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From the Bookshelf: Sophistication and Simplicity
(subtitle: The Life and Times of the Apple II Computer)
As new books about the computers of the 1980s get published, I've gone ahead and bought some of them, but it may not always be just out of the pure curiosity to know more about some specific subjects than can be found in different corners online. I ordered a book about the original TRS-80 because that was the first computer in my family's home and a book about the Color Computer that followed it because we'd used them for years, but I ordered a book about the Commodore Amiga in some part because it was by someone whose weblog I'd been reading, and this seemed a way to "support" his ongoing history of computer games. When I heard that someone with an online history of the Apple II was converting his web site into a book, I might not have had as much of a compulsion to go and order it as those previous cases. When I happened to walk by the computer bookshelves in the local bookstore and spotted a copy of "Sophistication & Simplicity: The Life and Times of the Apple II Computer," though, it might have been the sense of the book being "ready right to hand" that made me buy it then. I did think it would be interesting to have in permanent form a history of the Apple II computer itself as opposed to the company, as much as the downs and ups there have appealed to writers (but sometimes leave partisans of other computers complaining their favourite models were better, and cheaper anyway), and yet I did wonder about how that larger history might lend a darker tone to parts of the book.
The book that was at first a web site had a "pontillistic" feel, made up of many chapters each describing a computer model, or a particular group of expansion cards or other peripherals, or magazines that began publishing at a particular time, among other things. This might have made it feel a bit more like a compendium of information than a full history, but that in turn might have made me more skeptical of and wanting to see sources for the comments every so often that the people at Apple Computer who made decisions kept deliberately ignoring the computer that was paying all the bills and funding the development of a succession of machines intended to replace it before, so the theory went, it stopped selling. If the original sin of many Apple narratives predates the company itself to when Steve Jobs got Steve Wozniak to refine the design for the Atari video game Breakout but neglected to mention there would be a bonus on top of the fee, accusations that "neglect" of the Apple II eventually turned into a cold-blooded effort to make the computer just go away follow right afterwards, casting a certain shadow of apprehension over the successes of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
There's something undeniable in a quote from Steve Wozniak in a period magazine article about how thoughts of making small enhancements to the Apple II had vanished once work was under way on a first computer with many apparent enhancements that nevertheless didn't hang together on release and never found traction after that, but after that I got to wondering about a few period interpretations of Steve Jobs leaving Apple I've seen and whether this could have been seen as the beginning of a period of greater respect for the Apple II, culminating in the Apple IIgs being released at last. The book then implied new system software for the graphically upgraded computer was delayed until the expensive Macintosh II with its colour potential was released, but there I got to wondering about all the other times software has taken a while to be released, including the update to OS-9 for the Color Computer 3. The screenshots in the book of the software that eventually did show up, though, do manage to keep up my completely shallow opinion that this far from all of it I can just about ignore any little matter of architectural underpinnings and think that no other "graphical user interface" of the 1980s and early 1990s looks quite as good to me as one using "Chicago" as its system font. That means, of course, that Susan Kare's role in the making of the Macintosh could be rather significant, but also points out how there could have been a few advantages to the obscurity of the Color Computer. A paint program and a word processor for it didn't just imitate the interfaces of MacPaint and MacWrite, but also the system font itself.
Certainly, corporate histories of Apple describe the company as dividing into squabbling fiefdoms up until the return of Steve Jobs (whose return, as it turned out, managed to put an end not just to the long-sought Macintosh clones but also to an official third-party repackaging of the Apple II into what might have been an actually interesting kind of one of those cheap computer-like things meant for kids), but all the same I did get to wondering how the fate of the Apple II could have been settled outside the company when the microprocessor firm that made its 6502 processor was bought by Commodore to achieve vertical integration but then not allowed to make a 16-bit model. While that chip was eventually made by another company in the form of the 65816, it might have been just too late for "Woz's" documented architecture to be taken over and extended by reverse-engineering companies the way the "PC" got away from IBM.
Even with those thoughts of whether the narrative could have been a bit more complex than one drawn up in its earliest draft in 1993, right after the last model of the Apple II was removed from the catalogues and feelings might have been at their most unpleasant, the book was still chock-full of information. It inspired me to start one of my Apple II emulators and try typing a draft of this post in Appleworks, the integrated software package that featured in several chapters of the book despite comments by its author that Apple never advertised it (even though it was a best-seller anyway); getting the draft out of the emulator was a little tricky, though. I did wonder a bit about the arrangement of words in its title, if the other way around would have sounded better; it did turn out that the early Apple II ad they were taken from had put "simplicity" before "sophistication."
As new books about the computers of the 1980s get published, I've gone ahead and bought some of them, but it may not always be just out of the pure curiosity to know more about some specific subjects than can be found in different corners online. I ordered a book about the original TRS-80 because that was the first computer in my family's home and a book about the Color Computer that followed it because we'd used them for years, but I ordered a book about the Commodore Amiga in some part because it was by someone whose weblog I'd been reading, and this seemed a way to "support" his ongoing history of computer games. When I heard that someone with an online history of the Apple II was converting his web site into a book, I might not have had as much of a compulsion to go and order it as those previous cases. When I happened to walk by the computer bookshelves in the local bookstore and spotted a copy of "Sophistication & Simplicity: The Life and Times of the Apple II Computer," though, it might have been the sense of the book being "ready right to hand" that made me buy it then. I did think it would be interesting to have in permanent form a history of the Apple II computer itself as opposed to the company, as much as the downs and ups there have appealed to writers (but sometimes leave partisans of other computers complaining their favourite models were better, and cheaper anyway), and yet I did wonder about how that larger history might lend a darker tone to parts of the book.
The book that was at first a web site had a "pontillistic" feel, made up of many chapters each describing a computer model, or a particular group of expansion cards or other peripherals, or magazines that began publishing at a particular time, among other things. This might have made it feel a bit more like a compendium of information than a full history, but that in turn might have made me more skeptical of and wanting to see sources for the comments every so often that the people at Apple Computer who made decisions kept deliberately ignoring the computer that was paying all the bills and funding the development of a succession of machines intended to replace it before, so the theory went, it stopped selling. If the original sin of many Apple narratives predates the company itself to when Steve Jobs got Steve Wozniak to refine the design for the Atari video game Breakout but neglected to mention there would be a bonus on top of the fee, accusations that "neglect" of the Apple II eventually turned into a cold-blooded effort to make the computer just go away follow right afterwards, casting a certain shadow of apprehension over the successes of the iPod, iPhone, and iPad.
There's something undeniable in a quote from Steve Wozniak in a period magazine article about how thoughts of making small enhancements to the Apple II had vanished once work was under way on a first computer with many apparent enhancements that nevertheless didn't hang together on release and never found traction after that, but after that I got to wondering about a few period interpretations of Steve Jobs leaving Apple I've seen and whether this could have been seen as the beginning of a period of greater respect for the Apple II, culminating in the Apple IIgs being released at last. The book then implied new system software for the graphically upgraded computer was delayed until the expensive Macintosh II with its colour potential was released, but there I got to wondering about all the other times software has taken a while to be released, including the update to OS-9 for the Color Computer 3. The screenshots in the book of the software that eventually did show up, though, do manage to keep up my completely shallow opinion that this far from all of it I can just about ignore any little matter of architectural underpinnings and think that no other "graphical user interface" of the 1980s and early 1990s looks quite as good to me as one using "Chicago" as its system font. That means, of course, that Susan Kare's role in the making of the Macintosh could be rather significant, but also points out how there could have been a few advantages to the obscurity of the Color Computer. A paint program and a word processor for it didn't just imitate the interfaces of MacPaint and MacWrite, but also the system font itself.
Certainly, corporate histories of Apple describe the company as dividing into squabbling fiefdoms up until the return of Steve Jobs (whose return, as it turned out, managed to put an end not just to the long-sought Macintosh clones but also to an official third-party repackaging of the Apple II into what might have been an actually interesting kind of one of those cheap computer-like things meant for kids), but all the same I did get to wondering how the fate of the Apple II could have been settled outside the company when the microprocessor firm that made its 6502 processor was bought by Commodore to achieve vertical integration but then not allowed to make a 16-bit model. While that chip was eventually made by another company in the form of the 65816, it might have been just too late for "Woz's" documented architecture to be taken over and extended by reverse-engineering companies the way the "PC" got away from IBM.
Even with those thoughts of whether the narrative could have been a bit more complex than one drawn up in its earliest draft in 1993, right after the last model of the Apple II was removed from the catalogues and feelings might have been at their most unpleasant, the book was still chock-full of information. It inspired me to start one of my Apple II emulators and try typing a draft of this post in Appleworks, the integrated software package that featured in several chapters of the book despite comments by its author that Apple never advertised it (even though it was a best-seller anyway); getting the draft out of the emulator was a little tricky, though. I did wonder a bit about the arrangement of words in its title, if the other way around would have sounded better; it did turn out that the early Apple II ad they were taken from had put "simplicity" before "sophistication."