Great article.
It’s wild to look back at 1977/1978 and realize how suddenly the personal computer era exploded into the mainstream. The PET, TRS-80, and Apple II all hit the market within months of each other, and while hobbyists had already been tinkering with machines like the Altair, IMSAI, KIM-1, and Apple I, this was the moment computers truly became “consumer” products.
From a technical perspective, the timing made sense—there was a foundation of microprocessor-based systems and a growing community of enthusiasts. But for the general public, it felt like computers went from obscure to omnipresent overnight. They were suddenly on TV, in magazines, featured in books, and even depicted in movies and shows. That cultural shift was massive. For many of us, it marked the beginning of having computers in our homes—something that’s never changed since.
I appreciated the article’s attention to detail too. The bit about the TRS-80 monitor being repurposed from an existing product (with a "Mercedes Silver" color to boot), and the PET’s sheet metal casing being a practical choice rather than a design one—those are the kinds of behind-the-scenes decisions that rarely get spotlighted but say a lot about how fast things were moving back then.
It’s truly remarkable to me that in the late 70s/early 80s it was considered that programming your own computer in basic was not something that required special skills or technical ability.
It just goes to show how far out expectations have dropped, with basic human ingenuity and capability for expression having been crippled by reliance on increasingly advanced automation with increasingly simple interfaces.
Humanity is not going to fare well in the world of pervasive synthetic intelligence with simple language interfaces. I fear we will see an unprecedented dumbing down of the population, a new “dark age” perhaps.
And yet, people struggle; I read a post earlier about someone who tried to get elderly people onboarded with their iDevices, and they couldn't make heads or tails from it, already struggling with the PIN input. Mind you I'm sure they would've struggled with basic and everything in between too.
I grew up in this era, owned a VIC-20, and it's simply not true that many people were doing anything useful with the rather awful BASIC dialects that shipped in microcomputers. They were just a pain to work with -- no real editor, etc and often missing the ability to even use the graphics etc functions of the computer they shipped on (esp on Commodore devices). Professional developers mostly wrote to assembly.
We did BASIC (& Logo) programming in my elementary school, on Apple IIs. It's rare anybody got past basic "hunt the wumpus" programs.
There were program listings for simple games in the back of computer magazines of the era. Invariably the better ones were full of DATA statements at the end that were bits of 6502 or Z80 machine code to do the "real" work. Woe befell you if you typed them in slightly wrong.
Later, mostly in the "16-bit" era, we got structured BASIC varieties with better/real editors, and that definitely changed things. I got a lot done in GFA Basic on my Atari ST. But it's debatable if GW-BASIC, GFA Basic, (and later Visual Basic) etc were "really" BASICs... they were more like ... permissive and weird Pascal.
No, it's that those expectations were wrong in the first place.
I spent a fair amount of time in the early-mid 80's tutoring engineering students in Computer Science (basically a CS101 for non-CS students). A fair number of otherwise very smart people simply couldn't grasp the concepts beyond the very basics.
I think it's the opposite: our expectations have RISEN to an extent that it's harder for beginners to get started.
One of my sons was interested in learning programming, but the goal he envisioned was to write an AAA game. It was rather discouraging to have to tell him that it would take a minimum of 5 years (realistically more) to get to the level where he could consider getting hired into a team of hundreds to work on such a game.
In contrast, the first computer I had access to had a whopping 7167 bytes of RAM to work with, and a 25x40 character screen. Correspondingly, our ambitions were much more limited.
I recently started reading back issues of Dr. Dobb's magazine (the internet archive has issues until about 1990: <https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal?and%5B%5D=creat...>), and many articles seem to fall into the categories of either being fairly simple (mostly games), or visions of overly ambitious projects that likely never came to fruition (a multi user UNIX system implemented on an 8080 system with 32K RAM and a floppy drive, to be written by somebody who encountered his first computer two years earlier…).
To be sure, there were also quite sophisticated programs, such as a 6502 floating point package co-developed by Steve Wozniak.
I am from that era, so I might add something that perhaps is not obvious at all nowadays.
The microcomputer explosion gave birth to an large number of actual paper magazines and at least 50% of their content were... actual source listing you had to manually retype.
Basic was already fragmented in a billion different flavors and dialects (especially if your program had any kind of graphics) so the more ambitious user could also try their hand at translating a listing from - say - TSR-80 to Apple Basic.
In any case you were directly exposed to the actual source code, and tweaking or experimenting with it felt very natural.
> “ Three factors were required to join this holy ensemble: the technical expertise to design a capable and reliable microcomputer, a nose for the larger business opportunity latent in the hobby computer market…”
I think the same opportunity exists now in the hobby robot market.
I never used or even seen those computers, yet from pure curiosity I picked up 6502 CPU(Apple 2, Commodore 64, NES) assembly as a hobby project.
Its surprisingly easy, even for dumb person like me.
Great learning tool if you dream of building your own CPU architecture:)
> yet from pure curiosity I picked up 6502 CPU(Apple 2, Commodore 64, NES) assembly as a hobby project.
I cut my programming teeth on an Acorn Electron (a somewhat cut-down BBC Micro) then later a Master128. The fact that the BASIC ROM included a decent multi-pass assembler was great for learning the deeper workings of the machine and such things in general. Being able to easily mix BASIC and assembly provided good lessons wrt choosing where optimisations were worth bothering with and where you should just stick with BASIC to save dev time. Those machines were also based around variants of the 6502.
Surprised the Atari 8-bit series was left out. It was arguably one of the first home computers designed with an appliance-like philosophy, rather than the typical open, hobbyist-oriented design of its time. Features like ROM cartridges, the Atari SIO serial bus (which even influenced the design of USB), multiple joystick ports that doubled as input for external switches or sensors, and support for smart peripherals like disk drives and drawing tablets set it apart.
I still have my Atari 800 — it was my first real step into learning 6502 machine language.
There is a .. "new Wave" (?) .. happening around microcomputers associated with that era .. in the modern context. I think the reason this article has impact, is that this 'new Wave' of microcomputers is tangible, visible, and not just on the horizon but happening every single day, in a kind of quiet revolution/resurgence of platforms once considered 'outdated', suddenly becoming relevant again.
You can still use these machines - this holy trinity of computers still get regular software made for them - and as platforms, there is a resurgence happening.
The ZX Spectrum Next. The myriad FPGA-based consoles that allow full access to entire "retired architectures". The Apollo A6000 'next-gen Amiga' .. all of these new 'hobbyist systems' fulfil the original need that the 'trinity' systems proposed. There are, literally, hundreds of different ways to get a modern reproduction of the 'second wave' systems.
So I imagine a day, in the not too distant future, that really useful applications are released for the 'next-gen 8-bit hobby microcomputer' systems. Put a well-fitted Apple II environment in a wrist-watch, and watch the devs arrive .. ;)
By way of example, I have in my (admittedly extensive) retro computing collection, an Oric-1/Atmos system that was used consistently, every single week for 40 years, to record motorbike club membership details, statistics, visit logs, and so on. For 40 years that system was doing its job as an on-site membership database and fuel log. That it was offline and only physically accessible was a feature, not a bug.
I think there are plenty of other places that the modern, new-school 'retro-' microcomputers can find their setting - just a little bit above embedded, perhaps, side-wise to the mobile, and very definitely competing alongside desktop in terms of active user experience.
Not to mention, all the 'new retro consoles' are an awesome market for games and entertainment, of course ..
> the original Apple Computer (later called the Apple I)
All the original manuals/ads/etc (that I can find online) called it the Apple-1 (Arabic, not Roman). I think Woz was already working on the Apple II by the time the Apple I was released.
16 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 46.5 ms ] threadFrom a technical perspective, the timing made sense—there was a foundation of microprocessor-based systems and a growing community of enthusiasts. But for the general public, it felt like computers went from obscure to omnipresent overnight. They were suddenly on TV, in magazines, featured in books, and even depicted in movies and shows. That cultural shift was massive. For many of us, it marked the beginning of having computers in our homes—something that’s never changed since.
I appreciated the article’s attention to detail too. The bit about the TRS-80 monitor being repurposed from an existing product (with a "Mercedes Silver" color to boot), and the PET’s sheet metal casing being a practical choice rather than a design one—those are the kinds of behind-the-scenes decisions that rarely get spotlighted but say a lot about how fast things were moving back then.
It just goes to show how far out expectations have dropped, with basic human ingenuity and capability for expression having been crippled by reliance on increasingly advanced automation with increasingly simple interfaces.
Humanity is not going to fare well in the world of pervasive synthetic intelligence with simple language interfaces. I fear we will see an unprecedented dumbing down of the population, a new “dark age” perhaps.
Just because it's a skill you value doesn't mean its a skill others value
We did BASIC (& Logo) programming in my elementary school, on Apple IIs. It's rare anybody got past basic "hunt the wumpus" programs.
There were program listings for simple games in the back of computer magazines of the era. Invariably the better ones were full of DATA statements at the end that were bits of 6502 or Z80 machine code to do the "real" work. Woe befell you if you typed them in slightly wrong.
Later, mostly in the "16-bit" era, we got structured BASIC varieties with better/real editors, and that definitely changed things. I got a lot done in GFA Basic on my Atari ST. But it's debatable if GW-BASIC, GFA Basic, (and later Visual Basic) etc were "really" BASICs... they were more like ... permissive and weird Pascal.
I spent a fair amount of time in the early-mid 80's tutoring engineering students in Computer Science (basically a CS101 for non-CS students). A fair number of otherwise very smart people simply couldn't grasp the concepts beyond the very basics.
One of my sons was interested in learning programming, but the goal he envisioned was to write an AAA game. It was rather discouraging to have to tell him that it would take a minimum of 5 years (realistically more) to get to the level where he could consider getting hired into a team of hundreds to work on such a game.
In contrast, the first computer I had access to had a whopping 7167 bytes of RAM to work with, and a 25x40 character screen. Correspondingly, our ambitions were much more limited.
I recently started reading back issues of Dr. Dobb's magazine (the internet archive has issues until about 1990: <https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal?and%5B%5D=creat...>), and many articles seem to fall into the categories of either being fairly simple (mostly games), or visions of overly ambitious projects that likely never came to fruition (a multi user UNIX system implemented on an 8080 system with 32K RAM and a floppy drive, to be written by somebody who encountered his first computer two years earlier…).
To be sure, there were also quite sophisticated programs, such as a 6502 floating point package co-developed by Steve Wozniak.
The microcomputer explosion gave birth to an large number of actual paper magazines and at least 50% of their content were... actual source listing you had to manually retype. Basic was already fragmented in a billion different flavors and dialects (especially if your program had any kind of graphics) so the more ambitious user could also try their hand at translating a listing from - say - TSR-80 to Apple Basic.
In any case you were directly exposed to the actual source code, and tweaking or experimenting with it felt very natural.
I think the same opportunity exists now in the hobby robot market.
Great learning tool if you dream of building your own CPU architecture:)
Try it!
I cut my programming teeth on an Acorn Electron (a somewhat cut-down BBC Micro) then later a Master128. The fact that the BASIC ROM included a decent multi-pass assembler was great for learning the deeper workings of the machine and such things in general. Being able to easily mix BASIC and assembly provided good lessons wrt choosing where optimisations were worth bothering with and where you should just stick with BASIC to save dev time. Those machines were also based around variants of the 6502.
I still have my Atari 800 — it was my first real step into learning 6502 machine language.
You can still use these machines - this holy trinity of computers still get regular software made for them - and as platforms, there is a resurgence happening.
The ZX Spectrum Next. The myriad FPGA-based consoles that allow full access to entire "retired architectures". The Apollo A6000 'next-gen Amiga' .. all of these new 'hobbyist systems' fulfil the original need that the 'trinity' systems proposed. There are, literally, hundreds of different ways to get a modern reproduction of the 'second wave' systems.
So I imagine a day, in the not too distant future, that really useful applications are released for the 'next-gen 8-bit hobby microcomputer' systems. Put a well-fitted Apple II environment in a wrist-watch, and watch the devs arrive .. ;)
By way of example, I have in my (admittedly extensive) retro computing collection, an Oric-1/Atmos system that was used consistently, every single week for 40 years, to record motorbike club membership details, statistics, visit logs, and so on. For 40 years that system was doing its job as an on-site membership database and fuel log. That it was offline and only physically accessible was a feature, not a bug.
I think there are plenty of other places that the modern, new-school 'retro-' microcomputers can find their setting - just a little bit above embedded, perhaps, side-wise to the mobile, and very definitely competing alongside desktop in terms of active user experience.
Not to mention, all the 'new retro consoles' are an awesome market for games and entertainment, of course ..
All the original manuals/ads/etc (that I can find online) called it the Apple-1 (Arabic, not Roman). I think Woz was already working on the Apple II by the time the Apple I was released.