352 pages
English language
Published May 11, 2023 by University of Chicago Press.
Publisher’s description: An engrossing origin story for the personal computer—showing how the Apple II’s software helped a machine transcend from hobbyists’ plaything to essential home appliance.
Skip the iPhone, the iPod, and the Macintosh. If you want to understand how Apple Inc. became an industry behemoth, look no further than the 1977 Apple II. Designed by the brilliant engineer Steve Wozniak and hustled into the marketplace by his Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, the Apple II became one of the most prominent personal computers of this dawning industry.
The Apple II was a versatile piece of hardware, but its most compelling story isn’t found in the feat of its engineering, the personalities of Apple’s founders, or the way it set the stage for the company’s multibillion-dollar future. Instead, historian Laine Nooney shows, what made the Apple II iconic was its software. In software, we discover the material reasons people bought computers. …
Publisher’s description: An engrossing origin story for the personal computer—showing how the Apple II’s software helped a machine transcend from hobbyists’ plaything to essential home appliance.
Skip the iPhone, the iPod, and the Macintosh. If you want to understand how Apple Inc. became an industry behemoth, look no further than the 1977 Apple II. Designed by the brilliant engineer Steve Wozniak and hustled into the marketplace by his Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, the Apple II became one of the most prominent personal computers of this dawning industry.
The Apple II was a versatile piece of hardware, but its most compelling story isn’t found in the feat of its engineering, the personalities of Apple’s founders, or the way it set the stage for the company’s multibillion-dollar future. Instead, historian Laine Nooney shows, what made the Apple II iconic was its software. In software, we discover the material reasons people bought computers. Not to hack, but to play. Not to code, but to calculate. Not to program, but to print. The story of personal computing in the United States is not about the evolution of hackers—it’s about the rise of everyday users.
Recounting a constellation of software creation stories, Nooney offers a new understanding of how the hobbyists’ microcomputers of the 1970s became the personal computer we know today. From iconic software products like VisiCalc and The Print Shop to historic games like Mystery House and Snooper Troops to long-forgotten disk-cracking utilities, The Apple II Age offers an unprecedented look at the people, the industry, and the money that built the microcomputing milieu—and why so much of it converged around the pioneering Apple II.
The author does not warm up an ideological debate what the personal computer could have been. Instead she tells the story of the massification of pcs as a business story as the USA tried to revigorate its economy after the two oil crises. See the excerpts. As a European it is to be said: It's a solely American book.
Frequently insightful and cutting, the book provokes thorough reconsideration of how we may understand computers and software then and today.
Nooney writes about the creation of consumer computing in the late 70's and early 80's in the US by going into the technical, economic, social, and ideological forces acting on, as well as the well- and lesser-known figures in, the establishment of consumer computer markets. Effort is made to avoid repeating the common stories, to not fall into a hagiographic focus on Jobs, Woz, Gates, etc. These differences in perspective—going into the importance of how VisiCalc was marketed and packaged—and subject—chapters on bit-by-bit copy utilities and The Print Shop—enable Nooney to break out of worn narratives about what, how, and for whom personal computing came to be.
