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krpalmerNow that I can read the books that have to be “signed out” from the Internet Archive, I’m delving into that considerable collection. In the context of reading off a computer screen, having to get through a volume in a two-week loan can seem to feel like pushing a bit, but so far I’ve been able to handle that. Nor am I defeated by “the tyranny of choice.” A Wikipedia link happened to lead me back to Peter Nichols’ A Voyage For Madmen, about a nonstop round-the-world sailing race for solo mariners in the late 1960s (which might even so seem to have a few unfortunate resonances with “cooped up in isolation”). After that, the old computer magazines I skim through to feed the queue on Tumblr reminded me of a particular book, and it turned out the Archive did offer Frank Rose’s West of Eden: The End of Innocence at Apple Computer (along with a different book with the same title, a science fiction novel I happened to have read years ago).
I’d managed to remember this particular West of Eden being a source for some Digital Antiquarian chronicles, but did wonder as I started reading it whether, given all of the “Apple history” I’ve managed to imbibe already, the book would amount to familiar anecdotes written out to somewhat greater length. There did seem to be a bit more to it than that, though. I had also wondered from the book’s publication date how far it would go from “the end of innocence” into “Sculley’s successful years,” which didn’t last all that long for all that people have spent recent years proclaiming the ground is about to crumble beneath the modern Apple’s feet one way or another. As it turned out there, the book’s narrative ended at the beginning of 1986, just as improved computers began to trickle out of the pipeline. However, it did touch on early projects to create “bigger Macs” that never quite came to fruition; things didn’t seem quite a matter of, as some of the more extreme accusations over the years might get you thinking, “Steve Jobs was blinkered to the point of conviction the only upgrade the Macintosh might need was 512K.” So far as other potential bits of nuance went, I did contrast this book to Michael Moritz’s The Little Kingdom (which I found a copy of with a years-later prologue and epilogue in a remaindered bookstore that unfortunately closed a few years ago), which I just might have been all too tempted to view as counterpoint to “Woz as the unappreciated embodiment of what Apple should have stayed.” However, it did turn out that earlier book made a brief appearance in Rose’s, and was mentioned in the afterword as “taking you up to where this chronicle begins.”
I did note some brief anecdotes about the Apple IIc not selling well, which encompassed peripherals being in short supply on suppositions home users would make do with substitutes but didn’t bring up how obsessed Apple II users became with the thought of “expansion slots.” One thing I wondered about was how there weren’t any comments at any time about cheaper computers of any sort from Commodore and Atari threatening the company, which I know some would make a bigger deal of. There were also comments about John Sculley drawing up organization charts, which reminded me of comments in Macworld magazines as the decade wore on about how many times the company was reorganized. With this book finished, I’m already contemplating other books on computing I know to be in the Internet Archive, even if that also leaves me wondering when I’ll skip along to another topic.
I’d managed to remember this particular West of Eden being a source for some Digital Antiquarian chronicles, but did wonder as I started reading it whether, given all of the “Apple history” I’ve managed to imbibe already, the book would amount to familiar anecdotes written out to somewhat greater length. There did seem to be a bit more to it than that, though. I had also wondered from the book’s publication date how far it would go from “the end of innocence” into “Sculley’s successful years,” which didn’t last all that long for all that people have spent recent years proclaiming the ground is about to crumble beneath the modern Apple’s feet one way or another. As it turned out there, the book’s narrative ended at the beginning of 1986, just as improved computers began to trickle out of the pipeline. However, it did touch on early projects to create “bigger Macs” that never quite came to fruition; things didn’t seem quite a matter of, as some of the more extreme accusations over the years might get you thinking, “Steve Jobs was blinkered to the point of conviction the only upgrade the Macintosh might need was 512K.” So far as other potential bits of nuance went, I did contrast this book to Michael Moritz’s The Little Kingdom (which I found a copy of with a years-later prologue and epilogue in a remaindered bookstore that unfortunately closed a few years ago), which I just might have been all too tempted to view as counterpoint to “Woz as the unappreciated embodiment of what Apple should have stayed.” However, it did turn out that earlier book made a brief appearance in Rose’s, and was mentioned in the afterword as “taking you up to where this chronicle begins.”
I did note some brief anecdotes about the Apple IIc not selling well, which encompassed peripherals being in short supply on suppositions home users would make do with substitutes but didn’t bring up how obsessed Apple II users became with the thought of “expansion slots.” One thing I wondered about was how there weren’t any comments at any time about cheaper computers of any sort from Commodore and Atari threatening the company, which I know some would make a bigger deal of. There were also comments about John Sculley drawing up organization charts, which reminded me of comments in Macworld magazines as the decade wore on about how many times the company was reorganized. With this book finished, I’m already contemplating other books on computing I know to be in the Internet Archive, even if that also leaves me wondering when I’ll skip along to another topic.