The History of Computing

I often think of companies in relation to their contribution to the next evolution in the forking and merging of disciplines in computing that brought us to where we are today. Many companies have multiple contributions. Few have as many such contributions as Apple. But there was a time when they didn’t seem so innovative. 

This lost decade began about half way through the tenure of John Sculley and can be seen through the lens of the CEOs. There was Sculley, CEO from 1983 to 1993. Co-founders and spiritual centers of Apple, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, left Apple in 1985. Jobs to create NeXT and Wozniak to jump into a variety of companies like making universal remotes, wireless GPS trackers, and and other adventures. 

This meant Sculley was finally in a position to be fully in charge of Apple. His era would see sales 10x from $800 million to $8 billion. Operationally, he was one of the more adept at cash management, putting $2 billion in the bank by 1993. Suddenly the vision of Steve Jobs was paying off. That original Mac started to sell and grow markets. But during this time, first the IBM PC and then the clones, all powered by the Microsoft operating system, completely took the operating system market for personal computers. Apple had high margins yet struggled for relevance. 

Under Sculley, Apple released HyperCard, funded a skunkworks team in General Magic, arguably the beginning of ubiquitous computing, and using many of those same ideas he backed the Newton, coining the term personal digital assistant. Under his leadership, Apple marketing sent 200,000 people home with a Mac to try it out. Put the device in the hands of the people is probably one of the more important lessons they still teach newcomers that work in Apple Stores. 

Looking at the big financial picture it seems like Sculley did alright. But in Apple’s fourth-quarter earnings call in 1993, they announced a 97 drop from the same time in 1992. This was also when a serious technical debt problem began to manifest itself. 

The Mac operating system grew from the system those early pioneers built in 1984 to Macintosh System Software going from version 1 to version 7. But after annual releases leading to version 6, it took 3 years to develop system 7 and the direction to take with the operating system caused a schism in Apple engineering around what would happen once 7 shipped. Seems like most companies go through almost the exact same schism. Microsoft quietly grew NT to resolve their issues with Windows 3 and 95 until it finally became the thing in 2000. IBM had invested heavily into that same code, basically, with Warp - but wanted something new. 

Something happened while Apple was building macOS 7. They lost Jean Lois Gasseé who had been head of development since Steve Jobs left. When Sculley gave everyone a copy of his memoir, Gasseé provided a copy of The Mythical Man-Month, from Fred Brooks’ experience with the IBM System 360. It’s unclear today if anyone read it. To me this is really the first big sign of trouble. Gassée left to build another OS, BeOS. 

By the time macOS 7 was released, it was clear that the operating system was bloated, needed a massive object-oriented overhaul, and under Sculley the teams were split, with one team eventually getting spun off into its own company and then became a part of IBM to help with their OS woes. The team at Apple took 6 years to release the next operating system. Meanwhile, one of Sculley’s most defining decisions was to avoid licensing the Macintosh operating system. Probably because it was just too big a mess to do so. And yet everyday users didn’t notice all that much and most loved it. 

But third party developers left. And that was at one of the most critical times in the history of personal computers because Microsoft was gaining a lot of developers for Windows 3.1 and released the wildly popular Windows 95. 

The Mac accounted for most of the revenue of the company, but under Sculley the company dumped a lot of R&D money into the Newton. As with other big projects, the device took too long to ship and when it did, the early PDA market was a red ocean with inexpensive competitors. The Palm Pilot effectively ended up owning that pen computing market. 

Sculley was a solid executive. And he played the part of visionary from time to time. But under his tenure Apple found operating system problems, rumors about Windows 95, developers leaving Apple behind for the Windows ecosystem, and whether those technical issues are on his lieutenants or him, the buck stocks there. The Windows clone industry led to PC price wars that caused Apple revenues to plummet. And so Markkula was off to find a new CEO. 

Michael Spindler became the CEO from 1993 to 1996. The failure of the Newton and Copland operating systems are placed at his feet, even though they began in the previous regime. Markkula hired Digital Equipment and Intel veteran Spindler to assist in European operations and he rose to President of Apple Europe and then ran all international. He would become the only CEO to have no new Mac operating systems released in his tenure. Missed deadlines abound with Copland and then Tempo, which would become Mac OS 8. 

And those aren’t the only products that came out at the time. We also got the PowerCD, the Apple QuickTake digital camera, and the Apple Pippin. Bandai had begun trying to develop a video game system with a scaled down version of the Mac. The Apple Pippin realized Markkula’s idea from when the Mac was first conceived as an Apple video game system. 

There were a few important things that happened under Spindler though. First, Apple moved to the PowerPC architecture. Second, he decided to license the Macintosh operating system to companies wanting to clone the Macintosh. And he had discussions with IBM, Sun, and Philips to acquire Apple. Dwindling reserves, increasing debt. Something had to change and within three years, Spindler was gone.

Gil Amelio was CEO from 1996 to 1997. He moved from the board while the CEO at National Semiconductor to CEO of Apple. He inherited a company short on cash and high on expenses. He quickly began pushing forward OS 8, cut a third of the staff, streamline operations, dumping some poor quality products, and releasing new products Apple needed to be competitive like the Apple Network Server. 

He also tried to acquire BeOS for $200 million, which would have Brough Gassée back but instead acquired NeXT for $429 million. But despite the good trajectory he had the company on, the stock was still dropping, Apple continued to lose money, and an immovable force was back - now with another decade of experience launching two successful companies: NeXT and Pixar. 

The end of the lost decade can be seen as the return of Steve Jobs. Apple didn’t have an operating system. They were in a lurch soy-to-speak. I’ve seen or read it portrayed that Steve Jobs intended to take control of Apple. And I’ve seen it portrayed that he was happy digging up carrots in the back yard but came back because he was inspired by Johnny Ive. But I remember the feel around Apple changed when he showed back up on campus. As with other companies that dug themselves out of a lost decade, there was a renewed purpose. There was inspiration. 

By 1997, one of the heroes of the personal computing revolution, Steve Jobs, was back. But not quite… He became interim CEO in 1997 and immediately turned his eye to making Apple profitable again. Over the past decade, the product line expanded to include a dozen models of the Mac. Anyone who’s read Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, and Zone To Win knows this story all too well. We grow, we release new products, and then we eventually need to take a look at the portfolio and make some hard cuts. 

Apple released the Macintosh II in 1987 then the Macintosh Portable in 1989 then the Iicx and II ci in 89 along with the Apple IIgs, the last of that series. By facing competition in different markets, we saw the LC line come along in 1990 and the Quadra in 1991, the same year three models of the PowerBook were released. Different printers, scanners, CD-Roms had come along by then and in 1993, we got a Macintosh TV, the Apple Newton, more models of the LC and by 1994 even more of those plus the QuickTake, Workgroup Server, the Pippin and by 1995 there were a dozen Performas, half a dozen Power Macintosh 6400s, the Apple Network Server and yet another versions of the Performa 6200 and we added the eMade and beige G3 in 1997. The SKU list was a mess. Cleaning that up took time but helped prepare Apple for a simpler sales process. Today we have a good, better, best with each device, with many a computer being build-to-order. 

Jobs restructured the board, ending the long tenure of Mike Markkula, who’d been so impactful at each stage of the company so far. One of the forces behind the rise of the Apple computer and the Macintosh was about to change the world again, this time as the CEO. 

There was a nexus of Digital Research and Xerox PARC, along with Stanford and Berkeley in the Bay Area. The rise of the hobbyists and the success of Apple attracted some of the best minds in computing to Apple. This confluence was about to change the world. One of those brilliant minds that landed at Apple started out as a technical writer. 

Apple hired Jef Raskin as their 31st employee, to write the Apple II manual. He quickly started harping on people to build a computer that was easy to use. Mike Markkula wanted to release a gaming console or a cheap computer that could compete with the Commodore and Atari machines at the time. He called the project “Annie.”

The project began with Raskin, but he had a very different idea than Markkula’s. He summed it up in an article called “Computers by the Millions” that wouldn’t see publication until 1982. His vision was closer to his PhD dissertation, bringing computing to the masses. For this, he envisioned a menu driven operating system that was easy to use and inexpensive. Not yet a GUI in the sense of a windowing operating system and so could run on chips that were rapidly dropping in price. He planned to use the 6809 chip for the machine and give it a five inch display. 

He didn’t tell anyone that he had a PhD when he was hired, as the team at Apple was skeptical of academia. Jobs provided input, but was off working on the Lisa project, which used the 68000 chip. So they had free reign over what they were doing. 

Raskin quickly added Joanna Hoffman for marketing. She was on leave from getting a PhD in archaeology at the University of Chicago and was the marketing team for the Mac for over a year. They also added Burrell Smith, employee #282 from the hardware technician team, to do hardware. He’d run with the Homebrew Computer Club crowd since 1975 and had just strolled into Apple one day and asked for a job. 

Raskin also brought in one of his students from the University of California San Diego who was taking a break from working on his PhD in neurochemistry. Bill Atkinson became employee 51 at Apple and joined the project. They pulled in Andy Hertzfeld, who Steve Jobs hired when Apple bought one of his programs as he was wrapping up his degree at Berkeley and who’d been sitting on the Apple services team and doing Apple III demos.

They added Larry Kenyon, who’d worked at Amdahl and then on the Apple III team. Susan Kare came in to add art and design. They, along with Chris Espinosa - who’d been in the garage with Jobs and Wozniak working on the Apple I, ended up comprising the core team.

Over time, the team grew. Bud Tribble joined as the manager for software development. Jerrold Manock, who’d designed the case of the Apple II, came in to design the now-iconic Macintosh case. The team would eventually expand to include Bob Belleville, Steve Capps, George Crow, Donn Denman, Bruce Horn, and Caroline Rose as well. It was still a small team. And they needed a better code name. But chronologically let’s step back to the early project. 

Raskin chose his favorite Apple, the Macintosh, as the codename for the project. As far as codenames go it was a pretty good one. So their mission would be to ship a machine that was easy to use, would appeal to the masses, and be at a price point the masses could afford. They were looking at 64k of memory, a Motorola 6809 chip, and a 256 bitmap display. Small, light, and inexpensive.

Jobs’ relationship with the Lisa team was strained and he was taken off of that and he started moving in on the Macintosh team. It was quickly the Steve Jobs show. 

Having seen what could be done with the Motorola 68000 chip on the Lisa team, Jobs had them redesign the board to work with that. After visiting Xerox PARC at Raskin’s insistence, Jobs finally got the desktop metaphor and true graphical interface design. 

Xerox had not been quiet about the work at PARC. Going back to 1972 there were even television commercials. And Raskin had done time at PARC while on sabbatical from Stanford. Information about Smalltalk had been published and people like Bill Atkinson were reading about it in college. People had been exposed to the mouse all around the Bay Area in the 60s and 70s or read Engelbart’s scholarly works on it. Many of the people that worked on these projects had doctorates and were academics. They shared their research as freely as love was shared during that counter-culture time. Just as it had passed from MIT to Dartmouth and then in the back of Bob Albrecht’s VW had spread around the country in the 60s. That spirit of innovation and the constant evolutions over the past 25 years found their way to Steve Jobs. 

He saw the desktop metaphor and mouse and fell in love with it, knowing they could build one for less than the $400 unit Xerox had. He saw how an object-oriented programming language like Smalltalk made all that possible. The team was already on their way to the same types of things and so Jobs told the people at PARC about the Lisa project, but not yet about the Mac. In fact, he was as transparent as anyone could be. He made sure they knew how much he loved their work and disclosed more than I think the team planned on him disclosing about Apple. 

This is the point where Larry Tesler and others realized that the group of rag-tag garage-building Homebrew hackers had actually built a company that had real computer scientists and was on track to changing the world. Tesler and some others would end up at Apple later - to see some of their innovations go to a mass market. Steve Jobs at this point totally bought into Raskin’s vision. Yet he still felt they needed to make compromises with the price and better hardware to make it all happen. 

Raskin couldn’t make the kinds of compromises Jobs wanted. He also had an immunity to the now-infamous Steve Jobs reality distortion field and they clashed constantly. So eventually Raskin the project just when it was starting to take off. Raskin would go on to work with Canon to build his vision, which became the Canon CAT. 

With Raskin gone, and armed with a dream team of mad scientists, they got to work, tirelessly pushing towards shipping a computer they all believed would change the world. Jobs brought in Fernandez to help with projects like the macOS and later HyperCard. Wozniak had a pretty big influence over Raskin in the early days of the Mac project and helped here and there withe the project, like with the bit-serial peripheral bus on the Mac. 

Steve Jobs wanted an inexpensive mouse that could be manufactured en masse. Jim Yurchenco from Hovey-Kelley, later called Ideo, got the task - given that trusted engineers at Apple had full dance cards. He looked at the Xerox mouse and other devices around - including trackballs in Atari arcade machines. Those used optics instead of mechanical switches. As the ball under the mouse rolled beams of light would be interrupted and the cost of those components had come down faster than the technology in the Xerox mouse.  He used a ball from a roll-on deodorant stick and got to work. The rest of the team designed the injection molded case for the mouse. That work began with the Lisa and by the time they were done, the price was low enough that every Mac could get one. 

Armed with a mouse, they figured out how to move windows over the top of one another, Susan Kare designed iconography that is a bit less 8-bit but often every bit as true to form today. Learning how they wanted to access various components of the desktop, or find things, they developed the Finder. Atkinson gave us marching ants, the concept of double-clicking, the lasso for selecting content, the menu bar, MacPaint, and later, HyperCard. 

It was a small team, working long hours. Driven by a Jobs for perfection. Jobs made the Lisa team the enemy. Everything not the Mac just sucked. He took the team to art exhibits. He had the team sign the inside of the case to infuse them with the pride of an artist. He killed the idea of long product specifications before writing code and they just jumped in, building and refining and rebuilding and rapid prototyping. The team responded well to the enthusiasm and need for perfectionism. 

The Mac team was like a rebel squadron. They were like a start-up, operating inside Apple. They were pirates. They got fast and sometimes harsh feedback. And nearly all of them still look back on that time as the best thing they’ve done in their careers. 

As IBM and many learned the hard way before them, they learned a small, inspired team, can get a lot done. With such a small team and the ability to parlay work done for the Lisa, the R&D costs were minuscule until they were ready to release the computer. And yet, one can’t change the world over night. 1981 turned into 1982 turned into 1983. 

More and more people came in to fill gaps. Collette Askeland came in to design the printed circuit board. Mike Boich went to companies to get them to write software for the Macintosh. Berry Cash helped prepare sellers to move the product. Matt Carter got the factory ready to mass produce the machine. Donn Denman wrote MacBASIC (because every machine needed a BASIC back then). Martin Haeberli helped write MacTerminal and Memory Manager. Bill Bull got rid of the fan. Patti King helped manage the software library. Dan Kottke helped troubleshoot issues with mother boards. Brian Robertson helped with purchasing. Ed Riddle designed the keyboard. Linda Wilkin took on documentation for the engineering team. It was a growing team. Pamela Wyman and Angeline Lo came in as programmers. Hap Horn and Steve Balog as engineers. 

Jobs had agreed to bring in adults to run the company. So they recruited 44 years old hotshot CEO John Sculley to change the world as their CEO rather than selling sugar water at Pepsi. Scully and Jobs had a tumultuous relationship over time. While Jobs had made tradeoffs on cost versus performance for the Mac, Sculley ended up raising the price for business reasons.

Regis McKenna came in to help with the market campaign. He would win over so much trust that he would later get called out of retirement to do damage control when Apple had an antenna problem on the iPhone. We’ll cover Antenna-gate at some point. They spearheaded the production of the now-iconic 1984 Super Bowl XVIII ad, which shows woman running from conformity and depicted IBM as the Big Brother from George Orwell’s book, 1984. 

Two days after the ad, the Macintosh 128k shipped for $2,495. The price had jumped because Scully wanted enough money to fund a marketing campaign. It shipped late, and the 128k of memory was a bit underpowered, but it was a success. Many of the concepts such as a System and Finder, persist to this day. It came with MacWrite and MacPaint and some of the other Lisa products were soon to follow, now as MacProject and MacTerminal. But the first killer app for the Mac was Microsoft Word, which was the first version of Word ever shipped. 

Every machine came with a mouse. The machines came with a cassette that featured a guided tour of the new computer. You could write programs in MacBASIC and my second language, MacPascal. 

They hit the initial sales numbers despite the higher price. But over time that bit them on sluggish sales. Despite the early success, the sales were declining. Yet the team forged on. They introduced the Apple LaserWriter at a whopping $7,000. This was a laser printer that was based on the Canon 300 dpi engine. Burrell Smith designed a board and newcomer Adobe knew laser printers, given that the founders were Xerox alumni. They added postscript, which had initially been thought up while working with Ivan Sutherland and then implemented at PARC, to make for perfect printing at the time.

The sluggish sales caused internal issues. There’s a hangover  when we do something great. First there were the famous episodes between Jobs, Scully, and the board of directors at Apple. Scully seems to have been portrayed by many to be either a villain or a court jester of sorts in the story of Steve Jobs. Across my research, which began with books and notes and expanded to include a number of interviews, I’ve found Scully to have been admirable in the face of what many might consider a petulant child. But they all knew a brilliant one. 

But amidst Apple’s first quarterly loss, Scully and Jobs had a falling out. Jobs tried to lead an insurrection and ultimately resigned. Wozniak had left Apple already, pointing out that the Apple II was still 70% of the revenues of the company. But the Mac was clearly the future. 

They had reached a turning point in the history of computers. The first mass marketed computer featuring a GUI and a mouse came and went. And so many others were in development that a red ocean was forming. Microsoft released Windows 1.0 in 1985. Acorn, Amiga, IBM, and others were in rapid development as well. 

I can still remember the first time I sat down at a Mac. I’d used the Apple IIs in school and we got a lab of Macs. It was amazing. I could open a file, change the font size and print a big poster. I could type up my dad’s lyrics and print them. I could play SimCity. It was a work of art. And so it was signed by the artists that brought it to us:

Peggy Alexio, Colette Askeland, Bill Atkinson, Steve Balog, Bob Belleville, Mike Boich, Bill Bull, Matt Carter, Berry Cash, Debi Coleman, George Crow, Donn Denman, Christopher Espinosa, Bill Fernandez, Martin Haeberli, Andy Hertzfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Rod Holt, Bruce Horn, Hap Horn, Brian Howard, Steve Jobs, Larry Kenyon, Patti King, Daniel Kottke, Angeline Lo, Ivan Mach, Jerrold Manock, Mary Ellen McCammon, Vicki Milledge, Mike Murray, Ron Nicholson Jr., Terry Oyama, Benjamin Pang, Jef Raskin, Ed Riddle, Brian Robertson, Dave Roots, Patricia Sharp, Burrell Smith, Bryan Stearns, Lynn Takahashi, Guy "Bud" Tribble, Randy Wigginton, Linda Wilkin, Steve Wozniak, Pamela Wyman and Laszlo Zidek.

Steve Jobs left to found NeXT. Some, like George Crow, Joanna Hoffman, and Susan Care, went with him. Bud Tribble would become a co-founder of NeXT and then the Vice President of Software Technology after Apple purchased NeXT.

Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld would go on to co-found General Magic and usher in the era of mobility. One of the best teams ever assembled slowly dwindled away. And the oncoming dominance of Windows in the market took its toll.

It seems like every company has a “lost decade.” Some like Digital Equipment don’t recover from it. Others, like Microsoft and IBM (who has arguably had a few), emerge as different companies altogether. Apple seemed to go dormant after Steve Jobs left. They had changed the world with the Mac. They put swagger and an eye for design into computing. But in the next episode we’ll look at that long hangover, where they were left by the end of it, and how they emerged to become to change the world yet again. 

In the meantime, Walter Isaacson weaves together this story about as well as anyone in his book Jobs. Steven Levy brilliantly tells it in his book Insanely Great. Andy Hertzfeld gives some of his stories at folklore.org. And countless other books, documentaries, podcasts, blog posts, and articles cover various aspects as well. The reason it’s gotten so much attention is that where the Apple II was the watershed moment to introduce the personal computer to the mass market, the Macintosh was that moment for the graphical user interface.

Humanity is searching for meaning. We binge tv shows. We get lost in fiction. We make up amazing stories about super heroes. We hunt for something deeper than what’s on the surface. We seek conspiracies or... aliens.

I finally got around to reading a book that had been on my list for a long time, recently. Not because I thought I would agree with its assertions - but because it came up from time to time in my research. 

Chariots of the Gods? is a book written in 1968 by German Erich Von Daniken. He goes through a few examples to, in his mind, prove that aliens not only had been to Earth but that they destroyed Sodom with fire and brimstone which he said was a nuclear explosion. He also says the Ark of the Covenant was actually a really big walkie-talkie for calling space. 

Ultimately, the thesis centers around the idea than humans could not possibly have made the technological leaps we did and so must have been given to us from the gods. I find this to be a perfectly satisfactory science fiction plot. In fact, various alien conspiracy theories seemed to begin soon after Orson Welles 1938 live adaption of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds and like a virus, they mutated. But did this alien virus start in a bat in Wuhan or in Roman Syria. 

The ancient Greeks and then Romans had a lot of gods. Lucian of Samosata thought they should have a couple more. He wove together a story, which he called “A True Story.” In it, he says it’s all make-believe. Because they believed in multiple pantheons of gods in modern day Syria in the second century AD. In the satire, Lucian and crew get taken to the Moon where they get involved in a war between the Moon and the Sun kings for the rights to colonize the Morning Star. They then get eaten by a whale and escape and travel meeting great Greeks through time including Pythagoras, Homer, and Odysseus. And they find the new world. Think of how many modern plots are wrapped up in that book from the second century, made to effectively make fun of storytellers like Homer?

The 1800s was one of the first centuries where humanity began to inherit a rapid merger and explosion of scientific understanding and Edgar Allan Poe again took us to the moon in "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" in 1835. Jules Verne, Mary Shelley, and then H.G. Welles with that War of the Worlds in 1898. By then we’d mapped the surface of the moon with telescopes, so they wrote of Mars and further. H.P. Lovecraft gave us the Call of Cthulhu. These authors predicted the future - but science fiction became a genre that did more. It helped us create satire or allegory or just comparisons to these rapid global changes in ways that called out the social impact to consider before or after we invent. And to just cope with evolving social norms. The magazine Amazing Stories came in 1926 and the greatest work of science fiction premiered in 1942 with Isaac Asimov’s Foundation. Science fiction was opening our eyes to what was possible and opened the minds of scientists to study what we might create in the future. But it wasn’t real. 

Von Daniken and French author Robert Charroux seemed to influence one another in taking history and science and turning them into pseudohistory and pseudoscience. And both got many of their initial ideas from the 1960 book, The Morning of the Magicians. But Chariots of the Gods? was a massive success and a best seller. And rather than be dismissed it has now spread to include conspiracy and other theories. Which is fine as fiction, not as non-fiction. 

Let’s look at some other specific examples from Chariots of the Gods? Von Daniken claims that Japanese Dogu figures were carvings of aliens. He claims there were alien helicopter carvings in an Egyptian temple. He claims the Nazca lines in Peru were a way to call aliens and that a map from 1513 actually showed the earth from space rather than thinking it possible that cartography was capable of showing a somewhat accurate representation of the world in the Age of Discovery. He claimed stories in the Bible were often inspired by alien visits much as some First Nation peoples and cargo cults thought people in ships visiting their lands for the first time might be gods. 

The one thing I’ve learned researching these episodes is that technology has been a constant evolution. Many of our initial discoveries like fire, agriculture, and using the six simple machines could be observed in nature. From the time we learned to make fire, it was only a matter of time before humanity discovered that stones placed in or around fire might melt in certain ways - and so metallurgy was born. We went through population booms as we discovered each of these.

We used the myths and legends that became religions to hand down knowledge, as I was taught to use mnemonics to memorize the seven layers of the OSI model. That helped us preserve knowledge of astronomy across generations so we could explore further and better maintain our crops. 

The ancient Sumerians then Babylonians gave us writing. But we had been drawing on caves for thousands of years. Which seems more likely, that we were gifted this advance or that as we began to settle in more dense urban centers that we out of a need to scale operations tracked the number of widgets we had with markings that, over time evolved into a written language? First through pictures and then through words that evolved into sentences and then epics? We could pass down information more reliably across generation. 

Trade and commerce and then ziggurats and pyramids help hone our understanding of mathematics. The study of logic and automata allowed us to build bigger and faster and process more raw materials. Knowledge of all of these discoveries spread across trade routes. 

So ask yourself this. Which is more likely, the idea that humans maintained a constant, ever-evolving stream of learned ingenuity that was passed down for tens of thousands of years until it accelerated when we learned to write, or do you think aliens from outer space instead gave us technology? 

I find it revokes our very agency to assert anything but the idea that humans are capable of the fantastic feats we have reached and believe it insulting to take away from the great philosophers, discoverers, scientists, and thinkers that got us where we are today. 

Our species has long made up stories to explain that which the science of the day cannot. Before we understand the why, we make up stories about the how. This allowed us to pass knowledge down between generations. We see this in ancient explanations of the movements of stars before we had astrolabes. We see humans want to leave something behind that helps the next generations, or burial sites like with Stonehenge - not summon Thor from an alien planet as Marvel has rewritten their own epics to indicate. In part based on rethinking these mythos in the context of Chariots of the Gods?

Ultimately the greater our gaps in understanding, the more disconnected with ourselves I find that most people are. We listen to talking heads rather than think for ourselves. We get lost in theories of cabals. We seek a deeper, missing knowledge because we can’t understand everything in front of us. 

Today, if we know where to look, and can decipher the scientific jargon, all the known knowledge of science and history are at our fingertips. But it can take a lifetime to master one of thousands of fields of scientific research. If we don’t have that specialty then we can perceive it as unreachable and think maybe this pseudohistorical account of humanity is true and maybe aliens gave us 

If we feel left behind then it becomes easier to blame others when we can’t get below the surface of complicated concepts. Getting left behind might mean that jobs don’t pay what they paid our parents. We may perceive others as getting attention or resources we feel we deserve. We may feel isolated and alone. And all of those are valid feelings. When they’re heard then maybe we can look to the future instead of accepting pseudoscience and pseudohistory and conspiracies. Because while they make for fun romps on the big screen, they’re dangerous when taken as fact.

Apple found massive success on the back of the Apple II. They went public like many of the late 70s computer companies and the story could have ended there, as it did for many computer companies of the era who were potentially bigger, had better technology, better go to market strategies, and/or even some who were far more innovative. 

But it didn’t. The journey to the next stage began with the Apple IIc, Apple IIgs, and other incrementally better, faster, or smaller models. Those funded the research and development of a number of projects. One was a new computer: the Lisa. I bet you thought we were jumping into the Mac next. Getting there. But twists and turns, as the title suggests. 

The success of the Apple II led to many of the best and brightest minds in computers wanting to go work at Apple. Jobs came to be considered a visionary. The pressure to actually become one has been the fall of many a leader. And Jobs almost succumbed to it as well. 

Some go down due to a lack of vision, others because they don’t have the capacity for executional excellence. Some lack lieutenants they can trust. The story isn’t clear with Jobs. He famously sought perfection. And sometimes he got close. 

The Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC for short, had been a focal point of raw research and development, since 1970. They inherited many great innovations, outlandish ideas, amazing talent, and decades of research from academia and Cold War-inspired government grants. Ever since Sputnik, the National Science Foundation and the US Advanced Research Projects Agency had funded raw research. During Vietnam, that funding dried up and private industry moved in to take products to market. 

Arthur Rock had come into Xerox in 1969, on the back of an investment into Scientific Data Systems. While on the board of Xerox, he got to see the advancements being made at PARC. PARC hired some of the oNLine System (NLS) team who worked to help ship the Xerox Alto in 1973, shipping a couple thousand computers. They followed that up with the Xerox Star in 1981, selling about 20,000. But PARC had been at it the whole time, inventing all kinds of goodness. 

And so always thinking of the next computer, Apple started the Lisa project in 1978, the year after the release of the Apple II, when profits were just starting to roll in. 

Story has it that Steve Jobs secured a visit to PARC and made out the back with the idea for a windowing personal computer GUI complete with a desktop metaphor. But not so fast. Apple had already begun the Lisa and Macintosh projects before Jobs visited Xerox. And after the Alto was shown off internally at Xerox in 1977, complete with Mother of All Demo-esque theatrics on stages using remote computers. They had the GUI, the mouse, and networking - while the other computers released that year, the Apple II, Commodore, and TRS-80 were still doing what Dartmouth, the University of Illinois, and others had been doing since the 60s - just at home instead of on time sharing computers. 

In other words, enough people in computing had seen the oNLine System from Stanford. The graphical interface was coming and wouldn’t be stopped. The mouse had been written about in scholarly journals. But it was all pretty expensive. The visits to PARC, and hiring some of the engineers, helped the teams at Apple figure out some of the problems they didn’t even know they had. They helped make things better and they helped the team get there a little quicker. But by then the coming evolution in computing was inevitable. 

Still, the Xerox Star was considered a failure. But Apple said “hold my beer” and got to work on a project that would become the Lisa. It started off simply enough: some ideas from Apple executives like Steve Jobs and then 10 people, led by Ken Rothmuller, to develop a system with windows and a mouse. Rothmuller got replaced with John Couch, Apple’s 54th employee. Trip Hawkins got a great education in marketing on that team. He would later found Electronic Arts, one of the biggest video game publishers in the world.

Larry Tesler from the Stanford AI Lab and then Xerox PARC joined the team to run the system software team. He’d been on ARPANet since writing Pub an early markup language and was instrumental in the Gypsy Word Processor, Smalltalk, and inventing copy and paste. Makes you feel small to think of some of this stuff. 

Bruce Daniels, one of the Zork creators from MIT, joined the team from HP as the software manager. 

Wayne Rosing, formerly of Digital and Data General, was brought in to design the hardware. He’d later lead the Sparc team and then become a VP of Engineering at Google.  

The team grew. They brought in Bill Dresselhaus as a principal product designer for the look and use and design and even packaging. They started with a user interface and then created the hardware and applications. 

Eventually there would be nearly 100 people working on the Lisa project and it would run over $150 million in R&D. After 4 years, they were still facing delays and while Jobs had been becoming more and more involved, he was removed from the project. The personal accounts I’ve heard seem to be closer to other large out of control projects at companies that I’ve seen though. 

The Apple II used that MOS 6502 chip. And life was good. The Lisa used the Motorola 68000 at 5 MHz. This was a new architecture to replace the 6800. It was time to go 32-bit. 

The Lisa was supposed to ship with between 1 and 2 megabytes of RAM. It had a built-in 12 inch screen that was 720 x 364. 

They got to work building applications, releasing LisaWrite, LisaCalc, LisaDraw, LisaGraph, LisaGuide, LisaList, LisaProject, and LisaTerminal. They translated it to British English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. 

All the pieces were starting to fall into place. But the project kept growing. And delays. Jobs got booted from the Lisa project amidst concerns it was bloated, behind schedule, wasting company resources, and that Jobs’ perfectionism was going to result in a product that could never ship. The cost of the machine was over $10,000. 

Thing is, as we’ll get into later, every project went over budget and ran into delays for the next decade. Great ideas could then be capitalized on by others - even if a bit watered down. Some projects need to teach us how not to do projects - improve our institutional knowledge about the project or product discipline. That didn’t exactly happen with Lisa. 

We see times in the history of computing and technology for that matter, when a product is just too far advanced for its time. That would be the Xerox Alto. As costs come down, we can then bring ideas to a larger market. That should have been the Lisa. But it wasn’t. While nearly half the cost of a Xerox Star, less than half the number of units were sold.

Following the release of the Lisa, we got other desktop metaphors and graphical interfaces. Agat out of the Soviet Union, SGI, Visi (makers of Visicalc), GEM from Digital Research, DeskMate from Tandy, Amiga Intuition, Acorn Master Compact, the Arthur for the ARM, and the initial releases of Microsoft Windows. By the late 1980s the graphical interface was ubiquitous and computers were the easiest to use for the novice than they’d ever been before. 

But developers didn’t flock to the system as they’d done with the Apple II. You needed a specialized development workstation so why would they? People didn’t understand the menuing system yet. As someone who’s written command line tools, sometimes they’re just easier than burying buttons in complicated graphical interfaces. 

“I’m not dead yet… just… badly burned. Or sick, as it were.” Apple released the Lisa 2 in 1984. It went for about half the price and was a little more stable. One reason was that the Twiggy disk drives Apple built for the Lisa were replaced with Sony microfloppy drives. This looked much more like what we’d get with the Mac, only with expansion slots. 

The end of the Lisa project was more of a fizzle. After the original Mac was released, Lisa shipped as the Macintosh XL, for $4,000. Sun Remarketing built MacWorks to emulate the Macintosh environment and that became the main application of the Macintosh XL. 

Sun Remarketing bought 5,000 of the Mac XLs and improved them somewhat. The last of the 2,700 Lisa computers were buried in a landfill in Utah in 1989. As the whole project had been, they ended up being a write-off. Apple traded them out for a deep discount on the Macintosh Plus. By then, Steve Jobs was long gone, Apple was all about the Mac and the next year General Magic would begin ushering in the era of mobile devices. 

The Lisa was a technical marvel at the time and a critical step in the evolution of the desktop metaphor, then nearly twenty years old, beginning at Stanford on NASA and ARPA grants, evolving further at PARC when members of the team went there, and continuing on at Apple. The lessons learned in the Lisa project were immense and helped inform the evolution of the next project, the Mac. But might the product have actually gained traction in the market if Steve Jobs had not been telling people within Apple and outside that the Mac was the next thing, while the Apple II line was still accounting for most of the revenue of the company? There’s really no way to tell. The Mac used a newer Motorola 68000 at nearly 8 megahertz so was faster, the OS was cleaner, the machine was prettier. It was smaller, boxier like the newer Japanese cars at the time. It was just better. But it probably couldn’t have been if not for the Lisa.

Lisa was slower than it was supposed to be. The operating system tended to be fragile. There were recalls. Steve Jobs was never afraid to cannibalize a product to make the next awesome thing. He did so with Lisa. If we step back and look at the Lisa as an R&D project, it was a resounding success. But as a public company, the shareholders didn’t see it that way at the time. 

So next time there’s an R&D project running amuck, think about this. The Lisa changed the world, ushering in the era of the graphical interface. All for the low cost of $50 million after sales of the device are taken out of it. But they had to start anew with the Mac and only bring in the parts that worked. They built out too much technical debt while developing the product to do anything else. While it can be painful - sometimes it’s best to start with a fresh circuit board and a blank command line editor. Then we can truly step back and figure out how we want to change the world.

I’ve been struggling with how to cover a few different companies, topics, or movements for awhile. The lack of covering their stories thus far has little to do with their impact but just trying to find where to put them in the history of computing. One of the most challenging is Apple. This is because there isn’t just one Apple. Instead there are stages of the company, each with their own place in the history of computers. 

Today we can think of Apple as one of the Big 5 tech companies, which include Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. But there were times in the evolution of the company where things looked bleak. Like maybe they would get gobbled up by another tech company. To oversimplify the development of Apple, we’ll break up their storied ascent into four parts:

• Apple Computers: This story covers the mid-1970s to mid 1980s and covers Apple rising out of the hobbyist movement and into a gangbuster IPO. The Apple I through III families all centered on one family of chips and took the company into the 90s.
• The Macintosh: The rise and fall of the Mac covers the introduction of the now-iconic Mac through to the Power Macintosh era. 
• Mac OS X: This part of the Apple story begins with the return of Steve Jobs to Apple and the acquisition of NeXT, looks at the introduction of the Intel Macs and takes us through to the transition to the Apple M1 CPU.
• Post PC: Steve Jobs announced the “post PC” era in 2007, and in the coming years the sales of PCs fell for the first time, while tablets, phones, and other devices emerged as the primary means people used devices. 

We’ll start with the early days, which I think of as one of the four key Apple stages of development. And those early days go back far past the days when Apple was hocking the Apple I. They go to high school.

Jobs and Woz

Bill Fernandez and Steve Wozniak built a computer they called “The Cream Soda Computer” in 1970 when Bill was 16 and Woz was 20. It was a crude punch card processing machine built from some parts Woz got from the company he was working for at the time.

Fernandez introduced Steve Wozniak to a friend from middle school because they were both into computers and both had a flare for pranky rebelliousness. That friend was Steve Jobs. 

By 1972, the pranks turned into their first business. Wozniak designed Blue Boxes, initially conceived by Cap’n Crunch John Draper, who got his phreaker name from a whistle in a Cap’n Crunch box that made a tone in 2600 Hz that sent AT&T phones into operator mode. Draper would actually be an Apple employee for a bit. They designed a digital version and sold a few thousand dollars worth. 

Jobs went to Reed College. Wozniak went to Berkely. Both dropped out. 

Woz got a sweet gig at HP designing calculators, where Jobs had worked a summer job in high school.  India to find enlightenment. When Jobs became employee number 40 at Atari, he got Wozniak to help create Breakout. That was the year The Altair 8800 was released and Wozniak went to the first meeting of a little club called the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975 when they got an Altair so the People’s Computer Company could review it. And that was the inspiration. Having already built one computer with Fernandez, Woz designed schematics for another. Going back to the Homebrew meetings to talk through ideas and nerd out, he got it built and proud of his creation, returned to Homebrew with Jobs to give out copies of the schematics for everyone to play with. This was the age of hackers and hobbyists. But that was about to change ever so slightly. 

The Apple I 

Jobs had this idea. What if they sold the boards. They came up with a plan. Jobs sold his VW Microbus and Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator and they got to work. Simple math. They could sell 50 boards for $40 bucks each and make some cash like they’d done with the blue boxes. But you know, a lot of people didn’t know what to do with the board. Sure, you just needed a keyboard and a television, but that still seemed a bit much. 

Then a little bigger plan - what if they sold 50 full computers. They went to the Byte Shop and talked them into buying 50 for $500. They dropped $20,000 on parts and netted a $5,000 return. They’d go on to sell about 200 of the Apple Is between 1976 and 1977.

It came with a MOS 6502 chip running at a whopping 1 MHz and with 4KB of memory, which could go to 8. They provided Apple BASIC, as most vendors did at the time. That MOS chip was critical. Before it, many used an Intel or the Motorola 6800, which went for $175. But the MOS 6502 was just $25. It was an 8-bit microprocessor designed by a team that Chuck Peddle ran after leaving the 6800 team at Motorola. Armed with that chip at that price, and with Wozniak’s understanding of what it needed to do and how it interfaced with other chips to access memory and peripherals, the two could do something new. 

They started selling the Apple 1 and to quote an ad “the Apple comes fully assembled, tested & burned-in and has a complete power supply on-board, initial set-up is essentially “hassle free” and you can be running in minutes.” This really tells you something about the computing world at the time. There were thousands of hobbyists and many had been selling devices. But this thing had on-board RAM and you could just add a keyboard and video and not have to read LEDs to get output. The marketing descriptions were pretty technical by modern Apple standards, telling us something of the users. It sold for $666.66.

They got help from Patty Jobs building logic boards. Jobs’ friend from college Daniel Kottke joined for the summer, as did Fernandez and Chris Espinosa - now Apple’s longest-tenured employee. It was a scrappy garage kind of company. The best kind. 

They made the Apple I until a few months after they released the successor. But the problem with the Apple I was that there was only one person who could actually support it when customers called: Wozniak. And he was slammed, busy designing the next computer and all the components needed to take it to the mass market, like monitors, disk drives, etc. So they offered a discount for anyone returning the Apple I and destroyed most returned. Those Apple I computers have now been auctioned for hundreds of thousands of dollars all the way up to $1.75 million. 

The Apple II

They knew they were on to something. But a lot of people were building computers. They needed capital if they were going to bring in a team and make a go at things. But Steve Jobs wasn’t exactly the type of guy venture capitalists liked to fund at the time.

Mike Markkula was a product-marketing manager at chip makers Fairchild and Intel who retired early after making a small fortune on stock options. That is, until he got a visit from Steve Jobs. He brought money but more importantly the kind of assistance only a veteran of a successful corporation who’d ride that wave could bring. He brought in Michael "Scotty" Scott, employee #4, to be the first CEO and they got to work on mapping out an early business plan. If you notice the overlapping employee numbers, Scotty might have had something to do with that…

As you may notice by Wozniak selling his calculator, at the time computers weren’t that far removed from calculators. So Jobs brought in a calculator designer named Jerry Manock to design a plastic injection molded case, or shell, for the Apple II. They used the same chip and a similar enough motherboard design. They stuck with the default 4KB of memory and provided jumpers to make it easier to go up to 48. They added a cassette interface for IO. They had a toggle circuit that could trigger the built-in speaker. And they would include two game paddles. This is similar to bundles provided with the Commodore and other vendors of the day. And of course it still worked with a standard TV - but now that TVs were mostly color, so was the video coming out of the Apple II. And all of this came at a starting price of $1,298.

The computer initially shipped with a version of BASIC written by Wozniak but Apple later licensed the Microsoft 6502 BASIC to ship what they called Applesoft BASIC, short for Apple and Micorosft. Here, they turned to Randy Wiggington who was Apple’s employee #6 and had gotten rides to the Homebrew Computer Club from Wozniak as a teenager (since he lived down the street). He and others added features onto Microsoft BASIC to free Wozniak to work on other projects. Deciding they needed a disk operating system, or DOS. Here, rather than license the industry standard CP/M at the time, Wigginton worked with Shepardson, who did various projects for CP/M and Atari.  

The motherboard on the Apple II remains an elegant design. There were certain innovations that Wozniak made, like cutting down the number of DRAM chips by sharing resources between other components. The design was so elegant that Bill Fernandez had to join them as employee number four, in order to help take the board and create schematics to have it silkscreened.  The machines were powerful.

All that needed juice. Jobs asked his former boss Al Alcorn for someone to help out with that. Rod Holt, employee number 5, was brought in to design the power supply. By implementing a switching power supply, as Digital Equipment had done in the PDP-11, rather than a transformer-based power supply, the Apple II ended up being far lighter than many other machines. 

The Apple II was released in 1977 at the West Coast Computer Fair. It, along with the TRS-80 and the Commodore PET would become the 1977 Trinity, which isn’t surprising. Remember Peddle who ran the 6502 design team - he designed the PET. And Steve Leininger was also a member of the Homebrew Computer Club who happened to work at National Semiconductor when Radio Shack/Tandy started looking for someone to build them a computer. 

The machine was stamped with an Apple logo. Jobs hired Rob Janoff, a local graphic designer, to create the logo. This was a picture of an Apple made out of a rainbow, showing that the Apple II had color graphics. This rainbow Apple stuck and became the logo for Apple Computers until 1998, after Steve Jobs returned to Apple, when the Apple went all-black, but the silhouette is now iconic, serving Apple for 45 years and counting.

The computers were an instant success and sold quickly. But others were doing well in the market. Some incumbents and some new. Red oceans mean we have to improve our effectiveness. So this is where Apple had to grow up to become a company. Markkula made a plan to get Apple to $500 million in sales in 10 years on the backs of his $92,000 investment and another $600,000 in venture funding. 

They did $2.7 million dollars in sales in 1977. This idea of selling a pre-assembled computer to the general public was clearly resonating. Parents could use it to help teach their kids. Schools could use it for the same. And when we were done with all that, we could play games on it. Write code in BASIC. Or use it for business. Make some documents in Word Star, spreadsheets in VisiCalc, or use one of the thousands of titles available for the Mac. Sales grew 150x until 1980.

Given that many thought cassettes were for home machines and floppies were for professional machines, it was time to move away from tape. Markkela realized this and had Wozniak design a floppy disk for the Apple II, which went on to be known as the Drive II. Wozniak had experience with disk controllers and studied the latest available. Wozniak again managed to come up with a value engineered design that allowed Apple to produce a good drive for less than any other major vendor at the time. Wozniak would actually later go on to say that it was one of his best designs (and many contemporaries agreed).

Markkula filled gaps as well as anyone. He even wrote free software programs under the name of Johnny Appleseed, a name also used for years in product documentation. He was a classic hacker type of entrepreneur on their behalf, sitting in the guerrilla marketing chair some days or acting as president of the company others, and mentor for Jobs in other days.  

From Hobbyists to Capitalists

Here’s the thing - I’ve always been a huge fan of Apple. Even in their darkest days, which we’ll get to in later episodes, they represented an ideal. But going back to the Apple 1, they were nothing special. Even the Apple II. Osborne, Commodore, Vector Graphics, Atari, and hundreds of other companies were springing up, inspired first by that Altair and then by the rapid drop in the prices of chips. 

The impact of the 1 megahertz barrier and cost of those MOS 6502 chips was profound. The MOS 6502 chip would be used in the Apple II, the Atari 2600, the Nintendo NES, the BBY Micro. And along with the Zylog Z80 and Intel 8080 would spark a revolution in personal computers. Many of those companies would disappear in what we’d think of as a personal computer bubble if there was more money in it. But those that survived, took things to an order of magnitude higher. Instead of making millions they were making hundreds of millions. Many would even go to war in a race to the bottom of prices. And this is where Apple started to differentiate themselves from the rest. 

For starters, due to how anemic the default Altair was, most of the hobbyist computers were all about expansion. You can see it on the Apple I schematics and you can see it in the minimum of 7 expansion slots in the Apple II lineup of computers. Well, all of them except the IIc, marketed as a more portable type of device, with a handle and an RCA connection to a television for a monitor. 

The media seemed to adore them. In an era of JR Ewing of Dallas, Steve Jobs was just the personality to emerge and still somewhat differentiate the new wave of computer enthusiasts. Coming at the tail end of an era of social and political strife, many saw something of themselves in Jobs. He looked the counter-culture part. He had the hair, but this drive. The early 80s were going to be all about the yuppies though - and Jobs was putting on a suit. Many identified with that as well.

Fueled by the 150x sales performance shooting them up to $117M in sales, Apple filed for an IPO, going public in 1980, creating hundreds of millionaires, including at least 40 of their own employees. It was the biggest IPO since Ford in 1956, the same year Steve Jobs was born. The stock was filed at $14 and shot up to $29 on the first day alone, leaving Apple sitting pretty on a $1.778 valuation. 

Scotty, who brought the champagne, made nearly a $100M profit. One of the Venture Capitalists, Arthur Rock, made over $21M on a $57,600 investment. Rock had been the one to convince the Shockley Semiconductor team to found Fairchild, a key turning point in putting silicon into the name of Silicon Valley. When Noyce and Moore left there to found Intel, he was involved. And he would stay in touch with Markkula, who was so enthusiastic about Apple that Rock invested and began a stint on the board of directors at Apple in 1978, often portrayed as the villain in the story of Steve Jobs. But let’s think about something for a moment. Rock was a backer of Scientific Data Systems, purchased by Xerox in 1969, becoming the Xerox 500. Certainly not Xerox PARC and in fact, the anti-PARC, but certainly helping to connect Jobs to Xerox later as Rock served on the board of Xerox.

The IPO Hangover

Money is great to have but also causes problems. Teams get sidetracked trying to figure out what to do with their hauls. Like Rod Holt’s $67M haul that day. It’s a distraction in a time when executional excellence is critical. We have to bring in more people fast, which created a scenario Mike Scott referred to as a “bozo explosion.” Suddenly more people actually makes us less effective. 

Growing teams all want a seat at a limited table. Innovation falls off as we rush to keep up with the orders and needs of existing customers. Bugs, bigger code bases to maintain, issues with people doing crazy things. 

Taking our eyes off the ball and normalizing the growth can be hard. By 1981, Scotty was out after leading some substantial layoffs.  Apple stock was down. A big IPO also creates investments in competitors. Some of those would go on a race to the bottom in price. 

Apple didn’t compete on price. Instead, they started to plan the next revolution, a key piece of Steve Jobs emerging as a household name. They would learn what the research and computer science communities had been doing - and bring a graphical interface and mouse to the world with Lisa and a smaller project brought forward at the time by Jef Raskin that Jobs tried to kill - but one that Markkula not only approved, but kept Jobs from killing, the Macintosh. 

Fernandez, Holt, Wigginton, and even Wozniak just drifted away or got lost in the hyper-growth of the company, as is often the case. Some came back. Some didn’t. Many of us go through the same in rapidly growing companies. 

Next (but not yet NeXT)

But a new era of hackers was on the way. And a new movement as counter to the big computer culture as Jobs. But first, they needed to take a trip to Xerox. In the meantime, the Apple III was an improvement but proved that the Apple computer line had run its course. They released it in 1980 and recalled the first 14,000 machines and never peaked 75,000 machines sold, killing off the line in 1984. A special year. 

We mentioned John Locke in the episode on the Scientific Revolution. And Leibniz. They not only worked in the new branches of science, math, and philosophy, but they put many of their theories to use and were engineers. 

Computing at the time was mechanical, what we might now think of as clockwork. And clockwork was starting to get some innovative new thinking. As we’ve covered, clockworks go back thousands of years. But with a jump in more and more accurate machining and more science, advances in timekeeping were coming. Locke and Huygens worked on pendulum clocks and then moved to spring driven clocks. Both taught English patents and because they didn’t work that well, neither were granted. But more somethings needed to happen to improve the accuracy of time. 

Time was becoming increasingly important. Not only to show up to appointments and computing ever increasing math problems but also for navigation. Going back to the Greeks, we’d been estimating our position on the Earth relative to seconds and degrees. And a rapidly growing maritime power like England at the time needed to use clocks to guide ships. Why?

The world is a sphere. A sphere has 360 degrees which multiplied by 60 minutes is 21,600. The North South circumference is 21603 nautical miles. Actually the world isn’t a perfect sphere so the circumference around the equator is 21,639 nautical miles. Each nautical mile is 6,076 feet. When traveling by sea, trying to do all that math in feet and inches is terribly difficult and so we came up with 180 lines each of latitude, running east-west and longitude running north-south. That’s 60 nautical miles in each line, or 60 minutes. The distance between each naturally goes down as one gets closer to the poles - and goes down a a percentage relative to the distance to those poles. Problem was that the most accurate time to check your position relative to the sun was at noon or to use the Polaris North Star at night.

Much of this went back to the Greeks and further. The Sumerians developed the sexagesimal system, or base 60 and passed it down to the Babylonians in the 3rd millennium BCE and by 2000 BCE gave us the solar year and the sundial. As their empire grew rich with trade and growing cities by 1500 BCE the Egyptians had developed the first water clocks timers, proved by the Karnak water clock, beginning as a controlled amount of water filling up a vessel until it reached marks. Water could be moved - horizontal water wheels were developed as far back as the 4th millennium BCE. 

Both the sundial and the water clock became more precise in the ensuing centuries, taking location and the time of the year into account. Due to water reacting differently in various climates we also got the sandglass, now referred to as the hourglass. 

The sundial became common in Greece by the sixth century BCE, as did the water clock, which they called the clepsydra. By then it had a float that would tell the time. Plato even supposedly added a bowl full of balls to his inflow water clock that would dump them on a copper plate as an alarm during the day for his academy. 

We still use the base 60 scale and the rough solar years from even more ancient times. But every time sixty seconds ticks by something needs to happen to increment a minute and every 60 minutes needs to increment an hour. From the days of Thales in the 600s BCE and earlier, the Greeks had been documenting and studying math and engineering. And inventing. All that gathered knowledge was starting to come together.

Ctesibius was potentially the first to head the Library of Alexandria and while there, developed the siphon, force pumps, compressed air, and so the earliest uses of pneumatics. He is accredited for adding a scale and float thus mechanics. And expanding the use to include water powered gearing that produced sound and moved dials with wheels.

The Greek engineer Philo of Byzantium in the 240s BCE, if not further back, added an escapement to the water clock. He started by simply applying a counterweight to the end of a spoon and as the spoon filled, a ball was released. He also described a robotic maid who, when Greeks put a cup in her hand, poured wine. 

Archimedes added the idea that objects displaced water based on their volume but also mathematical understanding of the six simple machines. He then gets credited for being the first to add a gear to a water clock. We now have gears and escapements. Here’s a thought, given their lifetimes overlapping, Philo, Archimedes, and Ctesibius could have all been studying together at the library. Archimedes certainly continued on with earlier designs, adding a chime to the early water clocks. And Archimedes is often credited for providing us with the first transmission gears.

The Antikythera device proves the greeks also made use of complex gearing. Transferring energy in more complex gearing patterns. It is hand cranked but shows mathematical and gearing mastery by choosing a day and year and seeing when the next eclipse and olympiad would be. And the Greeks were all to happy to use gearing for other devices, such as an odometer in the first century BCE and to build the Tower of the Winds, an entire building that acted as a detailed and geared water clock as well as perhaps a model of the universe. 

And we got the astrolabe at the same time, from Apollonius or Hipparchus. But a new empire had risen. The astrolabe was a circle of metal with an arm called an alidade that users sighted to the altitude of a star and based on that, you could get your location. The gearing was simple but the math required to get accurate readings was not. These were analog computers of a sort - you gave them an input and they produced an output. At this point they were mostly used by astronomers and continued to be used by Western philosophers at least until the Byzantines.

The sundial, water clocks, and many of these engineering concepts were brought to Rome as the empire expanded, many from Greece. The Roman Vitruvius is credited with taking that horizontal water wheel and flipping it vertical in 14 CE. Around the same time, Augustus Caesar built a large sundial in Campus Martius. The Romans also added a rod to cranks giving us sawmills in the third century. The larger the empire the more time people spent in appointments and the more important time became - but also the more people could notice the impact that automata had. Granted much of it was large, like a windmill at the time, but most technology starts huge and miniaturizes as more precision tooling becomes available to increasingly talented craftspeople and engineers. 

Marcus Vitruvius Pollio was an architect who wrote 10 books in the 20s BCE about technology. His works link aqueducts to water-driven machinations that could raise water from mines, driven by a man walking on a wheel above ground like a hamster does today but with more meaning. They took works from the Hellenistic era and put them in use on an industrial scale. This allowed them to terraform lands and spring new cities into existence. Sawing timber with mills using water to move saws allowed them to build faster. And grinding flour with mills allowed them to feed more people.

Heron of Alexandria would study and invent at the Library of Alexandria, amongst scrolls piled to the ceilings in halls with philosophers and mechanics. The inheritor of so much learning, he developed vending machines, statues that moved, and even a steam engine. If the Greeks and early Roman conquered of Alexandria could figure out how a thing work, they could automate it. 

Many automations were to prove the divine. Such as water powered counterweights to open doors when priests summoned a god, and blew compressed air through trumpets. He also used a wind mill to power an organ and a programmable cart using a weight to turn a drive axle. He also developed an omen machine, with ropes and pulleys on a gear that caused a bird to sing, the song driven by a simple whistle being lowered into water. His inventions likely funding more and more research. 

But automations in Greek times were powered by natural forces, be it hand cranked, fire, or powered by water. Heron also created a chain driven automatic crossbow, showing the use of a chain-driven machine and he used gravity to power machines, automating devices as sand escaped from those sand glasses.

He added pegs to pulleys so the distance travelled could be programmed. Simple and elegant machines. And his automata extended into the theater. He kept combining simple machines and ropes and gravity into more and more complex combinations, getting to the point that he could run an automated twenty minute play. Most of the math and mechanics had been discovered and documented in the countless scrolls in the Library of Alexandria. 

And so we get the term automated from the Greek word for acting of oneself. But automations weren’t exclusive to the Greeks. By the time Caligula was emperor of the Roman Empire, bronze valves could be used to feed iron pipes in his floating ships that came complete with heated floors. People were becoming more and more precise in engineering and many a device was for telling time. The word clock comes from Latin for bell or clogga. I guess bells should automatically ring at certain times. Getting there...

Technology spreads or is rediscovered. By Heron the Greeks and Romans understood steam, pistons, gears, pulleys, programmable automations, and much of what would have been necessary for an industrial or steampunk revolution. But slaves were cheap and plentiful in the empire. The technology was used in areas where they weren’t. Such as at Barbegal to feed Arles in modern France, the Romans had a single hillside flour grinding complex with automated hoppers, capable of supplying flour to thousands of Romans. Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor, was based there before founding Constantinople.

And as Christianity spread, the gimmicks that enthralled the people as magic were no longer necessary. The Greeks were pagans and so many of their works would be cleansed or have Christian writings copied over them. Humanity wasn’t yet ready. Or so we’ve been led to believe. 

The inheritors of the Roman Empire were the Byzantines, based where Europe meets what we now think of as the Middle East. We have proof of geared portable sundials there, fewer gears but showing evidence of the continuation of automata and the math used to drive it persisting in the empire through to the 400s. And maybe confirming written accounts that there were automated lions and thrones in the empire of Constantinople. And one way geared know-how continued and spread was along trade routes which carried knowledge in the form of books and tradespeople and artifacts, sometimes looted from temples. One such trade route was the ancient Silk Road (or roads).

Water clocks were being used in Egypt, Babylon, India, Persia, Greece, Rome, and China. The Tang Dynasty in China took or rediscovered the escapement to develop a water powered clockwork escapement in the 700s and then in the Song Dynasty developed astronomical clock towers in the 900s. By now the escapements Su Sung is often credited for the first mechanical water clock in 1092. And his Cosmic Engine would mark the transition from water clocks to fully mechanical clocks, although still hydromechanical. The 1100s saw Bhoja in the Paramara dynasty of India emerge as a patron of the arts and sciences and write a chapter on mechanical bees and birds. These innovations could have been happening in a vacuum in each - or word and works could have spread through trade. 

That technology disappeared in Europe, such as plumbing in towns that could bring tap water to homes or clockworks, as the Roman Empire retreated. The specialists and engineers lacked the training to build new works or even maintain many that existed in modern England, France, and Germany. But the heads of rising eastern empires were happy to fund such efforts in a sprint to become the next Alexander. And so knowledge spread west from Asia and was infused with Greek and Roman knowhow in the Middle East during the Islamic conquests. The new rulers expanded quickly, effectively taking possession of Egypt, Mesopotamia, parts of Asia, the Turkish peninsula, Greece, parts of Southern Italy, out towards India, and even Spain. In other words, all of the previous centers of science. And they were tolerant, not looking to convert conquered lands to Islam. This allowed them to learn from their subjects in what we now think of as the Arabic translation movement in the 7th century when Arabic philosophers translated but also critiqued and refined works from the lands they ruled.

This sparked the Muslim golden age, which became the new nexus of science at the time. Over time we saw the Seljuks, ruling out of Baghdad, and Abbasids as Islamic empires who funded science and philosophy. They brought caravans of knowledge into their capitals. The Abbasids even insisted on a specific text from Ptolemy (the Almagest) when doing a treaty so they could bring it home for study. They founding of schools of learning known as Madrasas in every town. This would be similar to a university system today.

Over the centuries following, they produced philosophers like Muhammad Ibn Musa Al-Khwarizmi, who solved quadratic equations, giving us algebra. This would become important to make clockwork devices became more programmable (and for everything else algebra is great at helping with). They sent clockworks as gifts, such as a brass automatic water clock sent to Charlemagne between 802 and 807, complete with chimes. Yup, the clogga rang the bell.

They went far past where Heron left off though. There was Ibn-Sina, Al-Razi, Al-Jazari, Al Kindi, Thābit ibn Qurra, Ridwan, and countless other philosophers carrying on the tradition. The philosophers took the works of the Greeks, copied, and studied them. They evolved the technology to increasing levels of sophistication. And many of the philosophers completed their works at what might be considered the Islamic version of the Library of Alexandria, The House of Wisdom in Baghdad. In fact, when Baghdad was founded about 50 miles north of ancient Babylon, the Al-Mansur Palace Library was part of the plan  and over subsequent Caliphs was expanded adding an observatory that would then be called the House of Wisdom.

The Banu Musa brothers worked out of there and wrote twenty books including the first Book of Ingenious Devices. Here, they took the principles the Greeks and others had focused on and got more into the applications of those principles. On the way to their compilation of devices, they translated books from other authors, including A Book on Degrees on the Nature of Zodiacal Signs from China and Greek works.The three brothers combined pneumatics and aerostatics. They added plug valves, taps, float valves, and conical valves. They documented the siphon and funnel for pouring liquids into the machinery and thought to put a float in a chamber to turn what we now think of as the first documented crank shaft. We had been turning circular motion into linear motion with wheels, but we were now able to turn linear motion into circular motion as well.

They used all of this to describe in engineering detail, if not build and invent, marvelous fountains. Some with multiple jets alternating. Some were wind powered and showed worm-and-pinion gearing.  

Al-Biruni, around the turn of the first millennia, came out of modern Uzbekistan and learned the ancient Indian Sanskrit, Persian, Hebrew, and Greek. He wrote 95 books on astronomy and math. He studied the speed of light vs speed of sound, the axis of the earth and applied the scientific method to statics and mechanics. This moved theories on balances and weights forward. He produced geared mechanisms that are the ancestor of modern astrolabes. 

The Astrolabe was also brought to the Islamic world. Muslim astronomers added newer scales and circles. As with in antiquity, they used it in navigation but they had another use, to aid in prayer by showing the way to Mecca. 

Al-Jazari developed a number of water clocks and is credited with others like developed by others due to penning another Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices. Here, he describes a camshaft, crank dive and reciprocating pumps, two way valves, and expanding on the uses of pneumatic devices. He developed programmable humanoid robots in the form of automatic musicians on a boat. These complex automata included cams and pegs, similar to those developed by Heron of Alexandria, but with increasing levels of sophistication, showing we were understanding the math behind the engineering and it wasn’t just trial and error.

All golden ages must end. Or maybe just evolve and migrate. Fibonacci and Bacon quoted then, showing yet another direct influence from multiple sources around the world flowing into Europe following the Holy Wars. 

Pope Urban II began inspiring European Christian leaders to wage war against the Muslims in 1095. And so the Holy Wars, or Crusades would begin and rage until 1271. Here, we saw manuscripts copied and philosophy flow back into Europe. Equally as important, Muslim Caliphates in Spain and Sicily and trade routes. And another pair of threats were on the rise. The plague and the Mongols. 

The Mongol invasions began in the 1200s and changed the political makeup of the known powers of the day. The Mongols sacked Baghdad and burned the House of Wisdom. After the mongols and Mughals, the Islamic Caliphates had warring factions internally, the empires fractured, and they turned towards more dogmatic approaches. The Ottomon empire rose and would last until World War I, and while they continued to sponsor scientists and great learners, the nexus of scientific inquiry and the engineering that inspired shifted again and the great works were translated with that shift, including into Latin - the language of learning in Europe. By 1492 the Moors would be kicked out of Spain. That link from Europe to the Islamic golden age is a critical aspect of the transfer of knowledge.

The astrolabe was one such transfer. As early as the 11th century, metal astrolabes arrive in France over the Pyrenees to the north and to the west to Portugal . By the 1300s it had been written about by Chaucer and spread throughout Europe. Something else happened in the Iberian peninsula in 1492. Columbus sailed off to discover the New World. He also used a quadrant, or a quarter of an astrolabe. Which was first written about in Ptolemy’s Almagest but later further developed at the House of Wisdom as the sine quadrant. 

The Ottoman Empire had focused on trade routes and trade. But while they could have colonized the New World during the Age of Discovery, they didn’t. The influx of wealth coming from the Americas caused inflation to spiral and the empire went into a slow decline over the ensuing centuries until the Turkish War of Independence, which began in 1919. 

In the meantime, the influx of money and resources and knowledge from the growing European empires saw clockworks and gearing arriving back in Europe in full force in the 14th century. 

In 1368 the first mechanical clock makers got to work in England. Innovation was slowed due to the Plague, which destroyed lives and property values, but clockwork had spread throughout Europe. The Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomons in 1453 sends a wave of Greek Scholars away from the Ottoman Empire and throughout Europe. Ancient knowledge, enriched with a thousand years of Islamic insight was about to meet a new level of precision metalwork that had been growing in Europe.

By 1495, Leonardo da Vinci showed off one of the first robots in the world -  a knight that could sit, stand, open its visor independently. He also made a robotic lion and repeated experiments from antiquity on self driving carts. And we see a lot of toys following the mechanical innovations throughout the world. Because parents. 

We think of the Renaissance as coming out of Italy but scholars had been back at it throughout Europe since the High Middle Ages. By 1490, a locksmith named Peter Hele is credited for developing the first mainspring in Nurnburg. This is pretty important for watches. You see, up to this point nearly every clockwork we’ve discussed was powered by water or humans setting a dial or fire or some other force. The mainspring stores energy as a small piece of metal ribbon is twisted around an axle, called an abror, into a spiral and then wound tighter and tighter, thus winding a watch. 

The mainspring drove a gear train of increasingly smaller gears which then sent energy into the escapement but without a balance wheel those would not be terribly accurate just yet. But we weren’t powering clocks with water.

At this point, clocks started to spread as expensive decorations, appearing on fireplace mantles and on tables of the wealthy. These were not small by any means. But Peter Henlein would get the credit in 1510 for the first real watch, small enough to be worn as a necklace.

By 1540, screws were small enough to be used in clocks allowing them to get even smaller. The metals for gears were cut thinner, clock makers and toy makers were springing up all over the world. And money coming from speculative investments in the New World was starting to flow, giving way to fuel even more investment into technology.

Jost Burgi invented the minute hand in 1577. But as we see with a few disciplines he decided to jump into, Galileo Galilei has a profound impact on clocks. Galileo documents the physics of the pendulum in 1581 and the center of watchmaking would move to Geneva later in that decade. Smaller clockworks spread with wheels and springs but the 1600s would see an explosion in hundreds of different types of escapements and types of gearing.  He designed an escapement for a pendulum clock but died before building it. 

1610 watches got glass to protect the dials and 1635 French inventor Paul Viet Blois added enamel to the dials. Meanwhile, Blaise Pascal developed the Pascaline in 1642, giving the world the adding machine.

But it took another real scientist to pick up Galileo’s work and put it into action to propel clocks forward. To get back to where we started, a golden age of clockwork was just getting underway. In 1657 Huygens created a clock driven by the pendulum, which by 1671 would see William Clement add the suspension spring and by 1675 Huygens would give us the balance wheel, mimicking the back and forth motion of Galileo’s pendulum. The hairspring, or balance spring, then controlled the speed making it smooth and more accurate. And the next year, we got the concentric minute hand.

I guess Robert Hooke gets credit for the anchor escapement, but the verge escapement had been in use for awhile by then. So who gets to claim inventing some of these devices is debatable. Leibniz then added a stepped reckoner to the mechanical calculator in 1672 going from adding and subtracting to multiplication and division. Still calculating and not really computing as we’d think of it today.

At this point we see a flurry of activity in a proton-industrial revolution. Descartes puts forth that bodies are similar to complex machines and that various organs, muscles, and bones could be replaced with gearing similar to how we can have a hip or heart replaced today. Consider this a precursor to cybernetics. We see even more mechanical toys for the rich - but labor was still cheap enough that automation wasn’t spreading faster. 

And so we come back to the growing British empire. They had colonized North America and the empire had grown wealthy. They controlled India, Egypt, Ireland, the Sudan, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Kenya, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Burma, Australia, Canada, and so much more. And knowing the exact time was critical for a maritime empire because we wouldn’t get radar until World War II. 

There were clocks but still, the clocks built had to be corrected at various times, based on a sundial. This is because we hadn’t yet gotten to the levels of constant power and precise gearing and the ocean tended to mess with devices. The growing British Empire needed more reliable ways than those Ptolemy used to tell time. And so England would offer prizes ranging from 10,000 to 20,000 pounds for more accurate ways to keep time in the Maritime Act in 1714. Crowdsourcing.

It took until the 1720s. George Graham, yet another member of the Royal Society, picked up where Thomas Tompion left off and added a cylinder escapement to watches and then the deadbeat escapement. He chose not to file patents for these so all watch makers could use them. He also added mercurial compensation to pendulum clocks. And John Harrison added the grid-iron compensation pendulum for his H1 marine chronometer. And George Graham added the cylinder escapement. 

1737 or 1738 sees another mechanical robot, but this time Jacques de Vaucanson brings us a duck that can eat, drink, and poop. But that type of toy was a one-off. Swiss Jaquet-Droz built automated dolls that were meant to help sell more watches, but here we see complex toys that make music (without a water whistle) and can even write using programmable text. The toys still work today and I feel lucky to have gotten to see them at the Museum of Art History in Switzerland. Frederick the Great became entranced by clockwork automations. Magicians started to embrace automations for more fantastical sets. 

At this point, our brave steampunks made other automations and their automata got cheaper as the supply increased. By the 1760s Pierre Le Roy and Thomas Earnshaw invented the temperature compensated balance wheel. Around this time, the mainspring was moved into a going barrel so watches could continue to run while the mainspring was being wound. Many of these increasingly complicated components required a deep understanding of the math about the simple machine going back to Archimedes but with all of the discoveries made in the 2,000 years since. 

And so in 1785 Josiah Emery made the lever escapement standard. The mechanical watch fundamentals haven’t changed a ton in the past couple hundred years (we’ll not worry about quartz watches here). But the 1800s saw an explosion in new mechanical toys using some of the technology invented for clocks. Time brings the cost of technology down so we can mass produce trinkets to keep the kiddos busy.  This is really a golden age of dancing toys, trains, mechanical banks, and eventually bringing in spring-driven wind-up toys. 

Another thing happened in the 1800s. With all of this knowhow on building automations, and all of this scientific inquiry requiring increasingly complicated mathematics, Charles Babbage started working on the Difference Engine in 1822 and then the Analytical Engine in 1837, bringing in the idea of a Jacquard loom punched card. The Babbage machines would become the precursor of modern computers, and while they would have worked if built to spec, were not able to be run in his lifetime. 

Over the next few generations, we would see his dream turn into reality and the electronic clock from Frank Hope-Jones in 1895. There would be other innovations such as in 1945 when the National Institute of Standards and technology created the first atomic clock. But in general parts got smaller, gearing more precise, and devices more functional. We’d see fits and starts for mechanical computers, with Percy Ludgate’s Analytical Machine in 1909, the Marchant Calculator in 1918, the electromechanical Enigma in the 1920s, the Polish Enigma double in 1932, the Z1 from Konrad Zuse in 1938, and the Mark 1 Fire Control Computer for the US Navy in the World War II era, when computers went electro-mechanical and electric, effectively ending the era of clockwork-driven machinations out of necessity, instead putting that into what I consider fun tinkerations.

Aristotle dreamed of automatic looms freeing humans from the trappings of repetitive manual labors so we could think. A Frenchman built them. Long before Aristotle, Pre-Socratic Greek legends told of statues coming to life, fire breathing statues, and tables moving themselves. Egyptian statues were also known to have come to life to awe and inspire the people. The philosophers of the Thales era sent Pythagoras and others to Egypt where he studied with Egyptian priests. Why priests? They led ascetic lives, often dedicated to a branch of math or science. And that’s in the 6th century BCE. The Odyssey was written about events from the 8th century BCE. 

We’ve seen time and time again in the evolutions of science that we often understood how to do something before we understood why. The legendary King Solomon and King Mu of the Zhao dynasty are said to have automata, or clockwork, or moving statues, or to have been presented with these kinds of gifts, going back thousands of years. And there is the chance that they were. Since then, we’ve seen a steady advent of this back and forth between engineering and science. 

Sometimes, we understand how to do something through trial and error or random discovery. And then we add the math and science to catch up to it. Once we do understand the science behind a discovery we uncover better ways and that opens up more discoveries. Aristotle’s dream was realized and extended to the point we can now close the blinds, lock the doors, control the lights, build cars, and even now print cars. We mastered time in multiple dimensions, including Newton’s relative time. We mastered mechanics and then the electron and managed to merge the two. We learned to master space, mapping them to celestial bodies. We mastered mechanics and the math behind it.

Which brings us to today. What do you have to do manually? What industries are still run by manual labor? How can we apply complex machines or enrich what those can do with electronics in order to free our fellow humans to think more? How can we make Aristotle proud? One way is to challenge and prove or disprove any of his doctrines in new and exciting ways. Like Newton and then Einstein did. We each have so much to give. I look forward to seeing or hearing about your contributions when its time to write their histories!

Let’s oversimplify something in the computing world. Which is what you have to do when writing about history. You have to put your blinders on so you can get to the heart of a given topic without overcomplicating the story being told. And in the evolution of technology we can’t mention all of the advances that lead to each subsequent evolution. It’s wonderful and frustrating all at the same time. And that value judgement of what goes in and what doesn’t can be tough. 

Let’s start with the fact that there are two main types of processors in our devices. There’s the x86 chipset developed by Intel and AMD and then there’s the RISC-based processors, which are ARM and for the old school people, also include PowerPC and SPARC. Today we’re going to set aside the x86 chipset that was dominant for so long and focus on how the RISC and so ARM family emerged.   

First, let’s think about what the main difference is between ARM and x86. RISC and so ARM chips have a focus on reducing the number of instructions required to perform a task to as few as possible, and so RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computing. Intel, other than the Atom series chips, with the x86 chips has focused on high performance and high throughput. Big and fast, no matter how much power and cooling is necessary. 

The ARM processor requires simpler instructions which means there’s less logic and so more instructions are required to perform certain logical operations. This increases memory and can increase the amount of time to complete an execution, which ARM developers address with techniques like pipelining, or instruction-level parallelism on a processor. Seymour Cray came up with this to split up instructions so each core or processor handles a different one and so Star, Amdahl and then ARM implemented it as well. 

The X86 chips are Complex Instruction Set Computing chips, or CISC. Those will do larger, more complicated tasks, like computing floating point integers or memory searches, on the chip. That often requires more consistent and larger amounts of power.

ARM chips are built for low power. The reduced complexity of operations is one reason but also it’s in the design philosophy. This means less heat syncs and often accounting for less consistent streams of power. This 130 watt x86 vs 5 watt ARM can mean slightly lower clock speeds but the chips can cost more as people will spend less in heat syncs and power supplies. This also makes the ARM excellent for mobile devices. 

The inexpensive MOS 6502 chips helped revolutionize the personal computing industry in 1975, finding their way into the Apple II and a number of early computers. They were RISC-like but CISC-like as well. They took some of the instruction set architecture family from the IBM System/360 through to the PDP, General Nova, Intel 8080, Zylog, and so after the emergence of Windows, the Intel finally captured the personal computing market and the x86 flourished. 

But the RISC architecture actually goes back to the ACE, developed in 1946 by Alan Turing. It wasn’t until the 1970s that Carver Mead from Caltech and Lynn Conway from Xerox PARC saw that the number of transistors was going to plateau on chips while workloads on chips were growing exponentially. ARPA and other agencies needed more and more instructions, so they instigated what we now refer to as the VLSI project, a DARPA program initiated by Bob Kahn to push into the 32-bit world. They would provide funding to different universities, including Stanford and the University of North Carolina. 

Out of those projects, we saw the Geometry Engine, which led to a number of computer aided design, or CAD efforts, to aid in chip design. Those workstations, when linked together, evolved into tools used on the Stanford University Network, or SUN, which would effectively spin out of Stanford as Sun Microsystems. And across the bay at Berkeley we got a standardized Unix implementation that could use the tools being developed in Berkely Software Distribution, or BSD, which would eventually become the operating system used by Sun, SGI, and now OpenBSD and other variants. 

And the efforts from the VLSI project led to Berkely RISC in 1980 and Stanford MIPS as well as the multi chip wafer.The leader of that Berkeley RISC project was David Patterson who still serves as vice chair of the RISC-V Foundation. The chips would add more and more registers but with less specializations. This led to the need for more memory. But UC Berkeley students shipped a faster ship than was otherwise on the market in 1981. And the RISC II was usually double or triple the speed of the Motorola 68000. 

That led to the Sun SPARC and DEC Alpha. There was another company paying attention to what was happening in the RISC project: Acorn Computers. They had been looking into using the 6502 processor until they came across the scholarly works coming out of Berkeley about their RISC project. Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber from Acorn then got to work building an instruction set for the Acorn RISC Machine, or ARM for short. They had the first ARM working by 1985, which they used to build the Acorn Archimedes.

The ARM2 would be faster than the Intel 80286 and by 1990, Apple was looking for a chip for the Apple Newton. A new company called Advanced RISC Machines or Arm would be founded, and from there they grew, with Apple being a shareholder through the 90s. By 1992, they were up to the ARM6 and the ARM610 was used for the Newton. DEC licensed the ARM architecture to develop the StrongARMSelling chips to other companies. Acorn would be broken up in 1998 and parts sold off, but ARM would live on until acquired by Softbank for $32 billion in 2016. Softbank is  currently in acquisition talks to sell ARM to Nvidia for $40 billion. 

Meanwhile, John Cocke at IBM had been working on the RISC concepts since 1975 for embedded systems and by 1982 moved on to start developing their own 32-bit RISC chips. This led to the POWER instruction set which they shipped in 1990 as the RISC System/6000, or as we called them at the time, the RS/6000. They scaled that down to the Power PC and in 1991 forged an alliance with Motorola and Apple. DEC designed the Alpha. It seemed as though the computer industry was Microsoft and Intel vs the rest of the world, using a RISC architecture.

But by 2004 the alliance between Apple, Motorola, and IBM began to unravel and by 2006 Apple moved the Mac to an Intel processor. But something was changing in computing. Apple shipped the iPod back in 2001, effectively ushering in the era of mobile devices. By 2007, Apple released the first iPhone, which shipped with a Samsung ARM. 

You see, the interesting thing about ARM is they don’t fab chips, like Intel - they license technology and designs. Apple licensed the Cortex-A8 from ARM for the iPhone 3GS by 2009 but had an ambitious lineup of tablets and phones in the pipeline. And so in 2010 did something new: they made their own system on a chip, or SoC. Continuing to license some ARM technology, Apple pushed on, getting between 800MHz to 1 GHz out of the chip and using it to power the iPhone 4, the first iPad, and the long overdue second-generation Apple TV. The next year came the A5, used in the iPad 2 and first iPad Mini, then the A6 at 1.3 GHz for the iPhone 5, the A7 for the iPhone 5s, iPad Air. That was the first 64-bit consumer SoC.

In 2014, Apple released the A8 processor for the iPhone 6, which came in speeds ranging from 1.1GHz to the 1.5 GHz chip in the 4th generation Apple TV. By 2015, Apple was up to the A9, which clocked in at 1.85 GHz for the iPhone 6s. Then we got the A10 in 2016, the A11 in 2017, the A12 in 2018, A13 in 2019, A14 in 2020 with neural engines, 4 GPUs, and 11.8 billion transistors compared to the 30,000 in the original ARM. 

And it’s not just Apple. Samsung has been on a similar tear, firing up the Exynos line in 2011 and continuing to license the ARM up to Cortex-A55 with similar features to the Apple chips, namely used on the Samsung Galaxy A21. And the Snapdragon. And the Broadcoms. 

In fact, the Broadcom SoC was used in the Raspberry Pi (developed in association with Broadcom) in 2012. The 5 models of the Pi helped bring on a mobile and IoT revolution. 

And so nearly every mobile device now ships with an ARM chip as do many a device we place around our homes so our digital assistants can help run our lives. Over 100 billion ARM processors have been produced, well over 10 for every human on the planet. And the number is about to grow even more rapidly. Apple surprised many by announcing they were leaving Intel to design their own chips for the Mac. 

Given that the PowerPC chips were RISC, the ARM chips in the mobile devices are RISC, and the history Apple has with the platform, it’s no surprise that Apple is going back that direction with the M1, Apple’s first system on a chip for a Mac. And the new MacBook Pro screams. Even software running in Rosetta 2 on my M1 MacBook is faster than on my Intel MacBook. And at 16 billion transistors, with an 8 core GPU and a 16 core neural engine, I’m sure developers are hard at work developing the M3 on these new devices (since you know, I assume the M2 is done by now). What’s crazy is, I haven’t felt like Intel had a competitor other than AMD in the CPU space since Apple switched from the PowerPC. Actually, those weren’t great days. I haven’t felt that way since I realized no one but me had a DEC Alpha or when I took the SPARC off my desk so I could play Civilization finally. 

And this revolution has been a constant stream of evolutions, 40 years in the making. It started with an ARPA grant, but various evolutions from there died out. And so really, it all started with Sophie Wilson. She helped give us the BBC Micro and the ARM. She was part of the move to Element 14 from Acorn Computers and then ended up at Broadcom when they bought the company in 2000 and continues to act as the Director of IC Design. We can definitely thank ARPA for sprinkling funds around prominent universities to get us past 10,000 transistors on a chip. Given that chips continue to proceed at such a lightning pace, I can’t imagine where we’ll be at in another 40 years. But we owe her (and her coworkers at Acorn and the team at VLSI, now NXP Semiconductors) for their hard work and innovations.

Robert Taylor was one of the true pioneers in computer science. In many ways, he is the string (or glue) that connected the US governments era of supporting computer science through ARPA to innovations that came out of Xerox PARC and then to the work done at Digital Equipment Corporation’s Systems Research Center. Those are three critical aspects of the history of computing and while Taylor didn’t write any of the innovative code or develop any of the tools that came out of those three research environments, he saw people and projects worth funding and made sure the brilliant scientists got what they needed to get things done.

The 31 years in computing that his stops represented were some of the most formative years for the young computing industry and his ability to inspire the advances that began with Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article called “As We May Think” then ended with the explosion of the Internet across personal computers. 

Bob Taylor inherited a world where computing was waking up to large crusty but finally fully digitized mainframes stuck to its eyes in the morning and went to bed the year Corel bought WordPerfect because PCs needed applications, the year the Pentium 200 MHz was released, the year Palm Pilot and eBay were founded, the year AOL started to show articles from the New York Times, the year IBM opened a we web shopping mall and the year the Internet reached 36 million people. Excite and Yahoo went public. Sometimes big, sometimes small, all of these can be traced back to Bob Taylor - kinda’ how we can trace all actors to Kevin Bacon. But more like if Kevin Bacon found talent and helped them get started, by paying them during the early years of their careers… 

How did Taylor end up as the glue for the young and budding computing research industry? Going from tween to teenager during World War II, he went to Southern Methodist University in 1948, when he was 16. He jumped into the US Naval Reserves during the Korean War and then got his masters in psychology at the University of Texas at Austin using the GI Bill. Many of those pioneers in computing in the 60s went to school on the GI Bill. It was a big deal across every aspect of American life at the time - paving the way to home ownership, college educations, and new careers in the trades. From there, he bounced around, taking classes in whatever interested him, before taking a job at Martin Marietta, helping design the MGM-31 Pershing and ended up at NASA where he discovered the emerging computer industry. 

Taylor was working on projects for the Apollo program when he met JCR Licklider, known as the Johnny Appleseed of computing. Lick, as his friends called him, had written an article called Man-Computer Symbiosis in 1960 and had laid out a plan for computing that influenced many. One such person, was Taylor. And so it was in 1962 he began and in 1965 that he succeeded in recruiting Taylor away from NASA to take his place running ARPAs Information Processing Techniques Office, or IPTO. 

Taylor had funded Douglas Engelbart’s research on computer interactivity at Stanford Research Institute while at NASA. He continued to do so when he got to ARPA and that project resulted in the invention of the computer mouse and the Mother of All Demos, one of the most inspirational moments and a turning point in the history of computing. 

They also funded a project to develop an operating system called Multics. This would be a two million dollar project run by General Electric, MIT, and Bell Labs. Run through Project MAC at MIT there were just too many cooks in the kitchen. Later, some of those Bell Labs cats would just do their own thing. Ken Thompson had worked on Multics and took the best and worst into account when he wrote the first lines of Unix and the B programming language, then one of the most important languages of all time, C. 

Interactive graphical computing and operating systems were great but IPTO, and so Bob Taylor and team, would fund straight out of the pentagon, the ability for one computer to process information on another computer. Which is to say they wanted to network computers. It took a few years, but eventually they brought in Larry Roberts, and by late 1968 they’d awarded an RFQ to build a network to a company called Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) who would build Interface Message Processors, or IMPs. The IMPS would connect a number of sites and route traffic and the first one went online at UCLA in 1969 with additional sites coming on frequently over the next few years. That system would become ARPANET, the commonly accepted precursor to the Internet. 

There was another networking project going on at the time that was also getting funding from ARPA as well as the Air Force, PLATO out of the University of Illinois. PLATO was meant for teaching and had begun in 1960, but by then they were on version IV, running on a CDC Cyber and the time sharing system hosted a number of courses, as they referred to programs. These included actual courseware, games, convent with audio and video, message boards, instant messaging, custom touch screen plasma displays, and the ability to dial into the system over lines, making the system another early network. 

Then things get weird. Taylor is sent to Vietnam as a civilian, although his rank equivalent would be a brigadier general. He helped develop the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam. Battlefield operations and reporting were entering the computing era. Only problem is, while Taylor was a war veteran and had been deep in the defense research industry for his entire career, Vietnam was an incredibly unpopular war and seeing it first hand and getting pulled into the theater of war, had him ready to leave. This combined with interpersonal problems with Larry Roberts who was running the ARPA project by then over Taylor being his boss even without a PhD or direct research experience. And so Taylor joined a project ARPA had funded at the University of Utah and left ARPA. 

There, he worked with Ivan Sutherland, who wrote Sketchpad and is known as the Father of Computer Graphics, until he got another offer. This time, from Xerox to go to their new Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC. One rising star in the computer research world was pretty against the idea of a centralized mainframe driven time sharing system. This was Alan Kay. In many ways, Kay was like Lick. And unlike the time sharing projects of the day, the Licklider and Kay inspiration was for dedicated cycles on processors. This meant personal computers. 

The Mansfield Amendment in 1973 banned general research by defense agencies. This meant that ARPA funding started to dry up and the scientists working on those projects needed a new place to fund their playtime. Taylor was able to pick the best of the scientists he’d helped fund at ARPA. He helped bring in people from Stanford Research Institute, where they had been working on the oNLineSystem, or NLS. 

This new Computer Science Laboratory landed people like Charles Thacker, David Boggs, Butler Lampson, and Bob Sproul and would develop the Xerox Alto, the inspiration for the Macintosh. The Alto though contributed the very ideas of overlapping windows, icons, menus, cut and paste, word processing. In fact, Charles Simonyi from PARC would work on Bravo before moving to Microsoft to spearhead Microsoft Word.

Bob Metcalfe on that team was instrumental in developing Ethernet so workstations could communicate with ARPANET all over the growing campus-connected environments. Metcalfe would leave to form 3COM. 

SuperPaint would be developed there and Alvy Ray Smith would go on to co-found Pixar, continuing the work begun by Richard Shoup. 

They developed the Laser Printer, some of the ideas that ended up in TCP/IP, and the their research into page layout languages would end up with Chuck Geschke, John Warnock and others founding Adobe. 

Kay would bring us the philosophy behind the DynaBook which decades later would effectively become the iPad. He would also develop Smalltalk with Dan Ingalls and Adele Goldberg, ushering in the era of object oriented programming. 

They would do pioneering work on VLSI semiconductors, ubiquitous computing, and anything else to prepare the world to mass produce the technologies that ARPA had been spearheading for all those years. Xerox famously did not mass produce those technologies. And nor could they have cornered the market on all of them. The coming waves were far too big for one company alone. 

And so it was that PARC, unable to bring the future to the masses fast enough to impact earnings per share, got a new director in 1983 and William Spencer was yet another of three bosses that Taylor clashed with. Some resented that he didn’t have a PhD in a world where everyone else did. Others resented the close relationship he maintained with the teams. Either way, Taylor left PARC in 1983 and many of the scientists left with him. 

It’s both a curse and a blessing to learn more and more about our heroes. Taylor was one of the finest minds in the history of computing. His tenure at PARC certainly saw the a lot of innovation and one of the most innovative teams to have ever been assembled. But as many of us that have been put into a position of leadership, it’s easy to get caught up in the politics. I am ashamed every time I look back and see examples of building political capital at the expense of a project or letting an interpersonal problem get in the way of the greater good for a team. But also, we’re all human and the people that I’ve interviewed seem to match the accounts I’ve read in other books. 

And so Taylor’s final stop was Digital Equipment Corporation where he was hired to form their Systems Research Center in Palo Alto. They brought us the AltaVista search engine, the Firefly computer, Modula-3 and a few other advances. Taylor retired in 1996 and DEC was acquired by Compaq in 1998 and when they were acquired by HP the SRC would get merged with other labs at HP. 

From ARPA to Xerox to Digital, Bob Taylor certainly left his mark on computing. He had a knack of seeing the forest through the trees and inspired engineering feats the world is still wrestling with how to bring to fruition. Raw, pure science. He died in 2017. He worked with some of the most brilliant people in the world at ARPA. He inspired passion, and sometimes drama in what Stanford’s Donald Knuth called “the greatest by far team of computer scientists assembled in one organization.” 

In his final email to his friends and former coworkers, he said “You did what they said could not be done, you created things that they could not see or imagine.” The Internet, the Personal Computer, the tech that would go on to become Microsoft Office, object oriented programming, laser printers, tablets, ubiquitous computing devices. So, he isn’t exactly understating what they accomplished in a false sense of humility. I guess you can’t do that often if you’re going to inspire the way he did. 

So feel free to abandon the pretense as well, and go inspire some innovation. Heck, who knows where the next wave will come from. But if we aren’t working on it, it certainly won’t come.

Thank you so much and have a lovely, lovely day. We are so lucky to have you join us on yet another episode. 

We’ve covered Xerox PARC a few times - and one aspect that’s come up has been the development of the Bravo word processor from Butler Lampson, Charles Simonyi, and team. Simonyi went on to work at Microsoft and spearheaded the development of Microsoft Word. But Bravo was the first WYSIWYG tool for creating documents, which we now refer to as a word processor. That was 1974. 

Something else we’ve covered happened in 1974, the release of the Altair 8800. One aspect of the Altair we didn’t cover is that Michael Shrayer was a tinkerer who bought an Alatir and wrote a program that allowed him to write manuals. This became the Electric Pencil. It was text based though and not a WYSIWYG like Bravo was. It ran in 8k of memory and would be ported to Intel 8080, Zylog Z-80, and other processors over the years leading into the 80s. But let’s step back to the 70s for a bit. Because bell bottoms. 

The Altair inspired a clone called the IMSAI 8080 in 1975. The direct of marketing, Seymour Rubenstein started tinkering with the idea of a word processor. He left IMSAI and by 1978, put together $8,500 and started a company called MicroPro International. He convinced Rob Barnaby, the head programmer at IMSAI, to join him.

They did market research into the tools being used by IBM and Xerox. They made a list of what was needed and got to work. The word processor grew. They released their word processor, which they called WordStar, for CP/M running on the Intel 8080. By then it was 1979 and CP/M was a couple years old but already a pretty dominant operating system for microcomputers. Software was a bit more expensive at the time and WordStar sold for $495.

At the time, you had to port your software to each OS running on each hardware build. And the code was in assembly so not the easiest thing in the world. This meant they wanted to keep the feature set slim so WordStar could run on as many platforms as possible. They ran on the Osborne 1 portable and with CP/M support they became the standard. They could wrap words automatically to the next line.  Imagine that. 

They ported the software to other platforms. It was clear there was a new OS that they needed to run on. So they brought in Jim Fox, who ported WordStar to run on DOS in 1981. They were on top of the world. Sure, there was Apple Write, Word, WordPerfect, and Samna, but WordStar was it.

Arthur C Clarke met Rubenstein and Barnaby and said they "made me a born-again writer, having announced my retirement in 1978, I now have six books in the works, all through WordStar." He would actually write dozens more works. 

They released the third version in 1982 and quickly grew into the most popular, dominant word processor on the market. The code base was getting a little stale and so they brought in Peter Mierau to overhaul it for WordStar 4. The refactor didn’t come at the best of times. In software, you’re the market leader until… You thought I was going to say Microsoft moved into town? Nope, although Word would eventually dominate word processing. But there was one more step before computing got there. 

Next, along with the release of the IBM PC, WordPerfect took the market by storm. They had more features and while WordStar was popular, it was the most pirated piece of software at the time. This meant less money to build features. Like using the MS-DOS keyboard to provide more productivity tools. This isn’t to say they weren’t making money. They’d grown to $72M in revenue by 1984. When they filed for their initial public offering, or IPO, they had a huge share of the word processing market and accounted for one out of every ten dollars spent on software. 

WordStar 5 came in 1989 and as we moved into the 90s, it was clear that WordStar 2000 had gone nowhere so WordStar 6 shipped in 1990 and 7 in 1991. The buying tornado had slowed and while revenues were great, copy-protecting disks were slowing the spread of the software. 

Rubinstein is commonly credited with creating the first end-user software licensing agreement, common with nearly every piece of proprietary software today. Everyone was pirating back then so if you couldn’t use WordStar, move on to something you could steal. You know, like WordPerfect. MultiMate, AmiPro, Word, and so many other tools. Sales were falling. New features weren’t shipping. 

One pretty big one was support for Windows. By the time Windows support shipped, Microsoft had released Word, which had a solid two years to become the new de facto standard. SoftKey would acquire the company in 1994, and go on to acquire a number of other companies until 2002 when they were acquired. But by then WordStar was so far forgotten that no one was sure who actually owned the WordStar brand. 

I can still remember using WordStar. And I remember doing work when I was a consultant for a couple of authors to help them recover documents, which were pure ASCII files or computers that had files in WordStar originally but moved to the WSD extension later. And I can remember actually restoring a BAK file while working at the computer labs at the University of Georgia, common in the DOS days. It was a joy to use until I realized there was something better.

Rubinstein went on to buy another piece of software, a spreadsheet. He worked with another team, got a little help from Barnaby and and Fox and eventually called it Surpass, which was acquired by Borland, who would rename it to Quattro Pro. That spreadsheet borrowed the concept of multiple sheets in tabs from Boeing Calc, now a standard metaphor. Amidst lawsuits with Lotus on whether you could patent how software functions, or the UX of software, Borland sold Lotus to Novell during a time when Novell was building a suite of products to compete with Microsoft.

We can thank WordStar for so much. Inspiring content creators and creative new features for word processing. But we also have to remember that early successes are always going to inspire additional competition. Any company that grows large enough to file an initial public offering is going to face barbarian software vendors at their gates. When those vendors have no technical debt, they can out-deliver features. But as many a software company has learned, expanding to additional products by becoming a portfolio company is one buffer for this. As is excellent execution. 

The market was WordStar’s to lose. And there’s a chance that it was lost the second Microsoft pulled in Charles Simonyi, one of the original visionaries behind Bravo from Xerox PARC. But when you have 10% of all PC software sales it seems like maybe you got outmaneuvered in the market. But ultimately the industry was so small and so rapidly changing in the early 1980s that it was ripe for disruption on an almost annual basis. That is, until Microsoft slowly took the operating system and productivity suite markets and .doc, .xls, and .ppt files became the format all other programs needed to support. 

And we can thank Rubinstein and team for pioneering what we now call the software industry. He started on an IBM 1620 and ended his career with WebSleuth, helping to usher in the search engine era. Many of the practices he put in place to promote WordStar are now common in the industry. These days I talk to a dozen serial entrepreneurs a week. They could all wish to some day be as influential as he. 

Once upon a time, we put a quarter in a machine and played a game for awhile. And life was good. The rise of personal computers and subsequent fall in the cost of microchips allowed some of the same chips found in early computers, such as the Zylog Z80, to bring video game consoles into homes across the world. That one chip could be found in the ColecoVision, Nintendo Game Boy, and the Sega Genesis. Given that many of the cheaper early computers came with joysticks or gaming at the time, the line between personal computer and video game console seemed natural. 

Then came the iPhone, which brought an explosion of apps. Apps were anywhere from a buck to a hundred. We weren't the least surprised by the number of games that exploded onto the platform. Nor by the creativity of the developers. When the Apple App Store and Google Play added in-app purchasing and later in-app subscriptions it all just seemed natural. But it has profoundly changed the way games are purchased, distributed, and the entire business model of apps. 

The Evolving Business Model of Gaming

Video games were originally played in arcades, similar to pinball. The business model was each game was a quarter or token. With the advent of PCs and video game consoles, games were bought in stores, as were records or cassettes that included music. The business model was that the store made money (40-50%), the distributor who got the game into a box and on the shelf in the store made money, and the company that made the game got some as well. And discounts to sell more inventory usually came out of someone not called the retailer. By the time everyone involved got a piece, it was common for the maker of the game to get between $5 and $10 dollars per unit sold for a $50 game. 

No one was surprised that there was a whole cottage industry of software piracy. Especially given that most games could be defeated in 40 to 100 hours. This of course spawned a whole industry to thwart piracy, eating into margins but theoretically generating more revenue per game created. 

Industries evolve. Console and computer gaming split (although arguably consoles have always just been computers) and the gamer-verse further schism'd between those who played various types of games. Some games were able to move to subscription models and some companies sprang up to deliver games through subscriptions or as rentals  (game rentals over a modem was the business model that originally inspired the AOL founders). And that was ok for the gaming industry, which slowly grew to the point that gaming was a larger industry than the film industry.

Enter Mobile Devices and App Stores

Then came mobile devices, disrupting the entire gaming industry. Apple began the App Store model, establishing that the developer got 70% of the sale - much better than 5%. Steve Jobs had predicted the coming App Store in a 1985 and then when the iPhone was released tried to keep the platform closed but eventually capitulated and opened up the App Store to developers. 

Those first developers made millions. Some developers were able to port games to mobile platforms and try to maintain a similar pricing model to the computer or console versions. But the number of games created a downward pressure that kept games cheap, and often free. 

The number of games in the App Store grew (today there are over 5 million apps between Apple and Google). With a constant downward pressure on price, the profits dropped. Suddenly, game developers forgot they used to get 10 percent of the sale of a game a lot of times and started to blame the stores the games were distributed in on the companies that owned the App Stores: Apple, Google, and in some cases, Steam. 

The rise and subsequent decrease in popularity of Pokémon Go was the original inspiration for this article in 2016 but since a number of games have validated the perspectives. These free games provide a valuable case study into how the way we design a game to be played (known as game mechanics) impacts our ability to monetize the game in various ways. And there are lots and lots of bad examples in games (and probably legislation on the way to remedy abuses) that also tells us what not to do.

The Microtransaction-Based Economy

These days, game developers get us hooked on the game early, get us comfortable with the pace of the game and give us an early acceleration. But then that slows down. Many a developer then points us to in-app purchases in order to unlock items that allow us to maintain the pace of a game, or even to hasten the pace. And given that we're playing against other people a lot of the time, they try and harness our natural competitiveness to get us to buy things. These in-app purchases are known as microtransactions. And the aggregate of these in-app purchases can be considered as a microtransaction-based economy.

As the microtransaction-based economy has arrived in full force, there are certain standards emerging as cultural norms for these economies. And violating these rules cause vendors to get blasted on message boards and more importantly lose rabid fans of the game. As such, I’ve decided to codify my own set of laws for these, which are follows:

All items that can be purchased with real money should be available for free. 

For example, when designing a game that has users building a city and we develop a monument that users can pay $1 for and place in their city to improve morale of those that live in the city, that monument should be able to be earned in the game as well. Otherwise, you’re able to pay for an in-app purchase that gives some players an advantage for doing nothing more than spending money. 

In-app purchases do not replace game play, but hasten the progression through the game. 

For example, when designing a game that has users level up based on earning experience points for each task they complete, we never want to just gift experience points based on an in-app purchase. Instead, in-app purchases should provide a time-bound amplification to experience (such as doubling experience for 30 minutes in Pokémon Go or keeping anyone else from attacking a player for 24 hours in Clash of Clans so we can save enough money to buy that one Town Hall upgrade we just can’t live without). 

The amount paid for items in a game should correlate to the amount of time saved in game play. 

For example, get stuck on a level in Angry Birds. We could pay a dollar for a pack of goodies that will get us past that level (and probably 3 more), so we can move on. Or we could keep hammering away at that level for another hour. Thus, we saved an hour, but lost pride points in the fact that we didn’t conquer that level. Later in the game, we can go back and get three stars without paying to get past it. 

Do not allow real-world trading. 

This is key. If it’s possible to build an economy outside the game, players can then break your game mechanics. For example, in World of Warcraft, you can buy gold, and magic items online for real money and then log into the game only to have another shady character add those items to your inventory. This leads to people writing programs known as bots (short for robots) to mine gold or find magic items on their behalf so they can sell it in the real world. There are a lot of negative effects to such behavior, including the need to constantly monitor for bots (which wastes a lot of developer cycles), bots cause the in-game economy to practically crash when the game updates (e.g. a map) and breaks the bots, and make games both more confusing for users and less controllable by the developer.

Establish an in-game currency.

 You don’t want users of the game buying things with cash directly. Instead, you want them to buy a currency, such as gold, rubies, gems, karma, or whatever you’d like to call that currency. Disassociating purchases from real world money causes users to lose track of what they’re buying and spend more money. Seems shady, and it very well may be, but I don’t write games so I can’t say if that’s the intent or not. It’s a similar philosophy to buying poker chips, rather than using money in a casino (just without the free booze).

Provide multiple goals within the game.

Players will invariably get bored with the critical path in your game. When they do, it’s great for players to find other aspects of the game to keep them engaged. For example, in Pokémon Go, you might spend 2 weeks trying to move from level 33 to level 34. During that time, you might as well go find that last Charmander so you can evolve to a Charzard. That’s two different goals: one to locate a creature, the other to gain experience. Or you can go take over some gyms in your neighborhood. Or you can power level by catching hundreds of Pidgeys. The point is, to keep players engaged during long periods with no progression, having a choose your own adventure style game play is important. For massive multiplayers (especially role playing games) this is critical, as players will quickly tire of mining for gold and want to go, for example, jump into the latest mass land war. To place a little context around this, there are also 28 medals in Pokémon Go (that I’m aware of), which keep providing more and more goals in the game. 

Allow for rapid progression early in the game in order to hook users, so they will pay for items later in the game.

We want people to play our games because they love them. Less than 3% of players will transact an in-app purchase in a given game. But that number skyrockets as time is invested in a game. Quickly progressing through levels early in a game keeps users playing. Once users have played a game for 8 or 9 hours, if you tell them they can go to bed and for a dollar and it will seem like they kept playing for another 8 or 9 hours, based on the cool stuff they’ll earn, they’re likely to give up that dollar and keep playing for another couple of hours rather than get that much needed sleep! We should never penalize players that don't pay up. In fact, players often buy things that simply change the look of their character in games like Among Us. There is no need to impact game mechanics with purchase if we build an awesome enough game.  

Create achievable goals in discrete amounts of time. 

Boom Beach villages range from level 1 to level 64. As players rise through the ability to reach the next stage becomes logarithmically more difficult given other players are paying to play. Goals against computers players (or NPCs or AI according to how we want to think of it) are similar. All should be achievable though. The game Runeblade for the Apple Watch was based on fundamentally sound game mechanics that could enthrall a player for months; however, there’s no way to get past a certain point. Therefore, players lose interest, Eric Cartman-style, and went home.

Restrict the ability to automate the game.

If we had the choice to run every day to lose weight or to eat donuts and watch people run and still lose weight, which would most people choose? Duh. Problem is that when players automate your game, they end up losing interest as their time investment in the game diminishes, as does the necessary skill level to shoot up through levels in games. Evony Online was such a game; and I’m pretty sure I still get an email every month chastising me for botting the game 8-10 years after anyone remembers that the game existed. As a game becomes too dependent on resources obtained by gold mining bots in World of Warcraft, the economy of the game could crash when they were knocked off-line. Having said this, such drama adds to the intrigue - which can be a game inside a game for many. 

Pit players against one another.

Leaderboards. Everyone wants to be in 1st place, all the time. Or to see themselves moving up in rankings. By providing a ranking system, we increase engagement, and drive people towards making in-app purchases. Those just shouldn't be done to directly get a leg up. It's a slippery slope to allow a player to jump 30 people in front of them to get to #1,000 in the rankings only to see those people do an in-app purchase and create an addiction to the in-app purchases in order to maintain their position in the rankings. It's better to make smaller amounts and keep players around than have them hate a developer once they're realized the game was making money off addiction. Sounds a bit like 

Don’t pit weak players against strong players unnecessarily. 

In Clash of Clans a player builds a village. As they build more cool stuff in the village, the village levels up. The player can buy rubies to complete buildings faster, and so you can basically buy the village levels. But, since a player can basically buy levels, the levels can exceed the players skill. Therefore, in order to pit matched players in battles, a second metric was introduced to match battles that is based on won/lost ratios of battles. By ensuring that players of similar skill duel one another, the skill of players is more likely to progress organically and therefore they remain engaged with the game. The one exception to this rule that I’ve seen actually work well so far has been in Pokémon Go where a player needs to be physically close to a gym rather than just close to the gym while sitting in their living room playing on a console. That geographical alignment really changes this dynamic, as does the great way that gym matches heavily favor attackers, driving fast turnover in gyms and keeping the game accessible to lower level players.

Add time-based incentives. 

If a player logs into a game every day, they should get a special incentive for the day that amplifies the more days they log in in a row. Or if they don’t log in, another player can steal all the stuff. Players get a push alert when another player attacks them. There are a number of different ways to incentivize players to keep logging into an app. The more we keep players in an app, the more likely they are to make a purchase. Until they get so many alerts that they delete your app. Don’t do that.

Incentivize pure gameplay. 

 It might seem counter-intuitive to incentivize players to not use in-app purchases. But not allowing for a perfect score on an in-app purchase (e.g. not allowing for a perfect level in Angry Birds if you used an in-app purchase) will drive more engagement in a game, while likely still allowing for an in-app purchase and then a late-game strategy of finding perfection to unlock that hidden extra level, or whatever the secret sauce is for your game.

Apply maximum purchasing amounts.

Games can get addictive for players. We want dolphins, not whales. This is to say that we want people to spend what they would have spent on a boxed game, say $50, or even that per month. But when players get into spending thousands per day, they're likely to at some point realize their error in judgement and contact Apple or Google for a refund. And they should get one. Don't take advantage of people. 

Make random returns on microtransactions transparent.

There has been talk of regulating randomized loot boxes. Why? Because the numbers don't add up. Rampant abuse of in-app purchases for random gear means that developers who publish the algorithm or source code for how those rewards are derived  will have a certain level of non-repudiation when the law suits start. Again, if those rewards can be earned during the game as well (maybe at a lower likelihood) then we're not abusing game mechanics. 

Conclusion

The above list might seem manipulative at times. Especially to those who don't write code for a living. And to some degree it is. But it can be done ethically and when it is the long-term returns are greater. If nothing else, these laws are a code of ethics of sorts. 

These are lessons that hundreds of companies are out there learning by trial and error, and hopefully documenting them can help emergent companies not have to repeat some of the same mistakes of others. 

We could probably get up to 100 of these (with examples) if we wanted to! What laws have you noticed?