Monday, April 11, 2022

But Is It, Really?

The anniversary of the release of the Apple I, that is.

Wikipedia says it is, and so do several "this day in history" sites.

But Wikipedia also says that Steve Wozniak demonstrated the first prototype at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting three months later, and that it went "on sale" about that time, too.

So I'm not sure what "release" is supposed to mean.

Was April 11 the day they got the prototype assembled, called it complete, and started trying to figure out how they'd promote and sell it?

Or was that maybe the day that Jobs took the prototype in to the Byte Shop and got an order for "something like 50" of them?

I dunno. I was coming up on ten years old at the time, and I'm not sure I noticed computers until the Apple II arrived with a splash in 1977. I didn't learn to program (in BASIC on a TRS-80 Model III) or get my own first computer (a Commodore VIC-20) until the early 1980s.

Whatever the actual dates, I'm glad those two got the ball rolling.

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