Paul Laughton and his wife Kathleen O'Brien, also a programmer, worked to finish BASIC for Apple:
“One time we were over at Apple and complaining about how big it was getting. Steve made some comment about, ‘It shouldn’t be a problem,’ and my wife grabbed him by the collar, and pushed him against the wall.
‘Steve, this is a problem. You need to listen.’ And he listened.”
As work on the 99/4 and 1978 started, Texas Instruments recorded $2.5b in annual revenue, and the minnow Apple jumped to $7m.
When TI cancelled the 99/4 in 1983, it had nearly doubled earnings to $4.5b while Apple vaulted to $1b in annual revenue, a 13,750% rise.
Tom Ryan recalls:
“I quit HP for Apple and it was a step backward. The engineers were programming the MacOS on Macs! Crazy. I'd stepped away from an HP workstation with 32 Mb RAM, a large monitor, the latest processor, and I’m being asked to code on this little 8-inch Mac screen with no memory.
The upside was that the Mac OS team was small and tight. In meetings, we could all fit on the floor. Everybody knew everybody. The opportunity to change the world was there.”
HIG's Tom Erickson recalls:
To set the scene, this was at a time before Apple turned into a vampire ecosystem where everything that they do tries to suck money out of people. It sounds naive, 'Computers are the bicycle of the mind', but Apple was very idealistic then and we were on a mission. Whatever you could do to make something attractive, engaging, and understandable for people, we were keen on that. And nothing else.
So what kept me sane on my latest Transatlantic flight was "inventing the future" by John Buck. ( @hellojohnbuck)
It's an absolutely fascinating read about apple hardware development, especially around the 80s.
If you can spare $10 you may as well grab the epub file!
DosFox
Chris Silverman 🌻
