Apple II Obit

[David Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

Please DO NOT reproduce outside this list.


Dave


  DATE 12/20/93
  HEADLINE APPRECIATION; ONE GOOD APPLE; THE MARVEL AT THE CORE
                       OF THE PC BOOM
  BYLINE John Schwartz
  CREDIT Washington Post Staff Writer
  ART PHOTO; PHOTO,,ap
START-OF-TEXT
     The machine that changed the world, the magic box that first
wrestled computing away from the corporate giants and gave it to anybody
with $1,400, the technology that convinced us that the future was not
going to fold, spindle or mutilate us, died last month.
   Like many deaths, it came quietly, and in the dark. Apple didn't even
put out a press release when it dropped the Apple IIe, the last of the
Apple II product line. But this was no mere product cancellation. It
was the death of a hero of the revolution -- the personal computer
revolution.
   The Apple was a generational statement -- the brainchild of two
scruffy Silicon Valley kids named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, cobbled
together in Jobs's garage. These were the baby boomers taking on the
Establishment, a rainbow-colored logo against three big blue capital
letters: IBM. The computer, and the image, made Silicon Valley the new
home town of the American dream.
    The Apple II was a rock-and-roll message to the Pat Boone mainframe
world. Many rival brands in the heady early days of personal computing
died young, like digital Keith Moons and Janis Joplins. The Apple II,
however, was more like Frank Zappa, a classic survivor chugging
along, dying finally of a disease of the old. Apple had sold more than
5 1/2 million of the machines in its remarkable 16-year run.
    By the time Apple pulled the plug, technology had long passed the
II by. Almost a decade ago, the company moved on to the more powerful and
easy-to-use Macintosh line of computers. Just 2 percent of the computers
sold by Apple this year were IIe's, and almost all of those went to
schools, the most loyal purchasers of the machines.
     Despite its advanced age, the news still hit the many fans of the
machine hard. They remembered with great fondness the upstart machine
that started it all.
     Florence Haseltine, head of the Center for Population Research at
the National Institutes of Health, lovingly remembered her first 1980
Apple as saving her career: A self-confessed terrible speller, she
needed the computer so that she could correct her grant proposals
without retyping whole pages. "I'll always love that Apple II," she
said. "It gave me freedom -- and when anything does that you know it's
just the beginning of a whole explosion."
     This, then, was much more than just microchips and molded plastic.
The Apple II was the Model T of computing. Ford's mass-produced
invention took the power of transportation away from the rich railroads
and put individual drivers behind the wheel. Apple users, too, were
delivered from the priesthood that maintained the mainframes. And the
Apple was available in any color as long as it was beige.
     The machine itself was a shock: Its sculpted plastic case looked
less like a clunky computer terminal than some mysterious-but-elegant
kitchen appliance, perhaps from Germany.
     "It was the first computer that a lot of people fell in love with,"
said Richard Shaffer, publisher of the New York-based Computer Letter.
It was born of love, not market research, Jobs would later tell
audiences: "When we first started Apple, we really built the first
computer because we wanted one."
      Like the Model T, that early Apple was primitive by today's
turbocharged standards. Its disks could store a few college papers,
nothing more. Today's machines offer thousands of times the performance,
yet that early Apple was capable of running early versions of the same
programs found on machines in 1993: word processors, spreadsheets and
databases.
     The genius at Apple wasn't just technical, though. It was an
unprecedented marketing triumph: Apple got people to think that
computers were cool. No longer the domain of the dorks, computers became
objects of desire for a generation. Savvy publicist Regis McKenna saw
how Jobs and Wozniak would punch the buttons of a generation on the
make. One set of Apple ads made yuppie execs yearn for the power that
could be tapped through the keyboard; another made parents fret that
their precious children would fall behind the pack if they couldn't do
their homework on an Apple II. The company cannily sold the machines
directly to schools, building a loyal market of educators and parents.
By 1981, when IBM weighed into the market with its initial PC, more than
300,000 Apples had been sold, and public awareness of the brand was up
to 80 percent. By January 1982, the number sold had jumped to 650,000.
The sleek lines of the upgraded IIc were celebrated in the design
showcases of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
     Was it any wonder, then, that in 1982 Time magazine declared its
Man of the Year to be the computer?
   The Apple II legitimized personal computers in education and in
business, said Oliver Strimpel, executive director of the Computer
Museum in Boston -- which displays one of the machines prominently
among other pioneering boxes. "To some extent it was the genius of the
design, but to some extent it was luck -- the right machine at the right
place at the right time."
     To Shaffer, the appeal of the Apple II lay in its relative
simplicity: "You could open the top and look at the parts and see what
everything did." The II made sense partly because Wozniak designed the
machine's main circuit board on his own, with equal measures of
elegance and artistry. Today's machines are put together by armies of
engineers, and combine so many functions on a chip that you can't
distinguish the parts under the hood. "This is the last machine I think I
completely understood," Shaffer said.
    The II was good for Apple long after Apple stopped being good to it.
Jobs denigrated the II as he lurchingly tried to move the company to
new machines. As Apple struggled with the introductions of one failed
product after another in the early 1980s -- the Apple III, the
Buick-sized Lisa, and the initially disappointing Macintosh -- the
trusty Apple II kept the company afloat.
     Goodbye, Apple II. When our time comes, let's hope we will depart
with similar grace, or will have accomplished a fraction as much.


    @CAPTION: Production of the Apple IIe was unceremoniously stopped
last month.


    @CAPTION: Introduction of the Apple IIc in 1984, during the
computer's heyday: from left, Apple executives Steve Jobs, John
Sculley and Steve Wozniak.