Why Apple II Is the World's Best Selling Personal Computer (1978)
It&#x27;s well known that the Apple II was one of the first three prepackaged, preassembled personal computers on the market. It, the TRS-80 Model I, and the Commodore PET all appeared in late 1977.<p>It&#x27;s not well known that the Apple was <i>not</i> the obvious winner of the three; the TRS-80 was. Every small town in America had Tandy&#x27;s Radio Shack stores, and even if Radio Shack had a reputation for selling toys and gizmos as opposed to computers, it had a reputation. As a startup, Apple didn&#x27;t. Commodore wasn&#x27;t as well known as Tandy but was an established calculator and office-equipment company, with its own semiconductor fab that produced the 6502 CPU that Apple and other rivals used.<p>And, in fact, until about 1980, the TRS-80 dominated the market. What happened?<p>* The disk drive. All three computers only used tape storage in 1977, but their makers soon provided disk drives. Tandy&#x27;s drive is a horrible, unreliable kludge. Commodore&#x27;s PET disk drives are gigantic monstrosities that are fast and reliable[1] but far too expensive. Steve Wozniak&#x27;s Disk II is a combination of a brilliantly simple and reliable disk controller, and inexpensive-to-make (and thus highly profitable) drive mechanism, that still run well today, 40 years later.<p>* Third-party products. Apple published everything needed to create software and hardware for the II. Its slots invited engineers to design cards. The TRS-80 came with a superb BASIC tutorial, but Tandy otherwise kept all technical information secret, hoping to monopolize third-party development.[2] Radio Shack stores were not allowed to sell non-Tandy products, and couldn&#x27;t carry third-party publications like <i>80 Micro</i> that by default became the major way companies sold TRS-80 products (since other retailers didn&#x27;t want to compete with Radio Shack stores). Commodore&#x27;s Jack Tramiel never ever understood the importance of software development, and the PET fell far behind Tandy and Apple in the US; until the VIC-20 in 1980 most of Commodore&#x27;s computer sales were in Europe and Canada, where Apple and Tandy didn&#x27;t compete.<p>* VisiCalc. Because of the above, VisiCalc was written for the Apple when market share should have caused it to be written for TRS-80 (Dan Fylstra of Personal Software, VisiCalc&#x27;s publisher, was one of the first owners of the TRS-80). Being only available for Apple massively drove sales of the II; for the first time, people bought a computer to run a specific killer app, as opposed to the other way around. In turn, others chose the II to develop for<p>Even after 1980, when Apple had clearly gained sales momentum, Tandy still had the bulk of the installed base. <i>80 Micro</i>&#x27;s December 1982 issue (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;80-microcomputing-magazine-1982-12" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;80-microcomputing-magazine-1982-...</a>) has 484 pages. I&#x27;m pretty sure no Apple magazine ever came close to that thickness; the only other computer magazines in history to be that thick are 1) <i>PC Magazine</i> before it went bimonthly in 1984 after the December 1983 issue hit 800 pages, and 2) <i>BYTE</i>. Wayne Green, the publisher of <i>80 Micro</i>, had by that time written editorials in almost every single issue pleading with Tandy to encourage third-party developers. Tandy didn&#x27;t relent until the Model 16, introduced that year, had <i>zero</i> third-party software after six months. But by then it was too late.<p>As fat as they are, reading Tandy magazines like <i>80 Micro</i> and <i>Rainbow</i> (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;rainbowmagazine-1983-12&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;rainbowmagazine-1983-12&#x2F;</a>) from the early 1980s is like visiting a sad and barren alternate world; instead of Origin, Epyx, MicroProse, and SSI, there are much cruder-looking ads from tiny companies offering bad clones of popular arcade games.<p>[1] Two virtues Commodore&#x27;s later drives did not retain<p>[2] It&#x27;s clear in retrospect that TRS-80 was intentionally designed to not be compatible with the existing 8080&#x2F;Z80 standards. ROM&#x27;s location in the memory map broke CP&#x2F;M compatibility, and the expansion bus is not S-100 compatible.