GIVEN APPLE’S GARGANTUAN profits and global reach, it’s easy to forget that 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 was already “thinking different”, its debut hardware being the first single–board computer sold fully assembled and utilizing 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 colorful 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 color, BASIC commands, paddle controllers, and sound. Building primarily for himself, he was also kickstarting a computing revolution — the Apple II soon captured the imagination of wannabe home programmers, and the machine’s initial success bankrolled Apple for years.
Ultima creator Richard Garriott had 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!”
FUTURISTIC WORLD–BUILDING
Many programmers found much of the pleasure in using an Apple II came 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 creator Robert Woodhead. “Programmers knew everything about the platform, and part of the fun was figuring out ways to get the machine to do stuff.”
The hardware continued to evolve, but internal politics eventually derailed, Jordan Mechner unveiled on what was considered to be a dying platform. His reasoning? “The Apple II was a platform I understood — it was a lovely machine.”
