Article 24908 of comp.sys.apple2: Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2 Path: winternet.com!io.org!news.interlog.com!usenet.eel.ufl.edu!news.mathworks.com!tank.news.pipex.net!pipex!oleane!simtel!news.sprintlink.net!in2.uu.net!utcsri!newsflash.concordia.ca!news.mcgill.ca!DMI.USherb.CA!clouso.crim.ca!IRO.UMontreal.CA!guertinp From: guertinp@IRO.UMontreal.CA (Paul Guertin) Subject: "A Brief History of Apple", 1976-1978 Message-ID: Sender: news@IRO.UMontreal.CA Organization: Universite de Montreal, Canada Date: Thu, 21 Sep 1995 17:31:49 GMT Lines: 182 This is from the Call-A.P.P.L.E. Compendium #1. I thought you would enjoy it. I typed it as is, complete with typos and factual errors. Additional typos courtesy of my clumsy fingers. A Brief History of Apple by Michael M. Scott, President Presented at the September 12, 1978 meeting of A.P.P.L.E. Apple was started two and a half years ago by two gentlemen, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak who met at the "Home brew" computer club at the Stanford accelerator. There, they got together and put into manufacture the Apple 1, which was a single-board, black and white -basically a fancy monitor- that worked with a TV set. A year later, they were joined by two other gentlemen, that's myself (Mike Scott), Mike Markulla and Rod Holte, and formed Apple Computer, inc. and went about the business of making the Apple II. To give a little background on the five of us: Jobs is from Atari and, in fact, was the inventor of the "breakout" game that you see around a lot. Wozniak was in the advanced calculator group at h-p, and tried to interest h-p in doing a home computer, but they weren't interested, so he started working in his garage. Rod Holt was previously with Hickock as head of engineering and more recently at Atari and he did Apple's switching power supply and does the analog circuits and the rest of the support engineering. Mike Markulla was originally with Hughes aircraft and most recently had been with Intel as head of marketing and had been retired from there about a year and a half when he came to us, and I most recently was director of hybrids and transducers at National Semiconductor. So we have a mixed crew and have expanded on it. So we had five. February, a year and a half ago, we introduced the Apple II at the first West Coast Computer faire on April 5th, 1977. We shipped the first Apple II last June -sorry- June a year ago. This last June was out first million dollar sales month, and where we thought business was excellent and getting better, in the last three or four months it improved even further. The company has sought and obtained outside financing. We have a very small percentage of the company; the stock has been sold to private firms or individuals. In particular, we did this to establish more credence with banks and other people that we could obtain financing from, and also to obtain outside advice on how not to get into trouble. The principal outside contributors are: Benrock, which is part of the Rockefeller Foundation. They're the country's oldest capital venture firm. The other group is Capital Management, and they were the firm that originally financed Atari and arranged for the Warner buy-out of Atari And Capital now owns ten percent of Warner. We have a couple of private gentlemen; one is Art Brock who is known in the San Francisco area for his financing of such companies as Intel, Intercil, Fairchild and Quantel. It's not been made public yet, but joining our board as of a week and a half ago is an Apple freak who has one of the earliest Apples, with one at his home and one at his office. His name is Henry Singleton. He does not sit on any outside boards, but has given us the honor of joining Apple's Board of Directors. For those who don't know, eighteen years ago, with fifteen hundred dollars cash, he started a little company called Teledyne, Inc., and he is still Chairman of the Board, partially retired, the head of a 2.5 billion dollar a year company. He doesn't program in Basic or any of the other languages; he programs in machine language only. He's one of the five people we know who uses the internal floating point package to do financial analyses on the Apple. That's what he does at work for relaxation. And now he's working on a chess program which finds any three moves in little less than a second right now. So we're looking forward to his participation and advice. The company grew then, from the original five people; we currently, as of the last count, have 74 direct employees at the main Cupertino plant. We have 340 authorized stores right now and are sold internationally in almost every single country in the world, including throughout Europe, South America and the far east. International sales represent about 25% of our sales right now. We have indirectly working for Apple Computer then, about 100 people through sub-contractors. We specialize at the main plant; what we do is buy all the material. We then kit it, like Heathkit. We kit it out to sub-contractors who do the actual assembly of the PC board, and the insertion and the soldering. Then it returns to Apple where we do a board level test, a 24 hour burn in, and a final systems test. Se we try to keep down the amount of square footage that we need for expansion. One and a half years ago, we had 800 square feet. In the next six months we picked up another 3000. Last February, only six months ago, we swore it was enough space for 10 months when we moved into our new facility that was 21,000 square feet. A month ago we picked up another 5000, and we are next week picking up another 40,000 right in the same area. And that's keeping down what we do at the plant. What we have inside now in the way of groups, is in the marketing group. We now have a fairly complex marketing group. We have an applications engineer full time in marketing; we're adding one to the engineering group to answer questions. We still encourage the local clubs or the local dealers to filter it, or that the questions that come in, come in in writing, so we can combine them and put them out in the Contact newsletter. We have hired a full time service manager who will set up a separate service department. We have hired a full time publications group which consists of eleven people, partially made up of five text editors, and we still have not been able to keep up with the rate at which we need to document to put out a good manual. I'll give you two examples: one is the disk manual, which is atrocious, and we hope to have a revision in a couple of months, but it takes time to do it, and do it right. Applesoft II: hopefully the final revision is in print; this is a shrunk version, and it will be the same size as the Basic programming manual. It is not tutorial, but it goes exactly into the syntax of how the current released version of Applesoft II works. Separate from the publications department, we have an inside group of ten people doing programming that's working on dedicated, user-related (DowJones types) and other types. Besides the user-contributor group, we now have under contract five different outside groups doing software packages for us. We will in the future introduce packages for small business that will be Apple supported as opposed to user-supported, where we say "you can have copies, but don't call us if there's a bug". We're also looking at having an educational package. We have a well-known educational group doing some languages that are used for the high schools and colleges in teaching, to go in the Apple. Within the last three or four weeks we have added -he's not officially on our board till the 25th- a gentleman named Lloyd Martin from H-P who will head our applications software group. He, for your information, is the one that has headed the development software group at HP and done the applications package for the HP-45 series of programmable calculators. We've added two additional gentlemen inside Apple, one is Bill Thomas, who is starting the 18th. Bill is one of the original founders of Four-Phase. Did their software for their systems; did their Cobol compiler. He's joining us as manager of our systems software group. The other gentleman was head of the design team at Motorola on the 6800 microprocessor; he did the 6502 design at Mostech, and is the architect of the patent. That's Chuck Pettle, and Chuck joined us yesterday from Commodore. I'd say as a company a lot of people said "well, are you going to bring out a different product each year?". I think we've already shown that we don't have that intention. We certainly over the next couple of years will introduct other mainframe products. We think if the Apple II as being useful to the user for five to ten years and plan to continue supporting it with additional periferals and expanding the software that will run on the system. The more recent periferals out include the disk, which nobody can get ehough of. This illustrates a problem we have; we have established a user base, so whenever we announce we are immediately sold out for 8 to 12 weeks. A short example" we announced the communications card and put 500 in stock because marketing said that would be enough, and we sold out in two weeks, then we started the production cycle again. The Applesoft ROM card: we made an initial pre-production run of 2500, and also sold those out in less than two weeks. The disk we knew we were going to be in trouble on. We are the largest supplier of mini-drives in the world now, because we do business with Shugart, who makes 90% of the drives. We're their largest customer now and have been for four months. So those who haven't got theirs yet, be patient; current lead time is about 6 to 8 weeks on new orders. Those stores who had early orders in were supplied first on the disk drive. There are newer periferals coming; a high-speed serial card is in manufacturing and should be ready in 4 to 5 weeks. As soon as the manual is ready -since the manual is most of it- we will announce what we call the "Programmer's Aid" Rom, which is in stock now except for the manual, which will be ready in about four weeks. It plugs into slot B0 on the main Apple board and gives such things as Shannon's tone routines in firmware, hires routines in firmware, a tape verify routine and some other utility routines that are crammed on that 2K of code. We're interested in your input. You will be receiving in the mail, those of you who have your warranty cards in in the next couple of months, a questionaire to help us decide on what new periferals, or new software, or what new generation products we should look at, and we'd appreciate your input on it. For those of you who know people who don't have their warranty cards in, please encourage them to fill one out and send it in. That is how we key the mailings of the Contact users group and any updates that we have. --end of text--