Before the Mac...

[Jeff Wexler]

The Land Before Macs: A field guide

Benj Edwards - author for MacWorld

Since we live in the era of the Mac and the iPhone, we tend to overlook the earliest, non-Mac era of Apple history—a time when lumbering digital beasts roamed the earth. As a result, many misconceptions about Apple's earliest products continue to spread throughout the Internet unchecked. It's time to rectify that with an authoritative field guide to these early creatures.

At the height of Apple Computer’s classical age, these binary dinosaurs came with names like Apple I, II, and III—Roman-numeraled computer systems with lineages almost as ancient as the numerals themselves.

Thanks to recent fossil discoveries in the Masonite-Gypsum Shale Deposit (also known as my garage), we can now paint a fairly complete scientific portrait of these early Apple-bred creatures, including information on their habitats, diets, and behavior.

Although every one of the following species is now extinct, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on how far today's Apple species have evolved from their earliest forms.

Apple I

Era: 1976 to 1977

Life span: 1 year

Dimensions: 9 by 15.5 inches

Preferred Habitat: suburban garages, marshy wetlands

Diet: hacker sweat

Trivia: This short-lived specimen, the earliest known ancestor of all Apple dinosaurs, only appeared briefly in the fossil record. Its primitive form often lacked the protective shell that scientists believe later developed to defend its internal parts from torrential Mountain Dew spills. Lacking such a protective enclosure, the semi-aquatic Apple I often floated in a primordial soup of hobbyist goodwill that nourished the machine through osmosis.

Apple II

Era: 1977 to 1979

Life span: 2 years

Dimensions: 4.25 by 15.25 by 17.75 inches

Preferred Habitat: Dan Bricklin’s house

Diet: Integer BASIC, chaparral vegetation

This founding model of the Apple II species, with its streamlined body, seems well adapted to freshwater aquatic environments, and yet its rubber feet made it firmly at home on a household desktop. Digital food was scarce during its amphibious reign, so the Apple II relied on manual data entry through its keyboard or preformatted nutriment streamed through its cassette interface.

Life was apparently difficult for this early member of the Apple family, as numerous specimens have been found filled with card-like parasitic organisms.

Apple II Plus

Era: 1979 to 1982

Lifespan: 3 years

Dimensions: 4.25 by 15.25 by 17.75 inches

Preferred Habitat: small businesses, living room corners

Diet: amortization tables

Trivia: In the fossil record, Apple II Plus specimens often appear next to a symbiotic organism known as the Disk II. Based on studies of the Disk II’s anatomy, this smaller organism apparently fed the II Plus a steady diet of diskette-based data in exchange for protection from predators.

When partnered with the Disk II, the Apple II Plus could more easily digest VisiCalc spreadsheets, which aided its adaptation to businesslike environments.

Apple III

Era: 1980 to 1983

Lifespan: 3 years

Dimensions: 4.8 by 17.5 by 18.2 inches

Preferred Habitat: Apple warehouses

Diet: Pascal, desert vertebrates

Trivia: Little is known about the rare and massive Apple III, but scientists speculate that it could operate in extreme heat environments without ill effect due to its unique metal heat sink base. This ingenious adaptation to hot environments may have been responsible for its extinction as the climate cooled in the mid-1980s.

Alternate theories suggest that extensive interbreeding with the Apple IIe, which likely shared a common ancestor with the III, may have led to the Apple III’s complete disappearance from the fossil record.

Apple IIe

Era: 1983 to 1985

Lifespan: 2 years

Dimensions: 4.25 by 15.25 by 17.75 inches

Preferred Habitat: classrooms, computer labs

Diet: educational software, chocolate milk

The Apple IIe lived during a time of great upheaval in the digital climate. With its relatively light weight and low motherboard complexity, the IIe found a welcome ecological niche in educational environments, often as the plaything of juvenile Homo sapiens.

Later forms of this svelte but hardy beast, which commonly lived along the Oregon Trail, survived the mass 8-bit extinction of 1984 that killed over 90 percent of the 8-bit digital dinosaurs. Those advanced forms include the IIe Enhanced (1985) and the IIe Platinum (1987), both of which emerged after the dawn of the Macintosh.

Apple III+

Era: 1983 to 1984

Lifespan: 1 year

Dimensions: 4.8 by 17.5 by 18.2 inches

Preferred Habitat: dumpsters, corporate basements

Diet: unknown

Trivia: Our understanding of the Apple III+ is limited, and is mostly based a handful of lower chassis segments discovered in a Michigan corporate sewer in 1997. Based on extensive reconstructions, most scientists believe that the III+ was covered with a colorful coat of feathers that allowed primitive powered flight from office windows. However, its heavy frame would have prevented a gentle landing, thus explaining the many fractured and incomplete pieces of this machine found in the fossil record.

Apple Lisa

Era: 1983 to 1984

Lifespan: 1 year

Dimensions: 15.2 by 18.7 by 13.8 inches

Preferred Habitat: Apple’s Lisa division

Diet: graphical office environment suites, general remorse

Paleontologists first discovered fossils of the Lisa, the largest of all early Apple dinosaurs, encased in concrete at a landfill in Logan, Utah. That initially led many scientists to believe that the Lisa dwelled in subterranean habitats.

However, the recent discovery of a previously unknown tail-like appendage, which contains a freely rotating ball, has convinced experts that the Lisa may be a direct ancestor of the first Macintosh species.

Accordingly, the Lisa is often known as the “extremely fat Mac” due to its size and lumbering form. Its ample weight and girth likely arose as an adaptation to large quantities of free-flowing oxygen/capital in the atmosphere before the Dawning of the Great Responsibility that struck Apple headquarters in mid-1985.

After that time, much smaller Apple computers like the Macintosh and the Apple IIc appeared on the scene and completely changed the computing landscape, although how they developed, exactly, is still a mystery.

[benr]

I am actually reading the Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Issacson right now. Its awesome! Tons of cool tech history and overall a very interesting read. I def understand Apple better now and why they do the things they do.

[johnpaul215]

My Apple ][e is still at my Mom's house. It worked about 10 years ago when I booted it up to play around with. They actually manufactured them from 1983 till 1993. Kind of crazy, but they overlapped the first Macs.

[benr]

My Apple ][e is still at my Mom's house. It worked about 10 years ago when I booted it up to play around with.

Wow you should eBay that! I bet youd get an amount better than leaving it in your moms house to collect dust!

[johnpaul215]

eh, looks like $600+ depending on what it has included. A NIB one sold for $1200.

There were a TON of them made over 10 years, though I think we still have the boxes in the attic somewhere. That would add a bit to them. There are a few distinct Apple computers worth collector money. The Apple I is the holy grail. Partially because Apple offered a trade-in to get an Apple II, so most of them went back (and were destroyed?). The FIRST Macs actually have the Macintosh team's signatures in the inside of the case. They were in the molds. Not super easy to display, but collectible to some people.

Between my brother and I, we have a few weird old Macs. He found a Mac IIFX in a junk pile. They were released in 1990 with a $9,900 price tag, but probably not worth anything now. My sister and I went to Drexel University. First school in the USA to require students to own a computer (some time in the 1980s). That school was all Mac for years and years. She started in 1988 and got a Mac SE, I started in 1992 and got a IIsi. I still have those. Definitely not worth anything, but hard to get rid of.

I did recently hear a crazy statistic about how long it took Apple to sell 1,000,000 Macs (years) compared to how long it took them to sell 1,000,000 of the first iPhone (weeks).

[benr]

Exactly! And Im not sure about you but Id rather have 600+ bucks than a piece of furniture at my moms house!

[johnpaul215]

Just imagine what it'll be worth in 20 years!

[Philip Perkins]

An Apple II ran the entire mail order dept of the record label I worked for in the late '70s, incl the catalog, inventory, ordering, keeping track of masters, printing mailing labels, doing the spreadsheets for the company, payroll, royalties etc etc. They whole operation had ONE computer, that one. The people who wrote all those apps for that tiny computer that worked so well for us were geniuses.

There's a version missing here, the IIC, small, cute, white--same general shape as the IIs but smaller. I worked on the rollout film for it (like a low-budget feature film, shot in 35mm) but couldn't afford one--these computers were not cheap in those times. What I could afford in those days was a C64. I worked on the pieces for the later IIs, the III and the Lisa, as well as the first Mac. The Mac was a wonder--the others the computer techs really couldn't get to work on the set--the computers you saw in the films were props with lightbulbs in them.

philp

[Marc Wielage]

I am actually reading the Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Issacson right now. Its awesome! Tons of cool tech history and overall a very interesting read. I def understand Apple better now and why they do the things they do.

It is a great book (the #1 seller for non-fiction books last year), but know up front that Steve Jobs as a human being was awful. I think he accomplished a lot in his life -- as he said, "we made a dent in the universe" -- but was often infuriating, frustrating, and abusive to many people. I thought author Isaacson's very thoughtful questions and investigations were very well-done, and presented many sides of a complex man. It's a testament to Jobs that he understood that he was perceived as a monster by some people, and at least explained why he felt he had to act that way with the people he worked with.

[benr]

It is a great book (the #1 seller for non-fiction books last year), but know up front that Steve Jobs as a human being was awful. I think he accomplished a lot in his life -- as he said, "we made a dent in the universe" -- but was often infuriating, frustrating, and abusive to many people. I thought author Isaacson's very thoughtful questions and investigations were very well-done, and presented many sides of a complex man. It's a testament to Jobs that he understood that he was perceived as a monster by some people, and at least explained why he felt he had to act that way with the people he worked with.

Yea, dude was a freak, but grew up in the right place and the right time, had a vision and stuck to it and made/manipulated all the right friends.

[Philip Perkins]

Jobs was VERY unpleasant to work around (I had the pleasure) UNLESS he chose to be charming in which case he could be VERY charming (and then, suddenly, NOT). I don't imagine JP Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, George Eastman, Alexander Graham Bell et al were a great hang either, really--being kind of an asshole sociopath seems to come with that territory. I don't think Jobs was big enough to make a dent in the real universe, but he certainly made a huge crater in Western Civilization.

philp

[Marc Wielage]

I am actually reading the Steve Jobs Biography by Walter Issacson right now. Its awesome! Tons of cool tech history and overall a very interesting read. I def understand Apple better now and why they do the things they do.

It's a dynamite book, very well-researched, and done very objectively. I admire Isaacson for showing the good and the bad with Jobs, particularly the fact that he never took anybody's word for granted -- he often got several sides of the same story, presenting a "Rashamon"-like series of events.

I agree 100% with Phil's observation above. None of the great financiers or inventors of modern times were nice people, especially Thomas Edison. (His dealings with Nikolas Tesla were pretty dastardly.)

[johnpaul215]

I am glad Jobs did this book though. I am sure there will be other books in the future, but how many people of his caliber don't have the situation where they know it's time to do a project like that. True inventors, or innovators, are probably working on their death bed and can't be bothered to slow down to have a biography like this written.

We hear stories that Job was working on stuff the last few days he was alive, and I absolutely believe that (my father was the same way), but he also had a strong desire to have this book done with his cooperation. Kind of fascinating circumstances if you take the emotion out of it.

[Marc Wielage]

Isaacson has hinted that he's considering coming out with an updated edition that will add further notes and transcripts omitted from the original edition. He also admitted that he cut out about 50 pages that he felt shined a bad light on Jobs' family (at least, his treatment of them), and he did it out of consideration of their feelings.

The most remarkable thing about the Steve Jobs book is that it was written with the cooperation of the subject, during his lifetime. All the scandalous books on Carnegie, Joseph Kennedy, the Rothschilds, the Romanovs, the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts and so on were generally done long after they had died.

[Henchman]

Tomas Edison was not a nice person at all.

He took credit for inventions he never invented himself.

Just your average douchebag really.

[Tom Visser]

I just had the memory of loading Telengard from a C64 with a tapedrive pop into my head after reading this thread. It worked 1 out of 3 times or so. I loved my ][c. After year(s) of playing with Apples second hand via my friend's ][+ it was a joyous day when our family got a ][c of our very own, and it came in such a tiny case for its time.

look at those graphics man! here is the first game that ever let me go into space! I remember that moment even now.

[Marc Wielage]

Oh, I remember the Commodore 64's, too, though I never owned one. I did own an Apple II and spent a small fortune on it in the early 1980s. Back then, a single-sided floppy disk drive (180K!) was $350! We were excited to learn we could punch an extra notch in the disk so we could turn it over and use the other side! The Apple II shipped with upper case text only; if you wanted lower case, you had to buy a $100 third-party adapter to enable this mode. It was a very quirky machine, to say the least. I was very happy to switch over to the IBM-PC and MS-DOS once that became viable.

[OmahaAudio]

I ruined an entire clean room of chips at the Commodore factory in Pennsylvania once. I was there to take pictures for Newsweek and got suited up head to toe, including booties, head gear and face cover. After 15 minutes of taking pictures one of the guys in the room looked at my (exposed, dusty, etc.) camera bag filled with extra lenses and film and just said, "Oh Fuck!"...

The pictures turned out good though.

[Christopher Mills]

My father was an MIT grad, from Seattle, and a couple years older than Gates and Allen and Balmer... he knew all three of them way back when (I think he was a senior in high school when and where Gates was a freshman)..

he developed a lot of underlying infrastructure for microcomputers in the early to mid 1970s.. among other things..

There's a lot of overlap in the Apple 1 and some of the home made things we had at home from 1974-77.. and around 1981 I bought a Commodore CBM for myself... I coveted an Apple, (Model ii, just like we had at my high school... though the dial up to Georgia Tech's mainframe was actually more useful)

The CBM had a built in cassette tape deck for memory.. and responded to ASCII code fairly well.. mostly ran fortran and basic on it ...

Dad helped work on development of C+.... Designed microcomputer controlled assembly line equipment, worked on Landsat's projects to extract images from side looking Radar... travelled the world doing QC on ground stations for the LAndsat program...

Consultant to Scientific Atlanta, DALSA, lots of govt radar/computer interfaced fire control... avionics systems... medical telemetry.. and never got rich..he was much less an entrepreneur than a problem solver.. usually would tackle an entire hardware/machine language/firmware and software package on his projects..

He was a very artistic photographer.... and I got a ringside seat to the late 20th Century Computer and IT explosion from being raised by him... he passed about 2 years ago.. and I miss being able to ask him how things worked, and what he thought of our major figures in computing..

I have a vivid memory of an early 1970s newsletter being flung across the room as he declaimed: You won't believe what the asshole Gates said this month!"

Another of early 1970s helping to punch paper tape for a problem he wanted to run at MIT on their mainframe...

Another of our getting a used teletype terminal around 1974

And a ridiculously expensive Texas instruments calculator he bought to use on his PHD... like $900 and it only had 8 place character LED display.. and would only add subtract multiply and divide..

He was mostly a Unix/Linux guy for his home computers in his later years.. though he bought 1st gen Imac for my mom...