program in America. Draper went on to write other applications, marketed under the "Captain Software" label.
The Apple II filled a niche in the market, one that traditional computer manufacturers hadn't realized was there. The Apple was small and light, it was easy to use and could perform useful functions. A new purchaser could go home, take the components out of their boxes, plug them in, load the software, then sit down and write a book, plot a company's cash flow, or play a game.
By any standards Apple's subsequent growth was phenomenal. In its first year of operation, 1977, it sold $2.5 million worth of computers. The next year sales grew to $15 million, then in 1979 to $70 million. In 1980 the company broke through the $100 million mark, with sales of $117 million. The figures continued to rise, bounding to $335 million in 1981 and $583 million in 1982. Along the way the founders of Apple became millionaires, and in 1980, when the company went public, Jobs became worth $165 million and Wozniak $88 million.
The story of Apple, though, isn't just the story of two young men who made an enviable amount of money. What Jobs and Wozniak began with their invention was a revolution. Bigger than Berkeley's Free Speech Movement and "the summer of love" in Haight-Asbury, the technological revolution represented by the personal computer has brought a real change to society. It gave people access to data, programs, and computing power they had never had before. In an early promotional video for Apple, an earnest employee says, "We build a device that gives people the same power over information that large corporations and the government have over people."
The statement deliberately echoes the "power to the people" anthem of the sixties, but while much of the political radicals' time was spent merely posturing, the technological revolutionaries were delivering a product that brought the power of information to the masses. That the technological pioneers became rich and that the funky little companies they founded turned into massive corporations is perhaps testament to capitalism's capacity to direct change, or to coopt a revolution.
