Because the Vic-20 was hampered by the lower base RAM and only 22 column display, people tend to underestimate its popularity and impact, but it was the first computer model to sell over a million units. :-) Great vid.
Yeah, I think the 22 column display was the biggest issue. This meant it felt pretty unprofessional. I mean the 40 cols on a Commodore 64 was not good enough either. However, as a first machine for so many people, it WAS a big hit. The ZX Spectrum however really took over in that regard, at a very cheap price, and it was actually a very decent machine. But yeah, as a stepping stone to the Commodore 64, it was a great machine, and the C64 took so much from it, like its case! My friend had a Vic 20 and we had fun playing games on it :)
Glad to have you onboard. Please consider joining our UA-cam membership to support the channel. And soon, we should have a Discord server for the Apple II community, in which UA-cam membership will give extra access ;)
Great video! You're extremely polished for a channel with under 1000 subscribers. You just added one more today, on the strength of this video alone. Thanks!
Good video! I have an Apple IIe and a IIgs as well. The sound limitation, like so many other limitations, could be resolved with sound cards, although there weren't that many games supporting them. I've got a Mockingboard soundcard in the IIe (Great for Ultima V).
Yes I have heard about the Mockinboard. But, its a HARD sell. Because I could just get UItima IV or V on an Amiga and have excellent music. Or I could get a mocking board, JUST to get music on an Apple II. There IS this new FPGA card which has just come out, which I know has mockinboard support built in. I may get one for my Apple IIe. I do need to re-jig these machines. I have not really used them since maybe last March as I entered a massive rabbit hole repairing my Amiga 2000, then a 4000 and then upgrading them both, and then my Amiga 500. but from 2020 to end of 21 I did a lot of fiddling around with my three Apple IIs. I hope soon to have a space where I can have all 3 setup, all the time. If that comes to pass, I hope to give them all a lot more of my time, as right now I HAVE to store them away, when not in use.
In my humble opinion your channel have already developed into something close to the best. You mentioned the 8-bit Guy. Techmoan is another of my favorites, so now you just have to learn puppeteering :D
Thank you for the very kind comments. Sadly, the subscribers and viewing numbers do not reflect your opinion, yet... Hopefully time will improve things. Puppeteering? Don't get you? Are we talking hand puppets, sock puppets or marionettes? I suppose I could use a range of knitted sock puppets of Jobs, Tramiel, Alan Sugar and so on, to interject in videos :)
@@RetronautTech "Yet" is the word. It takes time. Your viewcount goes slowly but steadily up. Now let's talk about the important stuff although I am quite sure you already know. Just search "Techmoan - How to Write A UA-cam Comment - in 10 Steps" :D
Hopefully soon I will be able to do more on my little Apple II collection. I have an Apple IIe, a IIc, a IIgs and.... holy of holy's, the Apple IIe card for my Mac, effectively the last Apple II available. Just need time and space to get them on the channel more.
I believe the early ventless cases were some kind of foam plastic that was painted and didn't hold up to the heat generated by the system. The revised vented case was made out of injection molded ABS plastic
In the US Apple II's had a very strong presence in the school system - but I had a Commodore, and while I had a lot of exposure to Apple II's back then I never really got to know the system until recently. Compared to Commodore it always felt strange to me that the Apple doesn't have support for using the floppy drive built in to ROM (in particular, BASIC and the monitor) But on the other hand, ProDOS impressed me with its capabilities. Maybe not the most formidable OS you'd see on an 8-bit machine (compared to CP/M for instance) but I thought it was interesting in terms of what it offers. As far as the IIc is concerned - expansibility is a problem but the compact form factor is great and it's pretty well decked-out for an Apple II: two serial ports, floppy interface with support for Smartport devices (in the later ROM versions, anyway), and mouse support.
I think maybe a few factors shaped the Apple II. One, was that it was a small team with very little experience of making a product before. They had only produced the Apple I to that point, and that was a much simpler prospect, though not trivial of course. Another was that (I assume) they knew other micros were about to hit the market. So the clock was ticking. So, do you hang on until you have a Disk Drive ready for launch. And once you DO have a disk drive, soon after a decent DOS seems like a MUST not a nice to have. So, they launched, with the idea of getting these other things done as they went along. Once they had a Disk, it appeared autoboot was demanded. But, if you look at most micros of that era, none had autoboot. I think its that which DEFINES the Apple II experience. It launched "unfinished" to a degree, but then, there had never been micros until that point. So what did "finished" mean at that point. It was all a massive experiment anyway. Tandy REALLY though their machine would hardly sell at all, maybe 3500 IF they were lucky, and it went on to be the biggest seller by unit. I find this particular era fascinating. The transition from Mini Computers, with terminals, to actually having your own micro. I missed the bleeding edge by some 5 years. My first machine was a Dragon 32, and people make fun of it (because it was made in Wales it appears). But in actuality, it was a much more refined experience than that original Apple II. It had a FP BASIC, a better keyboard, 32KB as standard, floppy disks, and all for £200. What a difference 5 years made back then eh :)
Early on Apple gave large discounts and provided support to US public schools, which led to families buying the same computer for the home that their kids were already learning how to use. What really gave it a boost for business use is that it was the computer the first spreadsheet program was written for. It's biggest enemy was Steve Jobs, who was more about form than function and pushed the Lisa/Mac before the hardware was really there (the company still made most of it's money from the 2 long after the Mac came out), and the IBM PC, because no one in the business world ever got fired for buying IBM, a name that was very familiar at the time. For me the most annoying thing was the location of the reset button, about where the backspace key (on first gen & the Plus) usually is and way too easy to hit by accident. There was a hack to cut up the hinge side of a cassette tape holder to extend a bit of plastic over hit that made it take some force to use.
I don't still understand how could the Aple II outsell the PET, without a monitor, without uppercase characters and without floating point maths. Better keyboard? OK, the PET had a monitor, so it´s even. Colour graphics? OK, the PET had more RAM, so it's even. But the PET was also half the price, and it had uppercase and floating point.
I don't know, you'd have to ask someone who was buying at the time. I guess the Apple II DID have a better keyboard, and I think business owners might have been VERY put off by the original PETS keyboard. I know it was improved later, but initially, it WAS poor. Don't forget, for an Apple, you could get ANY monitor you could afford. And there is the key thing. I think BUSINESSES were buying the Apple IIs, and they found its keyboard + a decent monitor made more sense for them. Possibly, also, little Johny or Janet at home was tugging their trouser, demanding they get one for games. Or maybe they actually wanted to have a crafty game of Zork on it, when no one was looking? Now, don't forget, the TRS-80 very much was the larger seller, and it had BOTH a decent keyboard AND a monitor AND it was the cheapest of the 3. It was apparently a little unreliable, but there you go. What made the Apple II really shine though, was the Apple III, because it failed so bady. Watch Chapter 2 to see what I mean.
In the seventies everyone, at least in the US, had a TV already and most had more than one. When I bought my Apple 2 Plus it included the Sup'r'mod that allowed a standard TV to work with it. You lose half the screen width, but since that is what the vast majority of systems were using all the software took that into account. That, and the lack of lowercase, really did not make any difference until word processing software plus dial up bulletin board systems where everyone else thought we were always 'shouting' became a thing. It was easy enough to upgrade, by the time I outgrew it I had a 16k RAM card to make a total of 64k, a printer card designed to work with Epson printer, an 80 column card (but lost color capability to use it) that added lowercase functionality, a Z80 card complete with 64k of RAM to play around with CPM, a Mockingboard sound synthesizer, a modem, and 2 disk drive cards running the 4 floppy drives really needed for playing around with the Pascal language. I think I would have outgrown either of the other 2 computer types much sooner.
VisiCalc is a big part of the reason why. It was the first commercially available spreadsheet program and it first debuted on the Apple II. For a short while it was the only way to run the program. The other factor was that the Apple II featured much greater internal expansion capability than the PET or the TRS-80. Now for a home consumer, arguably the PET or the TRS-80 might make more sense from a purely financial standpoint, but for businesses the Apple II was the clear winner out of those three until the IBM PC entered the market in 1981.
@@AdamBuker Yes VisCalc was an early killer app on the Apple II, plus of course the machine did have great expandability and indeed that side of it exploded to fill in all the missing features. I guess a killer feature WAS the colour graphics, because I think quite often these machines were used by small businesses which were run at home. So little Johnny/Janet could also play games on the machine when it was not being used for business stuff. I have read anecdotally that many Apple II fans were in fact the children of these small business users.
@@stix2you Thanks for that insight. I guess the early release of the relatively cheap and performant Disk II drive, really pushed the quality of Apple II software. Certainly when I got my 1541 drive for my C64, most of the software on it was actually ports of Apple II and Atari games designed for a floppy equiped machine, which made them a world apart in scope, compared to tape based games. This was also when I got Infocom games for the first time, and what a revelation they were. I'll have to dig more into the Apple II software, not really scratched that surface yet.
Actually I worked on a trashcan from 2013 until last year, when it could not be used any more because the OS could not be upgraded. Worked flawlessly in all that time. Never overheated, as it actually DOES have a fan in it, and the entire case acts as a kind of heatsink. I found it ran warm, but it was very quiet, and running 3 monitors off it, it was a real workhorse. The G4 Cube feels like the direct ancestor of it though. Something of a vanity project, its certainly a UNIQUE looking machine. But it ONLY relied on convection cooling and apparently that REALLY is not enough for it. I have one, and I need to think If I should mod it, and but a little fan in there to get SOME kind of airflow goeing. The Trashcan, DOES have major issues with expandability, though it IS still more expandable than say a modern Mac Studio which has ZERO expandability unless its some kind of USB C dongle hanging off it, like techno fruit :)
Because the Vic-20 was hampered by the lower base RAM and only 22 column display, people tend to underestimate its popularity and impact, but it was the first computer model to sell over a million units. :-)
Great vid.
Yeah, I think the 22 column display was the biggest issue. This meant it felt pretty unprofessional. I mean the 40 cols on a Commodore 64 was not good enough either. However, as a first machine for so many people, it WAS a big hit. The ZX Spectrum however really took over in that regard, at a very cheap price, and it was actually a very decent machine.
But yeah, as a stepping stone to the Commodore 64, it was a great machine, and the C64 took so much from it, like its case! My friend had a Vic 20 and we had fun playing games on it :)
I’m happy I stumbled across this channel. So many great videos. I’ve got to look forward to.
Glad to have you onboard. Please consider joining our UA-cam membership to support the channel. And soon, we should have a Discord server for the Apple II community, in which UA-cam membership will give extra access ;)
Great video! You're extremely polished for a channel with under 1000 subscribers. You just added one more today, on the strength of this video alone. Thanks!
Thanks Rob, please make sure you HIT THE BELL as well, to get notified of new releases!
Good video! I have an Apple IIe and a IIgs as well. The sound limitation, like so many other limitations, could be resolved with sound cards, although there weren't that many games supporting them. I've got a Mockingboard soundcard in the IIe (Great for Ultima V).
Yes I have heard about the Mockinboard. But, its a HARD sell. Because I could just get UItima IV or V on an Amiga and have excellent music. Or I could get a mocking board, JUST to get music on an Apple II.
There IS this new FPGA card which has just come out, which I know has mockinboard support built in. I may get one for my Apple IIe. I do need to re-jig these machines. I have not really used them since maybe last March as I entered a massive rabbit hole repairing my Amiga 2000, then a 4000 and then upgrading them both, and then my Amiga 500. but from 2020 to end of 21 I did a lot of fiddling around with my three Apple IIs. I hope soon to have a space where I can have all 3 setup, all the time. If that comes to pass, I hope to give them all a lot more of my time, as right now I HAVE to store them away, when not in use.
In my humble opinion your channel have already developed into something close to the best. You mentioned the 8-bit Guy. Techmoan is another of my favorites, so now you just have to learn puppeteering :D
Thank you for the very kind comments. Sadly, the subscribers and viewing numbers do not reflect your opinion, yet... Hopefully time will improve things. Puppeteering? Don't get you? Are we talking hand puppets, sock puppets or marionettes? I suppose I could use a range of knitted sock puppets of Jobs, Tramiel, Alan Sugar and so on, to interject in videos :)
@@RetronautTech "Yet" is the word. It takes time. Your viewcount goes slowly but steadily up. Now let's talk about the important stuff although I am quite sure you already know. Just search "Techmoan - How to Write A UA-cam Comment - in 10 Steps" :D
We had a ][+ and a IIGS. Loved em. Yours are so clean, wow!
Hopefully soon I will be able to do more on my little Apple II collection. I have an Apple IIe, a IIc, a IIgs and.... holy of holy's, the Apple IIe card for my Mac, effectively the last Apple II available. Just need time and space to get them on the channel more.
The original Apple II was sold in kit form for a very short time.
I believe the early ventless cases were some kind of foam plastic that was painted and didn't hold up to the heat generated by the system. The revised vented case was made out of injection molded ABS plastic
In the US Apple II's had a very strong presence in the school system - but I had a Commodore, and while I had a lot of exposure to Apple II's back then I never really got to know the system until recently. Compared to Commodore it always felt strange to me that the Apple doesn't have support for using the floppy drive built in to ROM (in particular, BASIC and the monitor) But on the other hand, ProDOS impressed me with its capabilities. Maybe not the most formidable OS you'd see on an 8-bit machine (compared to CP/M for instance) but I thought it was interesting in terms of what it offers.
As far as the IIc is concerned - expansibility is a problem but the compact form factor is great and it's pretty well decked-out for an Apple II: two serial ports, floppy interface with support for Smartport devices (in the later ROM versions, anyway), and mouse support.
I think maybe a few factors shaped the Apple II. One, was that it was a small team with very little experience of making a product before. They had only produced the Apple I to that point, and that was a much simpler prospect, though not trivial of course.
Another was that (I assume) they knew other micros were about to hit the market. So the clock was ticking. So, do you hang on until you have a Disk Drive ready for launch. And once you DO have a disk drive, soon after a decent DOS seems like a MUST not a nice to have. So, they launched, with the idea of getting these other things done as they went along. Once they had a Disk, it appeared autoboot was demanded. But, if you look at most micros of that era, none had autoboot.
I think its that which DEFINES the Apple II experience. It launched "unfinished" to a degree, but then, there had never been micros until that point. So what did "finished" mean at that point. It was all a massive experiment anyway. Tandy REALLY though their machine would hardly sell at all, maybe 3500 IF they were lucky, and it went on to be the biggest seller by unit.
I find this particular era fascinating. The transition from Mini Computers, with terminals, to actually having your own micro. I missed the bleeding edge by some 5 years. My first machine was a Dragon 32, and people make fun of it (because it was made in Wales it appears). But in actuality, it was a much more refined experience than that original Apple II. It had a FP BASIC, a better keyboard, 32KB as standard, floppy disks, and all for £200. What a difference 5 years made back then eh :)
out of my six 8 bit machines my apple iie enhanced is my favorite. mine is from 86, then they came out with the platinum.
What is it about your IIe that you like so much? What extras do you have in it? Anything modern?
@@RetronautTech its just what im more familiar with, our school used to have them.
Early on Apple gave large discounts and provided support to US public schools, which led to families buying the same computer for the home that their kids were already learning how to use. What really gave it a boost for business use is that it was the computer the first spreadsheet program was written for. It's biggest enemy was Steve Jobs, who was more about form than function and pushed the Lisa/Mac before the hardware was really there (the company still made most of it's money from the 2 long after the Mac came out), and the IBM PC, because no one in the business world ever got fired for buying IBM, a name that was very familiar at the time.
For me the most annoying thing was the location of the reset button, about where the backspace key (on first gen & the Plus) usually is and way too easy to hit by accident. There was a hack to cut up the hinge side of a cassette tape holder to extend a bit of plastic over hit that made it take some force to use.
I don't still understand how could the Aple II outsell the PET, without a monitor, without uppercase characters and without floating point maths. Better keyboard? OK, the PET had a monitor, so it´s even. Colour graphics? OK, the PET had more RAM, so it's even. But the PET was also half the price, and it had uppercase and floating point.
I don't know, you'd have to ask someone who was buying at the time. I guess the Apple II DID have a better keyboard, and I think business owners might have been VERY put off by the original PETS keyboard. I know it was improved later, but initially, it WAS poor.
Don't forget, for an Apple, you could get ANY monitor you could afford. And there is the key thing. I think BUSINESSES were buying the Apple IIs, and they found its keyboard + a decent monitor made more sense for them. Possibly, also, little Johny or Janet at home was tugging their trouser, demanding they get one for games. Or maybe they actually wanted to have a crafty game of Zork on it, when no one was looking?
Now, don't forget, the TRS-80 very much was the larger seller, and it had BOTH a decent keyboard AND a monitor AND it was the cheapest of the 3. It was apparently a little unreliable, but there you go.
What made the Apple II really shine though, was the Apple III, because it failed so bady. Watch Chapter 2 to see what I mean.
In the seventies everyone, at least in the US, had a TV already and most had more than one. When I bought my Apple 2 Plus it included the Sup'r'mod that allowed a standard TV to work with it. You lose half the screen width, but since that is what the vast majority of systems were using all the software took that into account. That, and the lack of lowercase, really did not make any difference until word processing software plus dial up bulletin board systems where everyone else thought we were always 'shouting' became a thing.
It was easy enough to upgrade, by the time I outgrew it I had a 16k RAM card to make a total of 64k, a printer card designed to work with Epson printer, an 80 column card (but lost color capability to use it) that added lowercase functionality, a Z80 card complete with 64k of RAM to play around with CPM, a Mockingboard sound synthesizer, a modem, and 2 disk drive cards running the 4 floppy drives really needed for playing around with the Pascal language. I think I would have outgrown either of the other 2 computer types much sooner.
VisiCalc is a big part of the reason why. It was the first commercially available spreadsheet program and it first debuted on the Apple II. For a short while it was the only way to run the program. The other factor was that the Apple II featured much greater internal expansion capability than the PET or the TRS-80. Now for a home consumer, arguably the PET or the TRS-80 might make more sense from a purely financial standpoint, but for businesses the Apple II was the clear winner out of those three until the IBM PC entered the market in 1981.
@@AdamBuker Yes VisCalc was an early killer app on the Apple II, plus of course the machine did have great expandability and indeed that side of it exploded to fill in all the missing features. I guess a killer feature WAS the colour graphics, because I think quite often these machines were used by small businesses which were run at home. So little Johnny/Janet could also play games on the machine when it was not being used for business stuff. I have read anecdotally that many Apple II fans were in fact the children of these small business users.
@@stix2you Thanks for that insight. I guess the early release of the relatively cheap and performant Disk II drive, really pushed the quality of Apple II software. Certainly when I got my 1541 drive for my C64, most of the software on it was actually ports of Apple II and Atari games designed for a floppy equiped machine, which made them a world apart in scope, compared to tape based games. This was also when I got Infocom games for the first time, and what a revelation they were.
I'll have to dig more into the Apple II software, not really scratched that surface yet.
I really wanted one of these back in high school. By my second year at University in 1987, I wanted a Unix machine.
+46:40 and repeated that mistake again in the 2010s with the "trash can" Mac Pro.
Actually I worked on a trashcan from 2013 until last year, when it could not be used any more because the OS could not be upgraded. Worked flawlessly in all that time. Never overheated, as it actually DOES have a fan in it, and the entire case acts as a kind of heatsink. I found it ran warm, but it was very quiet, and running 3 monitors off it, it was a real workhorse.
The G4 Cube feels like the direct ancestor of it though. Something of a vanity project, its certainly a UNIQUE looking machine. But it ONLY relied on convection cooling and apparently that REALLY is not enough for it. I have one, and I need to think If I should mod it, and but a little fan in there to get SOME kind of airflow goeing.
The Trashcan, DOES have major issues with expandability, though it IS still more expandable than say a modern Mac Studio which has ZERO expandability unless its some kind of USB C dongle hanging off it, like techno fruit :)