16 April 2007 | IT Week

Happy birthday, Apple II

Thirty years ago, product design and graphics helped the Apple II outsell Commodore’s PET, and paved the way for today's obsession with computer games

They say that the surest sign that you’ve grown up since the 1960s and 1970s is that much-loved recordings from that era made by the Grateful Dead now sound really bad. Myself, I always thought Jerry Garcia’s singing a bit thin. But this month marks an anniversary that, just for once, nobody need say sorry about.

April 1977 saw the launch, at the first West Coast Computer Faire in San Francisco, of Commodore’s Personal Electronic Transactor 2001. The PET had nearly everything: though its trapezoidal monitor looks hilarious today, it used a pretty flexible, if restricted, set of characters based on a derivative of ASCII. It sold so fast by mail order, its price rose quickly from $500 to $600.

At the same show, however, another all-in one computer was also launched: the $1300 Apple II. While the PET was boxy, white, and looked like it might tot up your purchases at the supermarket check-out, the Apple II was a sleek wedge finished in beige, and looked like it might spring out of a smart graphic designer’s Italian-modern studio. It had a rectangular monitor, bit-mapped colour graphics, and sound.  The PET stayed in production just five years, and never worked with later machines like the portable (more like luggable) Commodore 64 that now gathers dust in my loft. But the Apple II was manufactured for nearly 17 years, and, as it grew more sophisticated, was a byword for backward compatibility.

The triumph of the Apple II over the PET can be explained, in part, by the growing public sensibility to graphics during the era of Ronald Reagan. I remember a top US military man coming on British television to defend the Strategic Defence Initiative of those years with the doctrine that, though his country had yet to make a space-based system of lasers actually work, its visualisations of same were superior to those of Soviets: the US had established, he said in all seriousness, a ‘graphics gap’.

Apple’s genius was to get people to trade up from the PET into this aestheticisation of everyday life, both in its hardware design and – above all – in its displays. In this month’s newsletter for Ideas21, a club of UK inventors active in intellectual property matters, patents expert Steve Van Dulken from the British Library nicely brings out how elegantly Steve Wozniak’s US patent 4,136,359 dealt with technical issues surrounding the display of colours.

But there was something else, too.

Like the PET, the first Apple IIs used audio cassettes for data storage, ran BASIC, and – initially, at least – had just 4kB of memory. Both machines used a 1Mhz microprocessor from the same company – MOS Technology, Inc, of Norristown, Pennsylvania. Both shared great success, too, in the world of education.

Yet though you could build games akin to Space Invaders on the PET, you could build still funkier games on the Apple II. Apple didn’t just pioneer aesthetics in IT, but kinaesthetics: moving, doing and touching things.

Today, 30 years after the Apple II, its legacy is still with us. The latest news is that China’s internet censor has begun to crack down on the millions of role-playing youths whom he believes to be ‘addicted’ to games.

As Jerry Garcia said, what a long, strange trip it’s been.