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I think you're underestimating just how dominant the Apple II was in the late seventies to mid eighties, at least in the US.. Apple made the machine until 1993 (and the model I'm talking about isn't even the 16-bit IIgs, but the 8-bit IIe) because they were still selling profitably up until then. Every school had them and every parent who could afford one got one for their kids. Commodore 64s were cheaper, sure, but had a reputation as a game machine and couldn't run Apple software or even exchange files with Apples. Better to buy an Apple II clone if you couldn't afford a real one. Not that there weren't games for the Apple II... there were plenty. Most of the biggest game publishers of the early micro era, including one or two that still exist today, developed for the Apple II first. Sierra On-Line, Broderbund, Electronic Arts. Programming an arcade game on the Apple II was so challenging, what with its bizarre screen memory layout, weird color scheme, and lack of hardware sprites, that many Apple II game programmers viewed programming for the C64 or Atari 400/800 (which used the same CPU but had actual graphics and sound hardware) as akin to cheating. Some of the most creative games of the era arose from these technical limitations. And hordes of young programmers cut their teeth learning how to remove the copy protection from these games so they could trade them for free games others had cracked. The guys who started id Software met at an Apple II publisher. It was as dominant in business right up until the IBM PC took off and even for some time after, thanks to VisiCalc, the first killer app. When Apple released the integrated software package AppleWorks in 1984 it shot to the top of the sales charts. Not merely the Apple II charts, but the industry charts for all computers including the PC. It stayed there for months and served as a foundation of a healthy third-party development ecosystem for years. The profits from the Apple II line paid for the development of the Lisa and then the Macintosh, and kept the company afloat until the Mac was profitable. Yeah, the Apple II was a big deal. I got in a bit late myself (I stared my first job in the industry in 1990) but it was still the foundation of my technology career. |