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In orbit above a blasted and destroyed planet Earth, a million people have lived and worked aboard the Outer Earth for almost a century. Riley Hale is a Tracer, someone who makes a living running deliveries across the station for above-board as well as black market clients. She prefers not to know what her cargo is, but when she's attacked by a gang en route to the air labs one day, she accidentally discovers the horrifying contents of her backpack. This starts a chain of events that has to do with conflict between the station Council, a terrorist group who think humans don't deserve to live anymore, and Riley's small gang of Tracers who just want to get by.

The action slows dramatically at the end, a bit too much for my taste, but overall the book had me at the edge of my seat for 90% of the story. Definitely recommend if you're looking for something entertaining to take your mind off, you know, all this.

You may get the impression from the title of the book that this is going to be one of those usual books that has Apple as the center of the early computer universe and yet another story about how the singular genius of Steve Jobs (and maybe Steve Wozniak gets a mention) single handedly created the personal computer industry. You would be 100% wrong. This book is about looking at the birth and early growth of the personal computer market from a different lens, one that doesn't center it around the humble beginnings by some boy tech genius (or geniuses) who self started with nothing more than coffee money in their pocket but saw the foregone conclusion that computers would be everywhere and took a chance. It instead explores the societal, cultural, and financial mileau around which many of these upstarts were growing out of. It explores how the personal computer's supposed inevitability was very much not that. It was a lot of trial and error and effort by lots of people and organizations to capitalize on the socioeconomic anxieties of the time with this new technological savior made ever more practical and real as the technology became more powerful.

Why the title then? First, it's not meant to be an encyclopedia but exploring a through line of a multi-decade birth of an industry. The Apple II's sweet spot was right in the middle of it was a pretty stable platform from 1977 to 1987. In the middle of that period it was the platform with the largest installed software base because of it. Because of some of its technological advances in the early part of the error it was also the early trail blazer in the microcomputer living up more to the vision of what it could be being presented by the industry. So it allowed an insight into the industry and its changes in a unique way. The book is actually only partly about the Apple II. The other part is on the burgeoning software industry of that era as well covering major facets of the industry from the business side (VisiCalc) to home software (Print Shop) to games (Snooper Troopers).

As someone who bought into the bootstrapped hero myth of the early computer industry put out by MSM and pop culture I have long since soured on the notion. Having an exploration of the counter-narrative was refreshing. It was in some places overwrought in how it pointed out privilege points of many of these early computer pioneer's history, many being straight white men who just so happened to have unusual access to very expensive and hard to come by computer resources, but it was a handful of places of style issues not issues with the overall point. The same can be true in their popping the "I'm just doing this to change the world" narrative we are constantly fed with pointing out how this was substantially about making a lot of money as well. It's good to recognize their greenwashing away of the profit motive for what it was but again it was done in some points in a bit heavy handed way. These instances are pretty few and far between though so doesn't detract from the book over all and, again, it is a bit of a stylistic issue not a fallacy of the underlying point.

As someone who has read countless books and articles on computer history much of the history was not new to me at all, neither was the stripping away of the mythology around the titans covered in the book. What I enjoyed even more than the book presenting the counter-narrative in a way approachable to people with more casual interest in the topic was the exploration of the history of programs I never explored before. I never knew about the history of The Print Shop or Snooper Troopers. I never even heard of the latter even. As someone that not only likes history but has had a career in software development and entrepreneurship I love reading project development history and company origin stories, especially when it is a more grounded exploration of it.