Future Knowledge

[00:00:14] Chris Freeland: Forget the iPhone, forget the iPod. even forget the classic Macintosh or the candy coated iMac. If you wanna understand how Apple came to rule the tech world, you need to start a couple of decades back in 1977 with the introduction of the Apple II. Hi everyone. I'm Chris Freeland. I'm a librarian at the internet Archive in The Apple II Age author Laine Nooney.

Recounts the story of this versatile piece of hardware, but the most compelling story isn't really the hardware. Or even the superstar owners of Apple. What made the Apple II iconic was its software and as someone who used print shop in junior high all the time. Yes, the software was definitely where it was at for the Apple II.

Today we're gonna hear from Lane, give a reading from their book, and then historian Finn Brunton will join the conversation and do a deeper dive with Lane into the story of the Apple II. The impact of this important piece of computing history as we get started here today. I'd like to welcome Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive's founder and digital librarian, to set the tone for the day.

[00:01:21] Brewster Kahle: Thank you very much, Chris, and I'm so glad that Laine and Finn are doing this gathering for us around what's an important contextual point about what shaped our whole industry and how the. Computer technology was not just for large corporations in the military, but things changed and empowered people in new and different ways.

It was from my era. I was an Apple II dev way back when, so I'm very glad that this is happening.

[00:01:53] Chris Freeland: To get things started in full is the internet archives free range archivist. And if you have spent time playing any of the games, the software and RK games that are emulated in the browser@archive.org, you can thank or blame this next person for that 'cause he is our software curator and, and therefore responsible for all that time that I've spent on playing Oregon Trail and is one of my favorite people on the planet: Jason Scott.

[00:02:17] Finn Brunton: There folks. Laine's book is something that's been in my life for a couple of years now because I've known Laine now for a good number of years. Lane asked to study me like a weird insect in my virtual computing cave. As I was doing things for the archive, we became really good friends and I don't know, drafted myself into the realm of Lane's official internet archive research assistant, because it was important to me for people.

To enjoy the millions of items that we've put up on the archive and how good it might be for the use of scholars and for enthusiasts and people who just wanted to both use old software, read about catalogs and have citations and Lane put me through my paces enough that I knew that this was going to be a humdinger of a book because Lane does not start.

By reading 10, looking back fondly articles from 1995 and assuming that's where we begin, lane asks all the hard questions. And so this book to me is a Breath of Fresh Air because we were starting to move into the era of Fond, just slightly out of focus memories of how computers were Lane asks really?

Is that what this was? Is that, is that what you think this was? Is this a love story? Lane's gonna dispel that. So just an absolute joy. And besides the book itself, Lane's always doing many other projects has been involved in so many other things, both in the realm of computers and in in academic work and, and is again, like I said, you've come in for a treat.

[00:03:55] Laine Nooney: I guess I have to talk now. Jason, thank you for your always generous introductions. There's a reason I call Jason my internet dad, and I think that just got explained to you. But yeah, so first of all, the internet archive in so many ways is the reason this book exists.

I began writing in January, 2020, so that was a very particular time to start trying to write a book, and two months later, three months later, no one was going anywhere. So while I was able to like grab a bunch of my own personal resources outta my office and stuff and bring them to my apartment to use as references, there was so much more material that I needed access to that in that moment could only be supplied by the internet archive.

I have a little two page note about this in the back of the book. It is the primary archive for this book, and it may well be the first academic book about which we could say that. So I'm, I'm totally and fully indebted to all of the hard work. That the people at this institution do.

Making sure that everything from a to instruction manuals, magazines, pop press books can be found in browser. It's not a replacement for the role of the traditional archive and the role that plays in historical research, but I think it's one hell of a compliment and it produces, I think, work of a different nature in terms of its capacity for both breadth and scope.

And I also wanna highlight that. Everyone here has just been so like easy and graceful to work with, especially Chris Freeland, such a consummate organizer, Caitlin Duncan. You know, everyone has just Brewster. Everyone has just been such a sincere supporter. Also, my undying admiration to Finn Brunton for being in conversation with me

There's no one I'd rather be talking to. Let's talk about this book I apparently wrote, so I have to begin any talk about, I'm gonna give a little, kind of like 10 minute. Intro maybe. And then I'm gonna cut to a reading of the book. and I have to begin with a confession, which is that unlike many of you, I never owned an Apple II.

This is one of the first questions people like to get after me about sort of running a depth test on my historical expertise, and we can, you know, talk a bit later about why computer history is so susceptible to these demands or expectations that you had to live through it to be able to talk about it or that you had to like or love computing in order to be its historian.

Realizing that I felt like I needed to preface a talk by saying I didn't grow up with an Apple ii. Got me thinking about my own computer history and what evidence beyond my own memories did I actually have of any of it. So like any good historian, I went back to my personal archive to see if I could find the earliest evidence of a computer in my life.

And this is sort of a funky exercise for someone like me to do. I was disowned 15 years ago. I don't have any contact with my parents, and so I don't have like the photographic evidence that you would expect someone to have of their early childhood. But on some occasion, in my early twenties, the last time I ever went home, I had the presence of mind to take a single box of artifacts with me sort of documents from my childhood back into my possession in college.

And so I went back to that box and amidst, you know, certificates for participation and report cards that said I talked too much in class and, you know, clippings from my local newspaper about my short-lived tech column. I happened to find what I so faintly remembered, which was my third grade autobiography titled My Long Life.

I wrote this in May, 1991. I was born April, 1982, so this means I had just turned nine when I wrote this. And you know, there's a lot to behold in a document like this. It reveals, let's say, the important structural role of the Thundercats in my childhood, my passion for roller coasters, my apprehension of not knowing my own gender, right?

My obsession with money maybe. But as I read and read through this thing, finally on the last page, I found it. Here, tucked away, almost innocuously, almost at the very, very, very, very end in a sea of childhood interest, right between swamp thing and Legos. Horses. Wild and tame was the sentence that made everything else happen.

Quote, we went to my aunt's house for my birthday. I got a computer with games Legos, one wrestling toy, and Ninja Turtles. So that computer, to the best of my recollection, was a Tandy 1000. The PC compatible home computer from Radio Shack that ran away with the home computing market in the mid to late eighties.

I had access to this computer because my aunt's husband at the time worked in computers, whatever that meant. And given that the system was at the time, about seven years old, my hunch is that it was phased out hardware left in a storage facility, uh, following some sort of routine company computing upgrades, right.

Something too out of date to keep using, but Right. You know, what protocols did anyone have at the time for something like E-waste? So it became the perfect thing to pawn off on a 9-year-old relative. So it's 1991, and I'm using a computer more than half a decade old. It still runs on floppy discs, which the cutting edge early adopters of the time would've considered long outdated, but I had no idea my computer was behind the times.

The public schools I went to had no computers. When I moved to a private school, these systems, which were probably clunky, old Apple IIs, seemed archaic compared to my computer. At school, we fiddled around playing the text-based game adventure, which truly makes no sense to a child or trekked through the slow slog of the Oregon Trail.

But at home, my computer had 16 colors. There were games I could play where avatar control was real and I could type commands, and I felt like the computer understood me. And every few months I would learn about the Windows operating system by going into various directories and deleting random files, an occurrence that became so frequent.

My mother taught me how to reformat the hard drive so she could stop doing it. And so I won't say that. What I do in this book is try and write a history in which, you know, this kid makes sense. I have little interest in making my, my identity or my personal story, the center of this, but. There's always been a part of the historical puzzle for me that was interested in what computer history looks like and feels like and sounds like if we didn't assume that what it meant to have a computer was a common experience.

That relationships to computers take many forms and that the conditions a possibility that allow computing to enter someone's life are very complex and do not always bend into adulthood toward nostalgia or happy former memories. There's many people who use computers who would never see themselves as computer people, and likewise, what it meant to be a computer person in the 1970s and eighties was not a stable or coherent identity.

Our contemporary insistence that early personal computing was about programming, hacking, gaming, pirating, all the hardcore practices of what was, in fact, a narrow segment of the overall computer market is a historical fiction produced and recirculated by those most invested in owning this past. But that's the thing about the past.

The minute you try to own it, you rob it of its truth. When I was working with my indexer on this book, he pointed out to me that he had to invent a particularly weird index category for my book to deal with my constant tendency to reflect on the nature of historical narrative itself. He said he didn't wanna use the word historiography, which refers to the study of the methods and narratives used by historians to write and develop history as an academic discipline.

He didn't think that term was appropriate because first, somehow I had never used historiography in the entire book, which felt like a really filthy, deep cut on his part to tell me that, but also he thought that wasn't quite what I was doing. Instead, he settled on history how it's told, which is like, this might be the only book in existence that has this formulation in the index.

It's a little clunky, but it's come to endear itself to me in how direct and uncomplicated it is. Somewhat ironically, I was, recently accused of having a quote political agenda to my book, which is to say that well educated white men, it's a, it's a thing well educated white men say when you point out that the people they idolize are also well educated white men, and that like, maybe that's context or something, or we should think about it or mention it, right?

As if there is any kind of history that has no politics, right? All histories are about how they are told. And so to demonstrate some of what I mean, I'm gonna just turn to a reading of the book itself from the introduction. I think the introduction kind of best captures the works orientation and the big ideas of what I think is at stake in trying to reimagine how we tell the history of computing.

Every once in a while, Steve Jobs announced a revolutionary product comes along, that changes everything. It was the morning of January 9th, 2007 at the annual macro of convention in San Francisco and Jobs. Apple Computer, CEO, and visionary in chief was angling to

[00:13:25] Brewster Kahle: make history.

[00:13:26] Laine Nooney: Attendees from across the creative sectors had camped outside the Moscone West Convention Center since nine o'clock the night before.

Had endured Coldplay and Gnarls Barkley as they stabled inside the auditorium awaiting jobs. Arrival, had dutifully even passionately cheered for jobs as rundown of iPod, shuffle developments, and iTunes sales, along with a pitch for Apple tv. Packed with clips from Zoolander and heroes. As everyone suspected, it all turned out to be one long tease for the only thing anyone remembers.

Steve Jobs was unveiling the iPhone hitched by jobs as the convergence of three distinct technological traditions, the telephone, the portable music player, and internet communication devices. The iPhone needed a conceptual on-ramp to help frame its revolutionary potential. So jobs opened with a little Apple history.

Behind him on stage, A slide deck transitioned to a picture of the iconic 1984 Macintosh computer, followed by the 2001 iPod. The selections were deliberate. Both had shifted Western norms about how computer technology fit into our lives, changed our gestures. Altered our workflows in jobs is for shortened timeline.

The the iPhone was the natural inheritor of this trajectory of innovation. A capstone technology and a chain of hardware evolution straddling the end of one century and the beginning of another. The iPhone promised to braid apple's many trajectories into a single impulse by drawing a direct path of influence from the Macintosh's graphical user interface to the dial of the iPod, to the touchscreen of the iPhone.

Jobs presented the development of all three as natural and inevitable subtly suggesting a metaphysical inheritance between them that transcends their status as mere products. This is company history told only through its virtues, a techno secular creation of Adam, in which the first man reaches out with a mouse and God swipes back with a finger.

But here we should pause and consider all the history that must be put aside for jobs as version of events to hold true Eli by necessity, or all the Apple products that flopped or failed the ideas that stayed on the drawing board, the incremental alterations intended to get Apple through the next quarter rather than catalyze a revolution.

Think of the clamshell laptops, the Lisa workstations, the Quick takes, Newtons and Pippins. But there is one absence in particular that reveals more than the rest. The Apple II. Released in 19 77, 7 years before the Macintosh, the Apple II would become one of the most iconic personal computing systems in the United States.

Defining the cutting edge of what you could do with a computer of one's own like the founding of Apple Computer Company in 1976. The development of the Apple II is often presented as a collaboration between Steve Jobs and his lesser known partner, Steve Wozniak. In truth, the product was almost entirely a feat of wozniak's prodigious talent in electrical engineering.

Though it likely would not have come to the market with the bang that it had, had jobs not been rapaciously dedicated to commercializing wozniak's talents, it was the Apple II, not the Macintosh that made Apple Computer Company one of the most successful businesses of the early personal computing era, giving the corporation a foundation from which it would leverage its remarkable longevity.

Yet the system cannot appear in jobs as harried, abridged history. The Apple II renders too complicated, the very mythology he was trying to enact through stagecraft to attend to such absences in jobs. Speech to its false starts and things left out is to make a case for a history of computing that is more intricate than our everyday blend of hype and nostalgia.

For many readers, the history of personal computing is personal. It is something witnessed, but also felt a nice, a nostalgic identification with a technological past that lives within us. It comes alive at surprising moments. A familiar background, a familiar computer in the background of a television show, a YouTube video recording of the a OL dial-up sound, a 3.5 floppy dis found in a box of old files.

These intimate memories of simpler technological times routinely form the ground from which personal computing circulates as a historical novelty. Beyond our individual reminiscences, personal computing's past has continually been leveraged by those invested in using the past like jobs did to barter for a particular kind of future.

To move beyond this frame is to suggest that perhaps computers themselves cannot tell their own history and that their most ardent profits are not the sole keepers of their meaning. The emergence of what we would now call personal computing in the United States during the 1970s and eighties is a wondrous mango.

Yeah. When we fixate on lauding heroes, heralding companies, or claiming revolutions, we limit the breadth of our understanding of an actual appreciation for the impact of computer technology and the work of history itself. Naive fixations leave us open to charismatic manipulation of particular talent of jobs is about the reason these technologies exist, the forces that brought them here, and the transformative authority they allegedly possess.

If these histories have thus far gone unheard, we may do well to ask ourselves what has been gained and who gained it from their exclusion. And what we may discover is that the story of great men with their great technologies launching their great revolutions is a story more for them and their shareholders than for us.

The history of personal computings is as much social, geographic, cultural, and financial as it is technical or driven by human genius. It's a story of hardware and software, children and investment bankers, hardcore hobbyists, enthusiastic, know nothings and resistant workers. The letter of the law and the spirit of the code.

Dramatic success and catalytic failure. It is a story of people and of money who had it, who wanted it, and how personal computing technology in the United States was positioned to make more of it. This is the journey this book takes you on using the Apple II and the software designed for it as a lens to magnify the conditions that first transformed the general purpose computer into a consumer product in the United States.

It's a story that begins in the mid seventies and extends into the mid eighties, a time during which there was a marked proliferation of microcomputer use among an uncertain American public. This was also a period of rapid industry transformation. As overnight entrepreneurs, hastily constructed a consumer computing supply chain where none had ever previously existed.

In other words, this moment in time marks the very beginning of individual computer ownership, technologically, economically, socially, and we could have no better guide through this, misunderstood and often misrepresented terrain than the Apple II's hardware and software. As the very thing jobs chose not to talk about the Apple.

Two nonetheless documents better than any computer of its time. The transformation of computing from technical oddity to mass consumer good and thus cultural architecture. Many of this book's readers will have been drawn to it by an internal sense of having watched the history of computing happen. But historical knowledge accumulates in other ways too, through YouTube videos or Netflix documentaries, films and television programs that use the 1970s and eighties as a historical set piece.

Articles in Wired or The Atlantic, perhaps even a book or two, like Isaacson's The Innovators, or Stephen Levy's Hackers. Histories of personal computing are also constantly drawn on by entrepreneurs, investors, and thought leaders often presented much the way jobs did at the iPhone launch. Discussions are highly selective and forever progressive.

We've been told over and over again in countless forms by myriad voices, that personal computing was from the moment of its invention, instantly recognized as a revolutionary technology and eagerly taken up by an American public. This is not true. The 1970s and eighties were not a period of mass consumer adoption in consumer households.

Indeed, the bullish estimates of the late seventies and early eighties investors, entrepreneurs, and futurists fell quite short of the heady productions that the market would double annually, year after year after year. Personal ownership of computing systems barely touched double digits by the mid 1980s and was in only a third of US households by the late 1990s.

Computers pollinated more quickly in businesses and schools, which are American institutions, more vulnerable to appeals of how a computer might improve workplace operations or enhance educational competitiveness. Yet on the domestic front, the truth is that personal computers were not ubiquitous American household tech, and this was not simply an issue of price.

The computer was not the television or the radio or the microwave. It was not obvious or easy to use even in, in its most commercial forms, nor did it solve a specific problem. Rather, the computer's greatest strength was also at the moment, it emerged its greatest weakness. A computer was never anything more than what one made of it.

Reluctance, ambivalence, confusion, and frustration were recurrent responses even among those excited about computing's possibilities. How even a fraction of the American public came to be convinced to make something of the personal computer is not a simple tale of the ignorant masses, recognizing the power and importance of the so-called computer revolution.

Rather, it is a story of the tremendous effort undertaken to present computing as essential, helpful, safe and personal. In order to do so. This emerging technology was quickly fitted to a variety of mainstream cultural and political norms. Personal computing was celebrated as a means to preserve American global economic leadership.

A way to backtrack the rising de-industrialization of the seventies and advanced American entrepreneurialism. Industry stakeholders eagerly leveraged laws and lobbied the government to protect their financial interests, even at the cost of their consumers. In a surreal defiance of 1980s, demographics that marked an unprecedented rise in divorce and single mothers, the personal computer was endlessly positioned as the ideal addition to the nuclear family and the personal computer was heralded as a device that could save a cratering national education system, all in the service of upholding the cause of American exceptionalism.

These ideas were not manipulations or malignant growths that formed atop some pure essence of what personal computing once was or could have been. They were motivations there from the start that shaped what people imagined personal computing should be and would become. So for me, the Apple II is not the star of the show.

It's the spotlight that illuminates the stage. As such, this is certainly not a story of how the Apple II created the conditions for the computer revolution. You'll find no delirious claims of first hood here. No Hail Marys of historical relevance. Rather, this is a story about how the Apple II is an optimal historical object, a platform through which we can locate an account of the rise of personal computing in the US that is both technical and cultural, economic and social sufficiently, broad and generalizable, yet nonetheless particular special.

Specific by the end of 1983. The Apple II and two E Family had the largest library of programs of any microcomputer on the market. Just over 2000, meaning that its users could interact with the fullest range of possibilities in the micro computing world. This gamut of software offers a glimpse of what users did with their personal computers, or perhaps were tellingly what users hoped their computers might do.

Well, not all products were successful. The period from the late seventies to the mid eighties was one of unusually industrious experimentation and software production. Is mom and pop development houses cast about trying to an, trying to create software that could satisfy the question, what is the computer even good for?

The fact that this brief era supplied such a remarkable range of answers from presumably obvious contributions like spreadsheets, word processors, and games to remarkably niche artifacts like recipe organizers, bio rhythm charters, and sexual scenario generators. Illustrates that. Unlike popular accounts that would cast the inventors of these machines as profits of the information age, who externalized human desire computing was an object of remarkable contestation, unclear utility, futurist, fantasy, conservative imagination, and frequent aggravation for its users.

Software is an essential part of this story because it is through software that the hypothetical use case of the computer materialized. Through software consumers began to imagine themselves and their lives as available to enhancement through computing. Rather than treat the American consumer software industry as monolithic or centralized, this book splits off into five concurrent software histories each tied to a specific kind of software category and told through the story of an individual software product.

So this is a kind of outline of the chapter organization where I look at the categories of business games, utilities, home productivity, or home software and education. Each one followed by its respective case study. And so the gambit here is that the emergence of specific software categories is actually itself a history of what people imagined computers were for, how people used them, and how they imagined or were asked to imagine themselves as users in each case.

The purpose of various software categories started out in determinate in the mid to late seventies, but formalized by the mid eighties through the tangled effort of developers, publishers, journalists, investors, industry analysts, and users themselves. Tied up in these stories of economics and industry are people, the consumers whose preferences, desires, and needs emerges, aggregates tallied up in a sales chart.

Users who posed questions and expressed opinions and letters to the editor, the magazine owners, editors and journalists who mediated consumer moods and ambitions. And of course, the programmers, investors, marketers, and company founders who didn't just imagine a new world of software but made it, financed it and sold it.

So in some ways, this book may sound like a mango of contradictions. It claims to focus on a specific piece of hardware, the Apple ii, but is more generally about software. It purports in some fashion to be a history of use, but is maybe more accurately a history of American industrial formation. Each chapter is unique to the category and case it focuses on, yet there's a great deal of common terrain between them, corporate history, sales analysis, attention to how forms of privilege shape, what kinds of opportunities are available to what kinds of people at what time.

This book wants to focus on the Apple II industry, yet at many moments, it exceeds that boundary when it is not helpful for understanding the larger movements of the market. It is a story that must also move between inventors, consumers, and the emergent industry's role in a larger speculative economy.

The history of technology is full of moments when the creative and technical problem solving of an individual or group, technically materially matters, altering the terrain of what is technologically feasible. The early history of microcom computing is rife with wicked problems that some people were, for any number of reasons better at solving than others, as well as moments when someone's ability to read or anticipate consumer desire transformed their range of opportunities.

As for consumers themselves, I wanna give sincere consideration to people's curiosity and willingness to purchase expensive software they'd never seen. To dense and incomprehensible manuals, to write letters to computer magazines, begging for help to bang their hands against keyboards to break copyright law in order to make backup discs, all in the hope that micro computing would prove itself worth the trouble.

Yet these moments never happen in a vacuum. It is no accident that so many of the individuals in this book are straight, middle to upper class educated white men operating in relatively supportive personal environments. This book takes extra care to consider the background and structural advantages of individual historical actors sometimes with surprising conclusions.

For example, access to Harvard rather than Silicon Valley is a defining attribute for many of the entrepreneurs in this book. As such, this book does not capitulate in its certainty. The most of what made personal computing happen was the financial interests of an elite investor class who were less interested in producing a social revolution than they were in securing their financial standing in the midst of the economic uncertainty of the 1970s and eighties.

These tensions at times Irresolvable in the project of historical storytelling are what the Apple II Age is not the story of a computer, but a roving tour of the American Microcom computing milieu. I cannot imagine telling the story differently. Refusing a clean focus is central to the work. This is a harder historical task, less heroic, less obvious, but it also helps dismantle our sense that any technology past or present should be taken as inevitable, unchangeable, or a political understanding that computing has always been a story of context rather than triumphs, broadens our horizons of interpretation in the present.

So to understand all this, we need to stick with it. Embedded in the Apple II is a story at last, ready to move beyond the hagiographic accounts of the brilliant loaner. Who engineered it? Steve Wozniak, the charismatic bully who designed it. Steve Jobs and the Savvy Investor who financed it, Mike Marla, and get its hand dirty with a greater historical challenge.

Understanding the microcomputers impact on everything else.

[00:30:49] Finn Brunton: Hi everybody, I'm Finn Brunton. It's been my privilege for for many years to be a colleague and a friend of Laine Nooney. It's also been my great distress as a historian to be stricken with the acute jealousy. Of working with Lane, who is an absolutely extraordinary historian and a tremendous writer.

And I want to start with a question about that. A good book, a great book is A thousand Decisions. You know, it's a thousand Choices about like this word, not that word, this case, not that case, this example, not that example. And one of the things that's so striking about this book, which you've highlighted already in your reading.

Is that it's not about an artifact, which is to say that's an easy book to write, right? Because like an artifact tells your story for you, you just like look at it. Instead, it's a spotlight. It uses the Apple II as a spotlight through which an incredible array of things are displayed to us, right? We go into all these different spaces.

We go into private homes and couples and relationships. We go into car trunks and storefronts and offices, so. The question at the heart of the production of the book for me is how do you arrive at the choices that you make? How did you settle on these five categories and how did you choose the specific pieces of software that was sort of best representative, not just of these categories, but of then the larger stories that you're able to tell through them.

[00:32:07] Laine Nooney: Yeah. Gosh, that's a great question. In a few cases, these were choices of expediency. In other cases, one, the idea of telling the story of software through categories was that I really wanted to make an argument that computers, particularly at this time have, were always about a plurality of use, that there is no generalized history.

You can give of what it meant to be a computer user at this time. And we really needed, I think, just a lot more granularity in our history of this period. And so in some ways, the magazines particularly Soft Talk Magazine is a huge archive for me in this project because they were the first, and I would say most kind of rigorous magazine to run, like sales chart listings of different software.

And I kind of borrowed from them. So these. Categories were pulled from. How did Soft Talk, which was the first magazine to really try to intensively understand the interest of different users? How did they divide up what software was for? And in several of the chapters, you know, especially things like home or Utilities, there is this contestation that winds up happening in that magazine about what is home software.

And they have a whole conversation about what they think that means. And so, you know, business games, utilities. Home and education seemed to give me the broadest range. There is one category that I didn't talk about, which was word processing. Part of the reason I did not talk about that was one, there is already a monograph about word processing.

Matt Kirschenbaum wrote a book called Track Changes, a Literary History, word Processing. He's not doing the same thing I'm trying to do, but I really felt like. Matt had that area right and he took it. And also just this book had to have a word limit, man. My editor was not gonna allow like another, you know, chill 14,000 word chapter to show up.

And then with the software I chose, I wanted each one to be an interesting development story, you story, but also publisher story. So I wanted different pieces of software that showcased how software got made. Published and distributed in different ways. So we have the kind of like corporate partnership model of something like VisiCalc.

We have the mom and pop homegrown story of mystery house with locksmith and utilities. We have this kind of anonymous lost to time software developer. With print shop, we have a internal developer that spins out of a prominent publisher and with Snooper troops, we also get this guy who kind of gets contract hired into a company to produce software.

And so I wanted to showcase that. There is also no one story about how software got made. There's many different economic and interpersonal relationships, and so I wanted each piece of software to come from a different company and to give a real sense of the range of coverage that I could provide.

[00:34:57] Finn Brunton: Absolutely. And it really comes across right? Like, I mean for me, one of the great sins of trying to write history is teleology, right? Of like looking back and then creating a purposeful story that explains how things arrived at the present and part of what makes the stories that you chose and the material that you've dug up and documented in the interviews you conducted.

So striking is the role that they place on Yeah. Personality contingency circumstance. So I want to ask. You an irritating question in a way that I hope will use, its irritating this usefully because I've written a book about cryptocurrency and other things. You've written a book about the Apple ii, the thing we're Sick to Death of People asking us about is the future.

What does this hold for the future? How can this help us think about the future? What does the future hold? Could you share with us how working on this book has caused you to reflect, not on the future, but on the concept of the future? Like how do we use the future in tech? How do we use this idea of the future in this industry, in how it markets itself?

How have you come to think about it differently having created this book?

[00:36:03] Laine Nooney: Yeah, it was interesting. That's a, that's a great question. 'cause you know how much I hate being asked about speaker. Yes. Which is like, oh, can we stop it? And maybe to explain why I find that tedious is that it's just very quickly, it's not that like, I think there's nothing to offer, but I think it's very.

Strange to me that we always wanna instrumentalize history to be useful to the present and that we have very little like language or affinity or like ability to relate to it on its own terms. It's like, can it just be its own thing without us needing to like find lessons or case studies about, oh, if only I knew what this company did wrong, I could not make that mistake.

And it's like, is that the only reason the past has value? Right. I think underneath it all, I really believe in the project of history is about to. Developing an ethical relationship to the past, and that ethical relationship is like a personal philosophical space that you can expand out from into other kinds of relationships in your life.

That's my wild historical method. The question of what I've learned about the future is that like, you know, I was writing big chunks of this book at the same time, like the Metaverse was popping off. It felt very similar in some ways in that I think we could make an easy argument that sort of the engines of late capitalism really fire up in the late seventies, early eighties, and you do see this ravenous investment discourse that kind of shapes around computing and about its inevitability, about the fact that it's going to save us about all of these magical things it's going to do.

Right. You watch that fail and then you watch it try to be resuscitated and that's almost on loop and it felt like I was watching the exact same thing happen in in the contemporary moment, is that capital needs spaces of investment. In order to like expand itself and it will find them and sort of territorialized them at any cost.

And in that sense it can very much rob technologies of what their potential might be because there's so much engineering around this idea of growth, right? We have to have growth and personal computing couldn't deliver growth. It didn't, we don't really get growth in personal computing maybe until the nineties, right?

This is not television, which went from 4% to 89% of US households in a decade. Like computing was a slow hard sell. This wasn't the smartphone. And, but the demand that it had to scale was like almost a, we refuse to let this fail kind of thing. Which, you know, we've seen this with VR for 30 years. Right. I mean, one of the things it's taught me about.

The future is that we kind of refuse to learn the lesson of letting things go.

[00:38:46] Finn Brunton: very well said. Yes. So actually, what you just said addresses a couple of questions around things like arguments for engaging in computer history beyond nostalgia, why people should learn about systems they never personally used and so on.

I wanted to throw a, a couple of more general questions at you. One is, what's a piece of eccentric weird left field software that you've wanted to write about but could not, either because of space or because it just didn't fit?

[00:39:12] Laine Nooney: That's a great question. I mean, there's a non eccentric answer to that question, which is the thing that I could not get into, but I really wished I would've preferred to write about in the games chapter.

I wrote about Mystery House because I knew so much about Sierra Online and I needed to be able to write. I just would. I did it for speed's sake, right? I basically had that kind of history con, that historical content already down. It was already written. It was easy for me. To produce that chapter. If I'd had my druthers on what I think the actual iconic software of that genre, of that category is, I probably would've chosen a sub logic flight simulator.

I would've loved to write that chapter about that particular piece of software. I think that probably either the recipe software or the bio rhythm stuff, I think the bio rhythms. I have feel like I have barely grazed what 1970s bio rhythm discourse is. And it's just the wildest stuff, right? I mean, like, you gotta look this up on Wikipedia, right?

This idea that each of us have like three different wavelengths we're always vibing on. And do you know about this, Finn? I feel like you have to know about bio rhythms, right? Yeah, yeah. Intellectual, emotional, physical. Is that right? And that, yeah, that you're supposed to track them into pseudoscience.

[00:40:27] Jason Scott: You try to find when you get a triple high, when all your crests align and then you can, you know, go do a job interview or, yeah, yeah.

[00:40:33] Laine Nooney: Yeah. And there's a lot of concern of like, well this plane crashed 'cause the pilot was at a triple low, you know? Yeah. It's like astrology, like on, you know, cocaine or something. It's really messy. I would love to be able to write about. Early quantification of the self stuff, but it felt too niche. It really only fits in the home chapter.

It was a little too niche and print shop was just such a good story, especially when I, like once I tracked those two guys down and I found out that they were also like a gay couple living in San Francisco in their early eighties, it was just like too good not to make that. And print shop is so iconic, right?

Yeah. I mean, it's the cover. This is the computer that's the computer icon from print shop. That's why there's not an apple on the cover of the book, in case anyone's reed about it.

[00:41:19] Jason Scott: So that actually, this segues wonderfully into one larger question, which is are there any genres of software from the period of the Apple II that don't exist anymore have radically changed?

[00:41:30] Laine Nooney: That is a fantastic question. Probably we still have business, we still have games. We still have education. We still have word processors. I mean, I think. Utilities, and maybe it's not changed. Maybe in some ways utility software has stayed the most the same. Right? It's, it's still kind of the quaint thing about utility software.

In the late seventies, in the eighties was that it was like, it was niche software for niche users, and so it never got exorbitant prices. The people who designed it were never covered in magazines. They were never software rock stars. You know, it was a much kind of quieter, community oriented mode of software production and.

I think the question now of like what a utility is, is probably quite proliferated and exploded and complex, but they don't have a commercial legacy in the way that many of these other software categories do. And maybe actually a little inspiring in that, you know,

[00:42:26] Jason Scott: there really is the humble utility. I have a question about the last part of the book.

The End where. You actually go to a, to a, a kind of flea market. And I was wondering if you could just say a little bit about the close of the book for the close of this talk about why you went there and what you learned and why you used that to end this book.

[00:42:45] Laine Nooney: Yeah. The epilogue is called on the consignment floor and it's about my visit to the vintage computing festival east, uh, which Jason drove me to.

So Jason figures somewhat prominently in the middle of that little, little epilogue and. I was told I had to write a formal academic conclusion and I was like, Ugh, fine, I'll summarize the book for anyone who didn't read it or whatever. But I felt like there was a more, I would say, I don't know if emotional is quite the word I wanna use, but there was like something I wanted to ruminate on about the nature of memory, nostalgia, about our desire to keep these technologies alive, but only in a very, very specific way.

The kind of narrowness that I find in a lot of like. Hobbyist fixation around these, which is like, how many times can we repeat how much ram a computer had? And think that that's knowledge, right? Like what do we think that information is and what are these acts of remembrance we do at these kinds of events?

like if you were to enter an like that, what is the historical argument it is making about the past and the present? I sort of end by going around the consignment floor, which is where everything, the same products that and the exhibitions of the Retro Computing festival are like.

Copiously documented and on display and, and everyone's got their like cool moed software running on, on the consignment floor. Everything is just kind of abandoned on these tables with like price tags written on it. And there was so much Apple equipment. It was stunning, like maybe a third of the entire room.

It was just full of Apple equipment and it just felt to me. To really get at something about how I really wanted, I think, at the end of the book, for us to have a sense that like we have many complex emotions about it, but I think we can't let those override our understanding. That these are like massive capital.

Like ma, like I sort of wanna end on this idea that like, these are massive capital intensive industries that are meant to design things for us to throw away with like grave economic and environmental consequences. And, and not to be like a moralist, but, but just to say like. What is our nostalgia doing that we kind of struggle to, to grasp that?

And why do our histories so often feel the same? Right? What is the repetition compulsion that we're sort of stuck in when it comes to the history of computing? And I say at the very end that the book is, it's intended to make you uncomfortable, and it's intended to give you a history of computing that does not suit or fit our idea of the way that history is supposed to make us feel.

I think a lot of us don't talk about the fact that like what we want from our history of computing is a feeling and that I use that epilogue to kind of play with the assumptions around our emotional expectations of history. Maybe that's how I would say it. Yeah.

[00:45:43] Finn Brunton: The content of the book is always fascinating in its own right, and so Lane sends you down the path of going like, oh yeah, print shop. Oh, that was everything wasn't it? And just sends you down this line. But just like it's so easy to fall for the action choreography of a movie, the incredible use of the lenses gets lost in all that, like how the person worked there.

And there's a lens that Lane uses in this book that I think. Part of what's so great about this thing is that even though it's 2023, it's still a brand new or newish way, is the way in which lane approaches this computer history. 'cause so much of it tends to focus on the capitalist numbers. There were a thousand sold the first year there were 50,000 sold the 10th year.

We all learned a lot, but lane's more asking about like, okay, all right, this is nice, but what's this doing to the humans? And right up at the top, pita asked almost immediately. I'm curious about the arguments for engaging with computing history that go beyond the nostalgia. Why should younger people learn about this subject?

Why is Lane, who is somebody's, you know, mild idea, five years to go to be born? Talking about this system, like how did you find a foothold in it and how should younger people find a foothold in talking about the Apple II?

[00:47:04] Laine Nooney: Yeah. On the one hand, I think, you know, why do we study anything from a time period we weren't there for, right?

I mean, let's look at, right. We can, uh, ask that question of any number of things, right? But I actually think in that sense, if you know. Histories of computing actually have maybe more value than many other old stuff. We might look at the history of, given the absolutely kind of enclosing role of computing in our lives.

And so I've been teaching history of computing to, you know, 18, 19, 20 year olds for quite a while now, and there is a real. Public literacy problem with what young people understand computers are. They do not understand how they actually work. They don't understand what they do. They don't, they don't even understand how they function at a basic technological level, differences between hardware and software.

And they don't understand where they come from. And in many cases, they think, I remember I once had a student come up to me with her smartphone after I had given a lecture, maybe on the history of computing up until like the Altair and. She kind of held her smartphone out to me and she was like, so they weren't trying to make this.

I was like, no, no, no, no one was trying to make you a smartphone. Right. And, and you, the, the idea that suddenly their whole relationship to computing can be kind of radically decentered. That they can begin to separate object in corporation. That they realize these histories exist. For decades prior to their being born.

Right? I mean, when they even realized that Apple goes back to the 1970s or that I had a student gasp when I said Steve Jobs was alive in the 1970s. Uh, she just didn't believe it. Right. And I think in a way there is a kind of foundational technical literacy. Young people lack because, I mean, there's all sorts of problems with what people get taught and when, but we've kind of abdicated on teaching them how the digital world works, and this is one part of that.

And man, do they light up in a history class once we start getting to computing. Like I, I actually, this is actually, it's actually the easiest part to sell them on because it feels like a world they have never, ever, ever thought about, and they are shocked by every minute of it.

[00:49:23] Chris Freeland: There, there's one question you, you kind of touched on it again, but I think maybe it might be worth teasing out a bit, is what were the differences in the Apple II line and the product line?

So the two E, the two C, the two Gs, was any one of those more of a, a breakout star and did one of them have more of an impact than the others?

[00:49:39] Laine Nooney: Yeah, so we're probably talking about either the two plus or the two E. So you have the original Apple II comes out in 1977. I believe it's, you know, don't crucify me if I slip a year here.

The Apple II plus I believe comes out. 1979, maybe 78, with the floppy disc, and I believe they swap out the smaller memory bricks for larger ones. So there's more ram in the machine. And that becomes really critical to why the Apple II is the machine for VisiCalc. 'cause VisiCalc just, it needed a level of robustness at the level of the hardware that like the TRS 80 and the Commodore pack could not do upon release.

Then you get the Apple II E and one of the more. Interesting observations I read from industry analysts in the early to mid eighties was that, you know, there was some, some corrections, I think in the bios or the firmware that they did in the two E, but they also made a few other kind of changes to the system, but fundamentally kept it compatible.

So rather than producing a new system. What that meant was that if you bought a two E in 1982, what you were paying for wasn't, it wasn't the best deal in terms of hardware, but what you were buying was entry into 2000 pieces of software. And so the longevity of the Apple II had to do with using that central architecture as a tent pole for the longevity of the model itself.

Many of these other companies kind of. You know, we've got, we've got the Commodore Pet, then we've got the Vic 20, then we've got the C 64, right? They're changing their models and so all that software just goes right down the toilet, right? It can't be, it's software released in 1980s, you know, for this system isn't compatible on that because Apple really stuck.

To a central architecture around, built around the Apple ii, they got a longer, a much longer shelf life and that that is the reason why you get the spike in popularity of the Apple II going into the eighties. It was not the bestselling computer in 1977, the TRS 80 was. But then Radio Shack had a number of proprietary issues that caused it to kind of backslide and Apple was able to capitalize on that because they were not changing the central architecture of their machine every few years.

The Apple II C, the C was for Compact. Compact, I believe. I don't talk about the C in the book much 'cause it's not a hardware history. Right. But it had like a little handle. It was like really tightly. It was almost supposed to be a kind of portable computer, so you could carry it around as if it was like a little purse or something.

The GSI am actually blanking on. The primary configuration changes with the gs. I've maybe spent a little more time looking at the Apple three, which was Apple's very short-lived attempt to enter the business market, so they were trying to make a business computer that could kind of compete on par with the IBM pc and that just, you know, that did not work out well for them.

[00:52:45] Finn Brunton: Whenever I deal with people and I have to talk about those periods, especially now from the point of view of 30 years ago, there's several things that people always forget and I, I don't wanna take this over, but the two number one things is like when I spoke to the Infocom people, the text adventure people, they said that easily one third to one half of their.

Software, mail order sales or hint book sales, I think was what they were able to track. It was going to doctors and lawyers and professors because those were the only people who could like really financially justify having these insane machines and that if you run for inflation and Apple II, if you're buying your Apple II off the lot, 79 80, you're paying the equivalent of about $4,000.

So. What I know from my point of view is that the Apple II was an elite piece of machinery. The only reason it doesn't get relegated to the dust bin of crazy high-end, you know, Osborne and other high-end business machines is because of their brilliant educational outreach. Which means a lot of people, even though very few owned them, they remember them 'cause they remember with their six friends having the copied version of Ultima playing after school in the lab while the teacher reads a book and they equate that with their owning an apple back then.

I'm playing Chop Lifter with my buddies when in fact, no, your parents did not blow the price of a small passenger van so that you could play Chop Lifter in the living room. Anyway,

[00:54:26] Chris Freeland: that was my experience as well. I mean, I think some of the reasons why I had such an affinity for the Apple II was that my, one of my best friends had one, and so we could swap software and play games together, and that that nostalgic feel is as much about being with my friend as it was sitting around the computer.

As we're coming here to the end, Jason Scott, if you would be interested in putting forward final words to sort of bring us to a close.

[00:54:50] Finn Brunton: That's me. Final words. Boy, first of all, we did this in person and it was a fantastic time and I ate way too much steak afterwards and it was a really, you know, it was wonderful to have lane within the confines of the archive, one of the really nice pivots that I said the archive has done.

Is that we have really opened up the building, which used to be a bustling 50 to 100 people under the roof to a ghost town, to a staging area for actual interaction of both the literary and online and offline worlds kind of interacting in there. And this is another extension of that I did not know when I joined the archive in 2011 that I would eventually end up at the Cyber 92nd Street Y.

But I really like the fact that it's been that. One of the really interesting side effects of the archive is how you get these very interesting cross pollinations. You end up with going to a meeting. It's supposed to be about anything from crypto to a new book to a political concern. And you bump into a person and someone goes, who's that?

And it's like, oh yeah. You know how like keyboards have numbers on them? It's that guy that he just went by, he just stopped by. He's just here and like that. That's such a beautiful bonus. But in the realm of like this particular piece of work, it is so easy. It is so time worn to fall into the gutter, the, the gully of, uh oh, we're talking about the Apple II.

Let's share about the fact that they ran slower, that there were interesting games that we remember and that people used them. And part of the whole point of Lane's book is that this is a different. Whole approach to it. You know, an overview of the social effect or the aspects of what the meanings of our locksmith or of print shop, to me is just not out there.

Somebody asked about other books, and I can quote you books. You know, there's, there's a great book called Twisty Little Passages, which is about the literary aspect of interactive fiction, and you can find a few other books, but this kind of interrogation is just refreshingly weirdly. You know, brought up in this book in a way that just hasn't been there before.

And I'm hoping that between the distance, this is a vanguard of, of additional ones. We have thousands and thousands and thousands of Apple, two programs emulated at the archive, which is a project I've been involved in for about a decade where you can go there, press a button, and suddenly you've booted up.

An emulation of an Apple II in the browser. I'll just leave that there. It's called Software Library Apple, but that's just to make the pretty little pictures come up. People have also been digitizing unbelievable reams of manuals and books and catalogs and magazines, and so throughout the archive there are.

I mean, everything from VHS tapes instructing you on how to use apples through to reference documents that Apple did in human interface design to manuals for games and programs that just never saw the light of day beyond a handful of sales. And it's, it's really magical that we live in, in that way. And so on top of that beautiful Sunday, we now have the sprinkles, the whipped cream of this intelligent, wonderful book.

[00:58:12] Chris Freeland: A big thank you to our speakers, to Laine, to Finn, to Jason for joining us today, for walking us through this trip back through a very important part of computing history. Thank you all and have a great day.

Thanks for joining us on this journey into the future of knowledge. Be sure to follow the show. New episodes, drop every other Wednesday with bold ideas, fresh insights, and the voices shaping tomorrow.