[LINK] Interesting quote from Steve Jobs...

stephen at melbpc.org.au stephen at melbpc.org.au
Sat Jan 30 07:26:03 AEDT 2010


Craig writes,

> On Fri, Jan 29, 2010 at 12:44:49PM +1100, Marghanita da Cruz wrote:
>
> > I probably should know but don't - what was revolutionary about the
> > Apple II?
> 
> the Apple II[1] was one of the first mass-market personal computers,


Yes, and certainly the Apple lle was an 'instant hit' with schools all
over the world. All of a sudden it became a must-have technology which
was 'cleverly' fuelled by Apple marketing.  Linkers might remember the 
Apples-for-schools campaign which enabled quite a significant discount 
for these computers for school communities which collected supermarket
receipts. Being a teacher at the time i well remember being approached
outside supermarkets by urchins from local schools begging one for the
purchase dockets. At that time, it was an amazingly powerful marketing
strategy by Apple and certainly did enable significant numbers of kids
in Australia to gain experience with IT (Bank Street Writer & VisiCalc
etc) and, enabled Aussie education to be in the vanguard of technology.
A position we still hold specially compared with many European schools.

Cheers
Stephen


> along with the TRS-80[2], and the Commodore PET[3] (all three released
> in 1977).  They had keyboards and had either a built-in TV-quality
> screen (the PET) or could be plugged into a TV set or monitor (which
> really weren't much better than a TV set anyway).
> 
> The Apple II had good graphics (for the time) and colour.  That's
> what really made it popular. while TRS-80 users like myself had only
> low-resolution black-and-white graphics, Apple II users could play a
> Space Invaders clone in colour.  OTOH, the TRS-80 had significantly
> better quality text (although without lowercase characters - Tandy saved
> a few cents off the production cost by not installing one of the video
> memory chips), 16 lines of 64 chars IIRC.
> 
> anyway, before them, home computers were homebrew hobbyist things like
> the Altair 8800[4] (1975) and the IMSAI 8080[5] (1976).  I don't think
> either of these was ever marketed in Australia, but I remember reading
> ads for them in American computer magazines of the era. some Australian
> hobbyists imported them directly, I remember seeing them (and similar
> machines) at MICOM[6] meetings.
> 
> 
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II_series
> 
> [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80
> 
> [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET
> 
> [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800
> 
> [5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSAI_8080
> 
> [6] http://micom.asn.au/
> 
> (I didn't realise MICOM still existed until i googled them just now.
> The club is 33 years old on Feb 20)
> 
> 
> craig
> 
> -- 
> craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>
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