Time article about Jobs

From: Scott Stevens <sastevens_at_earthlink.net>
Date: Thu Apr 22 21:56:48 2004

On Fri, 23 Apr 2004 00:14:28 +0100 (BST)
ard_at_p850ug1.demon.co.uk (Tony Duell) wrote:

> > Wozniak was at HP - IIRC he tried to get HP interested in the home
> > computer market - they just laughed and told him to get back to work...
>
> I've seen this comment before, and it's rather unfair on HP.
>
> At the time, HP were known for making some of _the best_ measuring
> instruments. They were not really interested in the mass market. Their
> aim was to sell the best, albeit at a high price.
>
> They'd been making desktop computers that ran BASIC for
> about 5 years when the Apple ][ came out. Having used the HP's of that
> period and the Apple ][, I am convinced that the HP was the better
> design, better built, although it probably cost 10 times as much.
>

The Apple 1 is likely what HP turned down. The Apple 2 came later.

The Apple 1 was a plain single-board computer. It shipped with no keyboard, no power transformer as a bare circuit board. It shipped this way because Apple deemed it too expensive to ship a heavy power transformer, and expected their typical customer to be able to source their own. It had the linear regulator and everything else for the power supply on the main board.

The keyboard interface provided was a bare 'strobed parallel ASCII' keyboard input. There was a 'scratchpad' area on the board to add an inverter or needed logic if your keyboard had the wrong logic polarity.

The Apple 1 was NOT the 'hacker proof' design that Jobs boasted about with the Macintosh (words which made me boycott the Mac entirely for over a decade after hearing Jobs speak them at a press event). Apple had already become a 'different company' by the Mac Launch. The Apple 1 was something totally different, and it was nothing that Hewlett-Packard could have sold. It was actually the sort of 'cool stuff' that many of us on this list would have liked. I would have bought one if I could have afforded it at the time.
Received on Thu Apr 22 2004 - 21:56:48 BST