With the greatest of respect, I have watched Apple from the day it started. I was publishing magazines about the Apple II before most people had ever heard what a personal computer was.
After the Apple II was introduced, then came the Commodore and the Tandy TRS-80.
I used to want to be a computer programmer when I was younger. We got an Apple II Plus when I was, like, 11 and I wrote programs and BASIC on that, like I think a lot of people did, but I have no idea how to program in the current languages at all.
One of the coolest days of my life was when I bought a 16K memory card upgrade and stuck it in my Apple II. I was kind of a geek.
I did some products for the Apple II, most notably the first small low cost thermal printer, the Silent Type.
Think of the first Apple II being shipped in 1977. It took almost a decade for it to land in my school where I could see it.
From the late '70s to the early '90s, I wrote anything anybody would pay me for. This ranged from articles on how to clean a longhorn cow's skull for living-room decoration to manuals on elementary math instruction on the Apple II... to a slew of software reviews and application articles done for the computer press.
Though many people mistakenly credit IBM with the first PC in 1981, the Apple II came out four years earlier, in 1977.
I wrote a lot about the need for an information appliance. I think we've pretty much arrived at one: the iPad. A child could figure out how to use it quickly. Compare it to a DOS computer or even an Apple II; it's no longer nearly as much of a hassle or a mystery.
I started on an Apple II, which I had bought at the very end of 1978 for half of my annual income. I made $4,500 a year, and I spent half of it on the computer.
I was a grad student at UC Berkeley when I bought my Apple II and it suddenly because a lot more interesting than school.
The launch of iPhone is very possibly bigger than the launch of the first Apple II or the first Mac. Steve Jobs's genius is his ability to use technology to create products that define fundamental cultural shifts.
There is no doubt that, since 1977 and the launch of Apple II - the first computer it produced for the mass market - many things which used to be done on paper, or on the telephone, have been done easier and faster on a screen.
Steve Jobs didn't really set the direction of my Apple I and Apple II designs but he did the more important part of turning them into a product that would change the world. I don't deny that.
My first computers were a Timex Sinclair and an Apple II.
My favorite computer of all time? The Apple II that got me started, of course.
The first home system we had was an Apple II, and I remember playing a game called 'Conan.' It should have been called 'Tarzan' because you were essentially Conan running around a forest with a boomerang, but it was obviously Tarzan.
That we plug in carts or CDs with megabytes of memory when only yesterday we were happy to have 64K or 128K in our Apple II and PC workhorses... that's nothing short of phenomenal.
The Apple II was not designed like an ordinary product. It used crazy tricks everywhere.
I knew the Apple II was great when I bought it, but as I dug into the details it just completely blew me away the creative artistic approach that the designers had taken.
We are proposing that there is value in a totally new product category and a totally new set of questions. Just like the Apple II proposed, 'Would you reasonably want a computer in your home if you weren't an accountant or professional?' That is the question Glass is asking, and I hope in the end that is how it will be judged.
My parents had a software company making children's software for the Apple II+, Commodore 64 and Acorn computers. They hired these teenagers to program the software, and these guys were true hackers, trying to get more colors and sound and animation out of those computers.
I started working at Apple about 18 months after I bought my Apple II.
The people who are getting 3-D printers at home are pioneers, kind of like the people who bought Apple IIs in 1981. Adults are usually the last people to get it. The kids are like, 'Get out of my way, I want at this thing.' They immediately start getting creative.
In fact when I first got my Apple II the first thing I did was turn it on and off, on and off, just because I had the power to do so, which I'd never had on a computer before.
