Article 24908 of comp.sys.apple2:
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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.
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