This book resonated with me on a personal level. It’s a rich source of information about the software on the Apple II line of computers, and Laine’s in-depth exploration of various software titles was particularly captivating. It is an excellent book.
In particular, I found the history of the Locksmith program extremely interesting! It was released in the early 80s and was a program to circumvent copyright protection and let people make copies of software. Laine goes into great detail about it, and this section brings up many other issues that still exist today.
One intriguing part of the book is Laine’s take on the North American video game crash and its effects on the Apple II. It’s a different perspective than what I’ve normally heard and read. While I don’t think Laine is wrong in his assessment of its impact on PCs, I believe this area needs more study. The research I’ve come across suggests that there hasn’t been much done on wider effects on the video game and computer industry. This underscores the book’s potential to inspire future studies and further exploration of its topics.
I’ll discuss other aspects of this later. They aren’t the book’s focus, but they got me thinking. These random thoughts don’t fit into any of the sections I wanted to discuss, so they must be lumped into their own section.
Author’s Note: I stumbled across the word Indefatigable (in-di-ˌfa-ti-gə-ˈbi-lə-tē), and my brain shut down. I didn’t know how to pronounce it and got derailed by it. A quick definition is a person who is untiring or won’t fatigue.
History of Apple
There was a lot here that I didn’t know or hadn’t heard of before. There is also an alternate version of one of the stories about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. It has to do with their time at Atari and the payment for the Breakout game.
I appreciate the diverse perspectives presented in this book. It’s a testament to the value of multiple viewpoints in historical research. Depending on the sources you use for your research, you’ll get a different side of the story. In this case, Laine provides accounts from both Wozniak and Jobs on the bet about using less than 50 chips to make a Breakout game.
In the first few chapters, Laine moves the reader through the 1970s. This covers hobbyist computers, the mainframe era, and the 1977 Trinity of computers. The struggles with defining what the personal computer would be used for are discussed. I’ve read a few other books about this, and it is fascinating to see how different parts of the world tackled this problem.
Other reading: If you would like some examples of this, please read the following:
- Gaming the Iron Curtain by Jaroslav Svelch
- Electronic Dreams by Tom Lean
- Homebrew Gaming and the Beginnings of Vernacular Digitality by Melanie Swalwell
There are others, but these are the three that I’m aware of them.
The 1977 Trinity of Computers is fascinating to me. For those who don’t know, this refers to three personal computers:
- Apple II
- The Commodore PET
- RadioShack TRS-80
I’ve read about the Commodore PET in Brian Bagnall’s trilogy of books, and this book covers the Apple II. I haven’t come across a book on RadioShack’s computers at this point. There is probably something out there, but I haven’t seen it yet. I’m guessing that it would be in a book about the history of RadioShack.
Laine mentions how Apple was the new kid on the block and used expandability to stand out from the other two computers. They go over the design of the Apple II, which I thought was interesting. It made me wonder how long cassettes were used as a storage medium in the US before being replaced by Floppy Disks. This is one of the many things this book made me think about.
The rest of the book covers various stories, but they are centered on different software titles. These represent:
- Business Software
- Video Games/Computer Games
- Utility Software
- Home Software
- Educational Software
It goes into the people and companies that made the software. This is a very cool way to do things, and I wish other authors who wrote about video games and computers would do the same.
VisiCalc, Mystery House, and Locksmith
Laine focuses on three pieces of software: business, games, and utility software. They mention educational software, which could easily fall into the games category. The story of the educational software is interesting, but I wanted to focus on VisiCalc, Mystery House, and Locksmith.
VisiCalc is a business application that was released in 1979. At the time, people, corporations, and computer manufacturers were trying to find a reason for people to buy personal computers (PCs), and this program was the solution.
In the mid-to-late 1970s, the computer software market was being created. It wasn’t known what you could do with a PC, and something like VisiCalc got the Apple II used for businesses. They give a few accounts of people buying an Apple II just for VisiCalc.
I should point out that Laine does a good job of not making this an overgeneralization of the computer’s popularity or use. By focusing on several different
Random thoughts while reading
I wanted to discuss the smaller stories I noticed while reading this book in this section. I don’t think either of these stories was meant to be the meat of the book, but I thought they were too interesting not to mention, and the things they made me think about were important.
The first is Laine’s use of editorials from gaming magazines as sources. This made me smile because it was something I used to do. I’ve read the editorial pages of many newspapers for different research projects. It connected with me in a way the author probably didn’t intend.
I found something extremely interesting in the chapter on Educational software. It concerns the North American Video Game Crash in the early 1980s. Laine extends the period of the crash (roughly 1983-1984, depending on the source) into 1985 to continue some of the early PC companies.
Laine, correctly, includes several computer and software developers. While there has been a lot of real and digital ink spilled on the North American Video Game Crash, less attention is paid to its impact on the PC market because people believe nothing happened—however, the software market as a whole contracted.
While there are parallels to the video game market today, I would caution against saying this is a situation of history repeating itself, mainly because history can’t repeat itself. Similar situations happen with similar or completely different underlying causes. Also, the companies and the people who run them are completely different.
I want to circle back to Locksmith. It was a program that helped people make backup copies of their software. Making copies was protected, but you couldn’t sell those copies. This made me think of the broader topic of clones and modifications.
I don’t know if anyone has comprehensively studied clones and rip-offs from the 70s and 80s. Almost every iconic arcade game had a clone, and many home console games were clones. Some of this was due to Atari owning many iconic arcade games and not licensing them to competing consoles.
Laine also points out an interesting trend concerning magazines at the time. While it is popular to bash publications today, back in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, they were the best source for information on hobbies. In the 1980s, these magazines took a stand against piracy through their editorial sections.
Not all of them did this, but it is interesting to see it. There has always been a strange relationship between tech magazines and software companies. The magazines need the companies to exist to advertise, have things to write about, and have news to write about. This creates a situation where the magazines are incentivized not to ruin relationships with publishers and developers.
Two other software titles are discussed. They weren’t as interesting to me as the stories about the companies, but they are important in explaining how people use PCs and the realities of educational software.
Educational software is strange. A few titles show up in the public consciousness, but I didn’t find the one listed in this book very interesting. The story of the business and the educational software market
Venture capitalists entered the video game market around the time of the North American Video Game Crash, and it was all corners of the market. Many companies were created because of this, and many of them were merged and shut down. This is another instance of a similar situation that can be seen across the history of video and computer games.
These are some of the things that I thought about while reading this book. At some point, I want to do an open-source analysis of some of these early magazines. Part of the reason I like reading books like The Apple II Age is that I get ideas for other projects.
Final Thoughts
To pull back the curtain a bit, I read this book and three others while I was installing a septic tank at my family’s cabin in northern Michigan. I can confidently say that this book is much better than digging a hole in the ground while bitten by deer flies that seem immune to bug spray. I’m not sure that is the ringing endorsement that Laine is looking for, but I did enjoy it.
This book offers some excellent insights. I liked the open-source research and focus on editorials. It is fun to see what people said at the time and how their perceptions of something changed over the years.
I did enjoy this book a lot. Not only did it provide some relief from dealing with the rain, the pain in the butt from moving rocks, and the somehow bug spray resist flies, but I learned a lot about some pieces of software that I didn’t know about.