[pyre]

It's more of a "Apple created the home computer all by themselves at a time when absolutely no one else was creating home computers. They invented the home computer from scratch," myth. In a decade or so, we're likely to see the same thing about Apple regarding the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Apple's 'marketing buzz' spiraling out of control within the general public until the statement becomes something akin to, "Apple invented everything that they've ever used from scratch... even their office furniture."

[crusso]

Yeah, I don't really know how to deal with your hyperbole. Who is passing along this myth that Apple invented the personal computer from scratch? Maybe you should add in that Woz invented electricity while you're spinning a tale?

[vidarh]

Perhaps that was hyperbole, but read this article for example, and you can see the impression it leaves about relative historical importance:

http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa121598.htm

Yet, at the time, nobody really cared about Apple. The two big sellers where the TRS-80 and the Commodore PET. Apple was a distant third who most people thought was too expensive. It was relevant only because it was the only third place contender.

TRS-80 and PET were both pre-ordered in higher volumes than what Apple sold per year in the first couple of years.

But they get the vast majority of the article, including a lot of attention for the (for the purpose of that article) irrelevant Apple I (it was sold as a kit, sold in the low hundreds, and had plenty of competition which the article ignores).

The worst outright error in the article is to claim the 6502 was designed by Rockwell - of course it was designed by Chuck Peddle, Bill Mensch and a few others at MOS Technologies (Bill Mensch incidentally still produce new models of it). Peddle was the person who personally got the 6502 off the ground and was responsible for the low price point - without Peddle, the Apple computers would've looked a whole lot different...

And the PET entry gets an incorrect NOTE about Commodore's start of the PET project which really only serves to diminish it's role (in reality, Commodore had bought MOS long before, and it was Chuck Peddle who had the responsibility to do a new computer and wanted to talk to Apple as an option before they decided whether to go ahead and do their own machine - the note doesn't match what either Chuck Peddle or Woz says about it, though Peddle and Woz have very different accounts of the discussions). It also makes it seem like Commodore had nothing, but Peddle had designed numerous boards around the 6502, including the KIM computer.

If you're going to insert notes like that, why's there no note about how Commodore bid for a deal with Radio Shack to be their computer supplier, but Roach at Radio Shack opted to have his team develop his own instead? It's a similar story, yet somehow it's important only when it involves Apple.

This is pretty par for the course for coverage of the start of the home computer era. There are few outright errors in that article, but it's biased in a way that contributes to making Apple seem far more important.

If you want to get a better idea of the mythmaking around Apple, I suggest Brian Bagnalls "Commodore: A company on the edge", which contrasts a lot of the coverage about Apple with contemporary sources and eyewitness accounts.

[epo]

Citation(s) needed. Who said this? When? Where?