Apple II Bits

Last week, I posted a blog to Computerworld that may be of interest to Apple II users: "Steve Wozniak on Steve Jobs’ resignation". It started when Greg Nelson sent the KansasFest email list a link to the CNN’s video interview with Woz. I thought to simply repurpose it for an Apple II Bits blog post — but the more I looked into it, the more I realized there was more to say here than found in a single embedded video.

The final blog post would’ve fit right at home on this site, but I decided to post it instead to my professional blog at my day job, Computerworld for several reasons:

1. It was already Friday, and I post here on Mondays and Thursdays only. I wanted to get the post published in time for the weekend.
2. Due to my own inconsistent publication schedule and a lack of focus in topics, I’ve not attracted an audience at Computerworld, which makes it rarely worth my time to blog there. But it’s still in my best interests to demonstrate that I occasionally have something relevant to contribute to discussions in the IT sector.
3. Even without a regular audience, the readership of Computerworld.com is, unsurprisingly, significantly larger than Apple II Bits. The details are company confidential, but I can say that putting the blog post there has earned it about a hundred-and-fifty times more pageviews than it would’ve gotten here.
4. My Computerworld co-workers have little interest in my Apple II hobby, but they’ll gladly promote any Computerworld content they find intriguing. As a result, my post got much more social media love on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus than it would’ve otherwise, contributing to the above pageviews. Heck, even Steve Wozniak had something to say about it on Facebook.
5. I was able to include a link back to apl2bits.net. Since it was a link to relevant and timely information, it wasn’t a conflict of interest or a blatant plug so much as a good opportunity to bring some new readers here.

I can’t republish that blog post here, but I wanted to do more than just link to it and say "Today’s Apple II Bits post is over here." I hope I’ve demonstrated some value in choosing to write for The Man instead of myself in this instance.

Last month, Steve Jobs was declared in a survey of 900 engineering undergraduates in the UK as one of the third greatest engineers of all time, taking credit for the Apple II and iPod.

Not to undermine the unbelievable heights to which Mr. Jobs has brought his fruit company, but is his engineering prowess really the quality that brought about those successes?

Steve Jobs is a salesman, for sure. But has been examined and debated on this blog, his role in the creation of many popular Apple products is questionable. Steve Wozniak (who was not on the list) invented the Apple II, and many other concepts that Apple Inc. has since popularized were first proven by other companies. It was Jobs who came up with the packaging and pitch that made these concepts into products, but he’s no hands-on inventor.

But let’s step back and see if this complaint is warranted. By definition, an engineer is "a person trained and skilled in the design, construction, and use of engines or machines" I think it’s fair to say that Jobs is familiar and perhaps responsible with both the design and use of Apple’s runaway hits. As for the construction, could he disassemble an iPhone, identify its parts, and then put it back together? I sincerely doubt it. Is two out of three qualities enough to label Jobs an engineer? Did the UK students in the survey even care, or was this more a popularity contest?

I cannot find an official publication of the survey or its methodology, but the validity of the students’ results must surely be questioned, regardless of Jobs’ presence or absence. The Apple co-founder ranked higher on the list than Nikola Tesla, Bill Gates, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Thomas Edison. Those pioneers were working with truly revolutionary ideas; Steve Jobs, they were not.

(Hat tips to Ben Camm-Jones and John Brownlee)

Several historical depictions of Steve Jobs have recently been unearthed, giving us a visual glimpse of the man who came to helm one of Silicon Valley’s most influential companies.

Though Jobs may be known as the suave and articulate emcee of many Apple events, he was not born to be in front of the camera. Moments before this early television appearance, he’s clearly not ready to become a media star.

Later, he became more comfortable being recorded on film, as demonstrated by this excerpt from the 1998 documentary Silicon Valley: A 100 Year Renaissance, which is still available from the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association. After hearing Woz speak on this illicit subject so many times, it’s a pleasant change to hear his more severe counterpart acknowledge the company’s origins.

Finally, there’s this AP photo that shows a rather hirsute Jobs sporting a tie and an extra-large Apple II.

Steve Jobs with the Apple II

With Jobs currently on medical leave, it’s interesting to see how far he’s come — and how far we hope he still has to go.

(Hat tips to Richi Jennings, Your Daily Apple News, Adam Rosen, and David Ewalt)

A few months ago, Playboy published an online version of an interview they conducted with Steve Jobs in 1985. With Jobs currently on medical leave, it seems a timely opportunity to review his not-so-humble origins as Apple’s first CEO. Some of my favorite excerpts discuss his relationship with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak:

Playboy: What happened to the partnership [with Steve Wozniak] as time went on?

Jobs: The main thing was that Woz was never really interested in Apple as a company. He was just sort of interested in getting the Apple II on a printed circuit board so he could have one and be able to carry it to his computer club without having the wires break on the way. He had done that and decided to go on to other things. He had other ideas.

Playboy: Such as the US Festival rock concert and computer show, where he lost something like $10,000,000.

Jobs: Well, I thought the US Festival was a little crazy, but Woz believed very strongly in it.

Playboy: How is it between the two of you now?

Jobs: When you work with somebody that close and you go through experiences like the ones we went through, there’s a bond in life. Whatever hassles you have, there is a bond. And even though he may not be your best friend as time goes on, there’s still something that transcends even friendship, in a way. Woz is living his own life now. He hasn’t been around Apple for about five years. But what he did will go down in history. He’s going around speaking to a lot of computer events now. He likes that.

Following suit, Newsweek has also published their own 1985 interview with Jobs. In this article are two themes in particular that I have trouble reconciling with the man who leads Apple today. The first is his prediction of his role in the world and in the industry:

I personally, man, I want to build things. I’m 30. I’m not ready to be an industry pundit. I got three offers to be a professor during this summer, and I told all of the universities that I thought I would be an awful professor. What I’m best at doing is finding a group of talented people and making things with them … I’m probably not the best person in the world to shepherd it to a five- or ten-billion-dollar company, which I think is probably its destiny …I don’t think that my role in life is to run big organizations and do incremental improvements.

Despite that disclaimer, Jobs has made it practically a corporate philosophy to make Apple customers into beta-testers, with first-generation hardware that is rarely up to snuff. Given the "incremental improvements" made each year to the iPhone and soon the iPad — both products being not revolutionary so much as evolutionary — it seems Jobs had a change of heart.

Second, there’s the dejection Jobs expressed at his diminished role in his final days at Apple:

I was, you know, asked to move out of my office. They leased a little building across the street from most of the other Apple buildings. I, we nicknamed it Siberia … So I moved across the street, and I made sure that all of the executive staff had my home phone number. I knew that John had it, and I called the rest of them personally and made sure they had it and told them that I wanted to be useful in any way i could, and to please call me if I could help on anything. And they all had a, you know, a cordial phrase, but none of them ever called back. And so I used to go into work, I’d get there and I would have one or two phone calls to perform, a little bit of mail to look at. But … this was in June, July … most of the corporate-management reports stopped flowing by my desk. A few people might see my car in the parking lot and come over and commiserate. And I would get depressed and go home in three or four hours, really depressed. I did that a few times and I decided that was mentally unhealthy. So I just stopped going in. You know, there was nobody really there to miss me.

For a man who was and is often characterized as blustery, overbearing, and obnoxious, such humble disconsolation seems unlike the legend that is Steve Jobs.

Finally, Apple II blogger Steven Black injects some further humanity into the discussion:

… as a guy in the industry who cut my teeth on, and still have massive affection for, Apple ][s, and who from my early teens took a deep interest in all of the stories surrounding the germination of the personal computer industry in the 70s & early 80s, and who lived through the times that saw its initial genesis, I can’t help putting all of the intellectualism aside and just hoping that this doesn’t signal the end of Steve’s career, or indeed an inexorably downward spiral in his health.

Steve’s an icon and a giant of the industry. This sounds blindingly obvious to say. But for many of us around my age, he is in a very real sense the father of our careers, and the founder of a not insignificant proportion of our way of life. I just hope all of the non-geek Apple customers out there can appreciate what the man has achieved in his lifetime. If & when Steve is lost to us, whenever that may occur, it will really feel like the captain has left the bridge.

(Hat tips to Taimur Asad, Leander Kahney, and Arnold Kim)

Steve Jobs, a survivor of pancreatic cancer who in 2009 underwent a successful liver transplant, is currently on medical leave from Apple Inc.

Many would argue that Apple’s health is directly tied to that of its co-founder and CEO, as evidenced by the company’s floundering without his leadership from 1985 to 1997. To commemorate that perspective, Computerworld recently published a gallery that highlights 12 noteworthy innovations rolled out under Jobs’ leadership at Apple. Though Jobs’ role in the design of many Apple products is questionable, we circumvented the issue by simply saying that these were products launched while he was CEO — a rather inarguable fact.

I was assigned this story by the publication’s chief news editor, Ken Mingis, who selected the contents of the gallery. It was originally proposed to cover only those products launched since Jobs’ return to the company in 1997 and not any of the releases from his first tour of duty, from the company’s founding in 1977 to when he was ousted in 1985. I had no issue with that — an article has to be focused, lest it try to cover all of existence — but we were challenged to explain to the readers how or why we could omit such milestones as the Apple II and the Macintosh. We compromised by adding those two products to the original ten, resulting in this final, chronological lineup:

Had it been up to me, I would’ve omitted different models of the same product, such as the iMac G4 and the iPhone 4, and maybe included more failures, like the Apple III and Apple Lisa (the latter especially being notable for its pre-Mac GUI). But even without those changes, it’s a pretty thorough gallery. Still, I still expected Apple fans to be more contentious in the selection, yet the article has thus far produced little discussion and feedback. What about you — what products would you have added or removed?

I was encouraged to be “witty” with each product’s headline, so I relied heavily on this list of Apple advertising slogans. Although it might’ve been clearer to use the product name and release date instead, editor Mike Barton, who also selected the photos, instead bolded the product name in its brief description, allowing us to be both witty and clear.

I hope everyone enjoys this brief review of Apple’s history. Whether or not you like Jobs, he and his company deserve to be in good health.

(Hat tip to Arnold Kim)

When I was a teacher, I asked my 11th-grade students who founded what was then called Apple Computer Inc. “Steve Jobs!” they confidently replied. I prompted them, “Yes, he was one of two Steves. Who was the other?” I died a little bit inside at their blank stares, then showed them G4’s special on the Apple II to rectify the matter. (They were, surprisingly, impressed by Wozniak’s wizardry as demonstrated in that show.)

Sadly, it is not just the next generation whose reality has been distorted. Whatever Apple’s origin, Steve Jobs has attained a popular culture ranking greater than his counterpart and will go down in history as having had more impact on the company. But does that belief reflect historical truth?

Doubtless much of Apple’s success has been attributed to Jobs. Last month’s Juiced.GS cited Carmine Gallo’s book The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs, which outlines seven principles Jobs has used to attain success:

1. Do what you love. Think differently about your career.
2. Put a dent in the universe. Think differently about your vision.
3. Kickstart your brain. Think differently about how you think.
4. Sell dreams, not products. Think differently about your customers.
5. Say no to 1,000 things. Think differently about design.
6. Create insanely great expectations. Think differently about your brand experience.
7. Master the message. Think differently about your story.

Gallo’s book is not the first to define these concepts. The Cult of Mac recently interviewed John Sculley, CEO of Apple 1983–1993. In that lengthy transcript (8,321 words!), the former sugar water salesman affirms several of the above points, including #4:

[Jobs] always looked at things from the perspective of what was the user’s experience going to be? But unlike a lot of people in product marketing in those days, who would go out and do consumer testing, asking people, “What did they want?” Steve didn’t believe in that.

He said, “How can I possibly ask somebody what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphic based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.” He believed that showing someone a calculator, for example, would not give them any indication as to where the computer was going to go because it was just too big a leap.

And #5:

What makes Steve’s methodology different from everyone else’s is that he always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do — but the things that you decide not to do. He’s a minimalist.

But are Jobs’ philosophies truly what drove Apple to success? In Susan Lammers’ 1986 book Programmers at Work, an interview with the late Jef Raskin, a former Apple employeee, offers a different perspective:

If Jobs would only take credit for what he really did for the industry, that would be more than enough. But he also insists on taking credit away from everyone else for what they did … He has not designed a single product. Woz designed the Apple II. Ken Rothmuller and others designed Lisa. My team and I designed the Macintosh. Wendell Sanders designed the Apple III. What did Jobs design? Nothing.

Andy Hertzfeld offers an opposing view of who can be considered the father of the Macintosh, but that computer is just one example. Mike Maginnis brings the above product line up to speed by amending it with the iPod, the design of which should be credited to companies PortalPlayer and Pixo. So what has Steve Jobs actually designed Apple Inc.? “Probably not as much as Jobs would like you to think,” Maginnis suggests.

But as far as our favorite computer is concerned, there is one story that most sources agree on — one quoted in The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs and retold in Sculley’s recent interview:

If you go back to the Apple II, Steve was the first one to put a computer into a plastic case, which was called ABS plastic in those days, and actually put the keyboard into the computer. It seems like a pretty simple idea today, looking back at it, but even at the time when he created the first Apple II, in 1977 — that was the beginning of the Jobs methodology. And it showed up in the Macintosh and showed up with his NeXT computer. And it showed up with the future Macs, the iMacs, the iPods and the iPhones.

Jobs may not be the design genius he’s made out to be, but his marketing genius is significant. Last month made 25 years since he was ousted from Apple; compare the decade without Jobs to the years since his return in 1996, and you’ll find the company has been revitalized and made significantly more profitable.

It was during Jobs’ absence from the company he founded that the last Apple II, the template for all that was to come from Apple Inc., rolled off the production line. He may have been responsible for the commercial success of the computer, but he cannot be directly blamed for its death. In the end, what else matters?