Given Apple’s gargantuan profits and global reach, it’s easy to forget it started life as two people in a garage. Much of the tech wizardry back then was down to Steve ‘Woz’ Wozniak, while Steve Jobs was tactician and visionary.
The first breakthrough occurred in 1976, with what would become the Apple Computer 1 (later referred to as Apple I). The machine was offered to HP, which declined, and so Apple Computer was born. Apple already was ‘thinking different’, its debut hardware being the first single-board computer, sold fully assembled and utilising a television for output.
But Woz was thinking bigger. Inspired by his work on arcade games, he wanted to create a computer that was faster, more colourful and noisier than anything else. Ultimately, as he recalled in a 1986 interview with Call-A.P.P.L.E.: “A lot of the features of the Apple II went in because I had designed Breakout for Atari. I had designed it in hardware. I wanted to write it in software now.”
With Apple rarely being equated with gaming, it’s surprising to discover its foundations rest on one man’s desire to ‘program a BASIC version of Breakout’. But soon Woz was tinkering with his computer, adding colour, BASIC commands, paddle controllers, and sound. Building primarily for himself, he was also kick-starting a computing revolution – the Apple II captured the imagination of wannabe home programmers, and the machine’s initial success bankrolled Apple for years.
Prior to founding EA, Trip Hawkins was director of strategy and marketing at Apple Computer, and recalls the Apple II fondly. “It was so far ahead of its time that photographers setting up images of the future would include an Apple II in the shot because it looked like it came from the future, not the present!”
Ultima creator Richard Garriott was similarly impressed. He’d previously battled with teletype terminals, but then found himself sat before an Apple II.
“I was in wonder. Suddenly, instead of invoking a command and waiting minutes for it to process and print the results, I had a computer that in real time could visually display to me any fantasy worlds and other fantastical ideas I could think about to program. I immediately saw it as the key to the future – or my own future, at least!”
There were, naturally, drawbacks. Woz’s products had their quirks, and the Apple II needed someone to make the most of it. “You had to be a great assembly language programmer and that kind of person is often not a great designer or artist,” mulls Trip. “Brilliant talents like Bill Budge could envision bigger ideas and were able to execute in an interdisciplinary fashion, as he did with the revolutionary Pinball Construction Set.”
However, many programmers found much of the pleasure in using an Apple II arrived from working out how to coax tiny gaming universes out the machine. “It was the first computer with decent graphics yet also simple enough that you could hold a model of the entire machine in your head,” explains Wizardry
