In May 1977, Steve Wozniak sat down and explained his new machine to the readers of Byte, people who still soldered their computers together from kits and bought parts at the Byte Shop. This crate follows the Apple II off page 34 and out into the world. You'll find Woz's own notes, the first programs people typed and loaded, a TV studio full of industry founders, and Woz's voice on the radio. Rounding it out are the rival machines that shared the shelf with his.
1
Byte's May 1977 issue carries 'The Apple-II,' a system description written by Wozniak himself, tucked between Baudot machines, a tiny assembler, and ads for every Byte Shop in the country. It is the moment the machine stepped out of the Homebrew circle and into print, so it opens the box.
2
Before the famous red Reference Manual of January 1978, there was this: a bundle of notes pulled from Wozniak's own filing cabinet that served as the Apple II's first documentation and tech support. Read it right after his Byte article and you can hear the same voice, just with the schematics left in.
3
Start with Woz's own Breakout, the game he wanted color and paddles for, then descend into Don Worth's 1978 roguelike Beneath Apple Manor, Bill Budge's Pong-clone debut Penny Arcade, and the beloved Lemonade Stand. Each one boots in your browser, and together they show what that hobbyist hardware was really for.
4
Computer Chronicles gathers the people driving the industry, including Steve Wozniak, Gary Kildall, Adam Osborne, Lore Harp of Vector Graphic, and Gene Amdahl. Seven years after the Byte article, the kit-builders are now company founders on public television.
5
Former Apple programmer Bob Bishop, broadcasting as 'Mr. Logic,' interviews Woz under his alias 'Rocky Clark' on a 1992 radio show, and Bishop gets the microphone turned on himself in a 2009 Juiced.GS interview. A 2013 Capital Public Radio segment rounds it out, so you hear the story from inside the room and from decades later.
6
This one mixes media on purpose, setting a May 1977 Sol-20 catalog, whose dealer pages list Byte Shops from Tempe to Berkeley, beside print ads for the Altair, the SWTPC 6800, and the Rockwell AIM-65. Together they make up the competition sitting on the same retail shelves the Apple II was trying to win.
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