Apple II Bits

The current state of the economy presents unique challenges, but also unique opportunities. As larger companies fold under the weight of their own bulk, new enterprises are small, nimble, and innovate enough to fill new niches and needs. What what better innovator and businessman to inspire budding entrepreneurs than Apple’s greatest Steve?

Jobs? No — Wozniak.

So says Trevor Owen, founder of the Lean Startup Machine. In his essay, "Why Founders Should Emulate Wozniak, Not Jobs" he makes several arguments:

• • Steve Jobs played a minor role in Apple’s early success with the Apple II
• • When Steve Jobs created the breakthrough Macintosh he had immense resources & clout
• • The Macintosh underperformed against the Apple II, essentially was a flop
• • NeXT Computers released a series of product flops
• • Jobs’s later success (as a CEO) is due to his failures

It’s not unusual to question Steve Jobs’ role in the design and success of Apple’s products, but this is the first time I’ve seen his business acumen also fall under scrutiny. Unsurprisingly, not everyone is convinced. Over at Forbes, E.D. Kain has some objections:

… if Wozniak had been in charge, it’s doubtful Apple would have been much of a company at all. Wozniak wanted to open the whole project up to all-comers. His enormous skill was in making things tick – not in building a company from the ground up…

… it really helps to couple visionary businessmen with brilliant engineers. So what if Jobs got ahead of himself in the early years? Start-ups today shouldn’t just look at the early careers of tech businessmen; they should pay attention to the entire package.

What do you think? Could Woz have built the Apple empire without Jobs? Could Jobs, without Woz?

When Steve Jobs passed away, a flurry of media was published about his life and times, his wisdom and accomplishments, his successes and failures. It’s easy for any one piece to have gotten lost in that maelstrom — but one in particular deserves to not be missed.

In 1995, Steve Jobs sat down with Daniel Morrow of the Computerworld Honors program for a 75-minute interview, conducted in conjunction with the Smithsonian. The transcript of that interview was published the day after Jobs’ passing — but something far more fascinating has since been unearthed.

As of this morning, the original video of that interview is now available. It’s a fascinating and candid look at the man who was, at that point in his career (40 years old), still at NeXT and two years away from his return to Apple. Across the 16 chapters into which the interview has been divided, he talks about his early encounters with authority, the parallel between computing and artistry, and his hopes for NeXT, Pixar, and even Apple.

Steve Jobs in 1995. Screen capture from a Computerworld video.

The aforementioned transcript makes it easy to identify the passages where the Apple II is discussed. I could find only a handful of such moments, the first being in chapter six, where Jobs identifies the quality of his computers (both the hits and the flops) in which he held the most pride:

The things I’m most proud about at Apple is where the technical and the humanistic came together … The Macintosh basically revolutionized publishing and printing. The typographic artistry coupled with the technical understanding and excellence to implement that electronically — those two things came together and empowered people to use the computer without having to understand arcane computer commands. It was the combination of those two things that I’m the most proud of. It happened on the Apple II and it happened on the Lisa … and then it happened again big time on the Macintosh.

The next occurrence is in chapter nine, when he draws a comparison with Apple’s competitors:

With IBM taking over the world with the PC, with DOS out there; it was far worse than the Apple II. They tried to copy the Apple II and they had done a pretty bad job.

One of the things that built Apple II’s was schools buying Apple II’s; but even so there was about only 10% of the schools that even had one computer in them in 1979 I think it was.

AFAIK, this Computerworld gallery marks the first time this interview has been made publicly available. I encourage anyone interested in a candid, unscripted, and in-depth conversation with Steve Jobs to take a look.

[Full disclosure: I was responsible for the layout of this gallery and participated in the editing, production, and promotion of it.]

Between last week’s video and a special episode of the Open Apple podcast, I’ve said all I can about Steve Jobs’ passing. But many others have shared more eloquent thoughts than mine, and I’d like to share some of my favorites here.

The Open Apple shownotes link to several celebrities’ social media tributes. Among those not mentioned are Richard Garriott, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg.

On the visual front, there have been many artistic interpretations, including from the New Yorker and XKCD.

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BoingBoing.net temporarily reskinned their site with a familiar look.

Several celebrities have offered video tributes, including liberal show hosts Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart.

Read the rest of this entry »

I update this blog every Thursday. There’s no rule against me updating it more than once.

Steve Jobs has passed away. My co-workers and I got together this morning to reflect on what this means for us and our world.

Great work by Keith Shaw in producing and editing this video. I know of at least one more video and one podcast that will feature Apple II users. I’ll post them here on Monday.

Steve Jobs passed away yesterday at the age of 56.

Image courtesy Apple.

Here’s a video from Computerworld with more details.

An excellent profile of the man and his insights and wisdom is available in this 2005 commencement speech from Stanford.

I’m not really sure what more to say. Apple II users Dan Bricklin, Bill Budge, Chris Espinosa, John Romero, and Wil Wheaton do.

Around this time last year, the Cult of Mac interviewed John Sculley, the businessman who Steve Jobs recruited away from selling “sugar water” (Pepsi) to run Apple. The company’s board of directors would eventually side with Sculley and oust Jobs, initiating the next chapter in the soap opera that is Apple’s turbulent past.

It must be something about autumn that brings Sculley to the minds of reporters, as Janet Guyon at the Wall Street Journal recently grilled the former CEO. You’d think that his and Apple’s story, being the stuff of legend, would be well-known by now, but even in these latest reports, interesting tidbits surface.

The first was that Sculley had a history with Apple predating his professional involvement: he made his former employer one of Apple’s biggest clients.

I had seen one of the first spreadsheets developed for an Apple II computer after being invited to Harvard Business School to talk to a class about the Pepsi Challenge. When that product was commercialized in the early 1980s, I bought every Pepsi bottler an Apple computer and told them they could have it for free as long as they sent us their sales reports on a floppy disk every week. This greatly condensed the time it took us to get sales reports.

Despite that intersection, Sculley’s experience at Pepsi didn’t make him a technical wizard. But it did help him develop the skills which Apple assessed themselves as lacking. Jobs’ own Reality Distortion Field could bring in supporters for any new product — but what about for an old one?

I found the challenges of Apple particularly intriguing. What they needed was someone who could keep the Apple II computer, which was a cash machine, commercially alive for three more years because Steve Jobs was still a year away from introducing the Macintosh. In 1983, Apple was outsold by each Atari and Commodore by 2-to-1 … Keeping the Apple II alive didn’t require someone to know much about computer technology, it required someone who knew something about how to market and sell a near end-of-life product.

Just like how Woz and Jobs complemented each other with technical and entrepreneurial know-how, so too did Sculley and Jobs learn from each other:

[Steve Jobs and I] were learning from each other. He was learning from me about "experience marketing," how to sell consumer products, how you run a much bigger company and how you recruit people from outside your industry.

Still, they had their differences, including one that could’ve significantly impacted the development of the Apple II. Some Apple II Bits readers have pinned the blame for the Apple II’s demise on Jobs. Whether or not that’s true, by process of elimination, the odds begin to favor that interpretation. Says Sculley:

We were still very dependent on the profits of Apple II. I felt we had to push profits of Apple II and Steve wanted to lower the price of the Mac to get sales up.

Whatever their past partnerships or antagonisms, the triangle between Sculley, Jobs, and Apple was unlike any that Sculley had ever encountered — in a way that does not bode well for the future of the company:

Apple is Steve Jobs and Steve Jobs is Apple. That was entirely different from anything I had experienced coming out of Pepsi.

Pepsi never had so public a leader or so identified a creator as Steve Jobs. Given the recent resignation of Sculley’s former partner, what does this mean for the company the two have left behind?