The Apple Effect 5 Apple Revolutions: Personal Computing Publishing Imaging Video Audio The world changed when it became possible for Once upon a time, electronics enthusiasts to assemble components to computers were make their own personal computer. Altair was the first to market components together in kit form, complex, rare and but two guys named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, operating from a garage in California, were not far expensive machines behind with a kit that is now known as the Apple I. that companies – even About 200 were produced, but that convinced the two Steves to found Apple Computer Inc countries – struggled to and work on a computer that did not require electronics knowledge to assemble and use. It afford to build, buy or was the release of this model in 1977, the Apple ][, use. which heralded the widespread leap of electronics from the mainframe to personal computing. Suddenly business, home and schools had access Two guys in a garage precipitated a shift in our to computing power previously available only with universe to one where computers are simple to use, mainframes. yet more powerful than many dreamed possible. The evolution of software The company they started, Apple Computer Inc, Early mainframe computers had to be programmed has consistently led the way in personal computing by methods which amounted to rewiring the innovations and in developing many of the tools circuits. Personal computers made the jump and technologies we take for granted. to programming languages—even the Apple I The Apple Effect is a story of five revolutions in included Apple Basic—which evolved into ‘software’ computing history. It is the story of how Apple when lines of code were compiled into machine Computer over the past thirty years has changed the readable form. way we work, learn and play. The invention of the floppy disk enabled pre- compiled software to be readily distributed instead Personal computing of typed each time from a hard copy. Soon the software industry sprang up to develop programs Before the personal computer revolution began, with an easy to use interface to perform specific computers occupied a large cabinet or even room, tasks, compiled onto floppy disk and distributed in accepted input from punch cards, recorded data shrink wrapped boxes. on magnetic tape, and required serious looking The Apple ][ had three useful software tools which technicians in white coats to operate. Museum we now take for granted—the word processor, the Victoria even has one such beast called CSIRAC. spreadsheet and the database. These were the tools Progress in miniaturisation of electronic components that made personal computers popular. in the early 1970s resulted in computers getting smaller, accepting input from a keyboard and having The internet a screen display, but they were still expensive and Perhaps the most profound change has evolved technically difficult to operate. from an obscure piece of hardware called the ‘modem’ which enabled communication between computers over telephone lines. Academics in the USA (not Apple) devised protocols to facilitate communication, regardless of operating system, marking the birth of the internet. Publishing The expense of laser printing was more acceptable on the The Macintosh (with its brief Mac because networking forerunner the Lisa) in 1984 was built in from the start, and the LaserWriter in 1985 enabling one printer to be took publishing from the shared easily between Macs, printing press to the desktop. using simple-to-implement The Macintosh was AppleTalk networking. revolutionary in that a Specialist desktop publishing paper-like white display software such as Aldus showed on screen exactly what PageMaker (1985) made it easy to would be printed (WYSIWYG or combine text and graphics for printing. What You See is What You Get). Other computers showed green print on a black screen This software was made possible because the in a monospaced typeface with complex codes Macintosh had the hardware to support it. With indicating formatting. the Macintosh, Apple made a bold move from 5.25 inch floppy disks to 3.5 inch floppies. A second The Macintosh also made a huge leap forward with or external floppy drive was a lower cost storage the introduction of the graphical user interface we option offered by Apple until hard drives became now take for granted. Instead of a ‘command line’, affordable. It enabled printing businesses to access the graphical interface used Window, Icon, Menu material supplied by clients on floppy disk. and Pointing device (WIMP). The mouse made it possible to easily access the screen, just as a pencil draws on paper, leading to graphics and the imaging Imaging revolution. The mouse made it possible to access any point Reports, essays, brochures, newsletters and all on the screen, opening up exciting possibilities manner of other printed works, with combined of scalable image manipulation. But trying to text and graphics, could now be produced on draw with a mouse was like trying to draw with a the desktop. But dot matrix printers lacked the brick shaped pencil. This problem was solved by sharpness of the printing press. developments in both hardware and software. The hardware was the graphics tablet, a pressure The Apple LaserWriter (1985) sensitive pad with an electronic touch pencil completed the leap forward in place of the mouse. The software was Adobe by providing a means of Illustrator (1987). This drawing program used bézier printing text and graphics at a curves to create smooth lines, circles and arcs. quality comparable with that of the professional printing In 1988 Apple introduced a scanner, which enabled press. In technical terms, this hand-drawn art to be quickly input onto the screen, was accomplished by use of where it could be digitally manipulated a page description language using graphics software. called Adobe PostScript, which Adobe, realising the need supported printing of scalable text to manipulate scanned and graphics at high resolution. images, introduced Adobe Initially PostScript laser printing Photoshop in 1990. This was expensive because it required huge revolutionised photo retouching processing power. Over 8 million dots had to and processing by allowing changes to be be mapped and fed in an uninterrupted stream to made in digital form instead of manually. Digital the laser. This data processing could not be done manipulation was faster, non-destructive of the on a host computer because, at the time, there was original and therefore, easily reversible. no way to move that amount of data fast enough Desktop colour printing made the imaging through the printer port. The solution was to build revolution affordable for amateurs. The colour inkjet another computer inside inside the laser printer, printer made colour almost as cheap as black and with enough RAM to cope with all the dots in one white, whilst the Apple Color LaserWriter and other stream. colour printing technologies satisfied the need for professional high quality colour output. At a time when green-on-black display was Today every Macintosh includes iMovie software, considered normal, Apple led the industry with the which supports video acquisition, editing and technology needed to support colour monitors, output, usually by burning straight to DVD. For printers and scanners. Meanwhile Adobe again professionals, Apple’s Final Cut Studio supports led the software industry in 1993 with the portable high-end video editing in High Definition along with document format (PDF) enabling documents, companion applications that support sound editing including images, to be sent to a printery for and animation. reproduction without plate manufacture. In January 1994 Apple again led the industry with Audio the introduction of the QuickTake 100 digital camera In 1983 a group of musicians and music merchants and software that made it easy to capture and agreed to standardise an interface by which new transfer digital images directly from camera to the instruments could communicate control instructions computer for manipulation and printing. This is a with other instruments and microcomputers. This revolution still evolving today with digital cameras standard was dubbed MIDI (Musical Instrument now displacing film. Digital Interface) and Apple narrowly beat Atari to become the first manufacturer to adopt it with Video the Apple ][. The electronic composer could now use a relatively inexpensive instrument, such as The invention of video tape recording and an electronic keyboard, controlled by a personal lightweight video cameras soon resulted in the computer. displacement of 8mm film as the primary means for amateurs to capture video. But editing video tape Software enabled note sequences played on a recordings was difficult. keyboard or other MIDI-capable instrument to be digitally recorded and played back by the Apple ][ or In 1989 Avid introduced plug-in cards for the Macintosh. The logical progression was that a single Macintosh which could convert video tape to digital keystroke could activate every device in the studio format for editing and playback, but cost confined remotely and in synchrony. this technology to production studios. This led to compositional software. Musicians with In 1991 Apple introduced QuickTime software that no programming experience could create an infinite allowed the Macintosh Quadra 900 to create, edit variety of output routines using simple on-screen and display real time video if an analog to digital graphic displays. The composer could now invent a converter card was installed to facilitate video studio full of phantom instruments at will, limited input. By 1993 the Macintosh AV series was supplied only by the imagination. with the necessary cards to capture analog video recordings in digital format. The video revolution The final result of the computer compositional had arrived for amateurs, albeit well-heeled revolution is that the computer can be used in live amateurs. Over the next few years this hardware performances.