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.

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 from $500 to $600.

At the same show, however, a rival all-in-one computer was also launched: the $1,300 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 graphic designer’s modern studio. It had a rectangular monitor, bit-mapped colour graphics and sound. The PET stayed in production for just five years, and never worked with later machines, like the portable (more like luggable) Commodore 64. But the Apple II was manufactured for more than 16 years, and, as it grew more sophisticated, became 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 appearing on UK 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 were superior to those of the 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 and buy 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 neatly explains how elegantly Steve Wozniak’s US patent 4,136,359 dealt with technical issues surrounding the display of colours.

Like the PET, the first Apple IIs used audio cassettes for data storage, ran Basic, used a 1MHz microprocessor from MOS Technology, and – initially, at least – had just 4kB of memory.

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.