The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal

by Laine Nooney

An engrossing origin story for the personal computer—showing how the Apple II’s software helped a machine transcend from hobbyists’ plaything to essential home appliance.
 
Skip the iPhone, the iPod, and the Macintosh. If you want to understand how Apple Inc. became an industry behemoth, look no further than the 1977 Apple II. Designed by the brilliant engineer Steve Wozniak and hustled into the marketplace by his Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, the Apple II became one of the most prominent personal computers of this dawning industry.
 
The Apple II was a versatile piece of hardware, but its most compelling story isn’t found in the feat of its engineering, the personalities of Apple’s founders, or the way it set the stage for the company’s multibillion-dollar future. Instead, historian Laine Nooney shows, what made the Apple II iconic was its software. In software, we discover the material reasons people bought computers. Not to hack, but to play. Not to code, but to calculate. Not to program, but to print. The story of personal computing in the United States is not about the evolution of hackers—it’s about the rise of everyday users.
 
Recounting a constellation of software creation stories, Nooney offers a new understanding of how the hobbyists’ microcomputers of the 1970s became the personal computer we know today. From iconic software products like VisiCalc and The Print Shop to historic games like Mystery House and Snooper Troops to long-forgotten disk-cracking utilities, The Apple II Age offers an unprecedented look at the people, the industry, and the money that built the microcomputing milieu—and why so much of it converged around the pioneering Apple II.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Technology, Business, Apple, Computers

352 pages, Hardcover

Published May 9, 2023

Reviews

[Bjørn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I misled myself here. I thought it would be a book about Apple II. It's about the Apple II Age, as the title suggests. iWoz is where you (I) get to read about transistors.

The Apple II Age is a dense read (it's published by the University of Chicago Press, so it's not exactly a shocker). There is a lot of information. I am slightly (very) obsessed with this period in computing… so to find out how much I didn't know was surprising, in a good way. The analyses of Apple's advertising were very interesting – at first, dad with his new computer on the dinner table as Mum is doing whatever it is that women do in the kitchen; then, as the software producers rebranded and changed their audience, a boy, with his parents' hands on his shoulders (this must have been a bit awkward). White hands, obviously.

The historians of computing have a tendency to, ahem, forget the existence of women. Ada Lovelace and Susan Kare get a mention every now and then. I had no idea, though, that Roberta Williams not just existed, but also pretty much single-handedly (with her reluctant husband on programming and sighing duties) created Sierra On-Line. For Nooney, the computer is an afterthought (if not for the fact that "Apple" is a brand people tend to know, this book could have been called The Era of TRS-80). It's about the people who created computing as we know it, who pushed the boundaries of what software could do… and, unsurprisingly, pivoted from hobbyists in their basements towards money.

At the end, Nooney admits – after a rather depressing epilogue, with which I disagree – "[h]onestly, my aims have been more feral than that, and simpler: this has been a heist, tailored to rob as many people as possible of their much- cherished faith in computing’s primordial innocence by showing how compromised, fraught, and indifferent, to all of us, this history actually is. Disrupting nostalgia is a dangerous game but worthwhile." Nostalgia is what I came here for, though. If this sentence was in the introduction, I would probably stop reading, expecting 300 pages of pain and suffering. Because while the Apple II community isn't quite as large as it used to be in the 1980s, to some of us those old, heavy, overheating…things are still a source of joy. If I have one regret, it's that I don't have an Apple II of my own. Sure, everything's available online (a lot of illustrations are Nooney's screenshots from online emulators) but, really, after finding out the lost mystery of Mystery House I just want to connect my non-existent Apple II to my non-existent TV and get lost in a game that had pixels the size of my iPhone and offered two shades of grey: black and white.

I'm old. I'm nostalgic. I enjoyed this book. The heist failed. Take that, Laine Nooney! (And let me know if you ever get to the latter years of ZX Spectrum, C64, Atari 400/800, etc. I'll be waiting, with a mysterious, pixellated smirk on my four-coloured face.) I recommend this book to everyone who enjoyed my own review of it :)

[Alessia Cozza]

much more accessible academic book that provides a really good history of computers and how they became personal - wished there was more of a personal flair but i’ll just have to seek out other books that dive into it more!!

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Looks at the history of the creation and growth of the commercial software industry in the '80s, focusing on several companies and products for the Apple ][: VisiCalc, Mysterious House Adventure, Print Shop, and Spinnaker's Learning programs. This approach changes the focus of most of these histories, from hardware of course, to software, and presents some different people than other histories do. Very good, with a lot of attention to detail. Since I was an Apple ][ guy pretty much for all but the first couple years of this history, it brought back lots of memories, and all seemed right to me. A valuable addition to these histories.

[Allan Olley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a history of the inception of the personal computing industry in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It looks at both the characteristics of users like hobbyists and business users and the way businesses made and especially sold and marketed their products. After the first chapters lay out the elements that set the stage for the origins of the first fully assembled home computers in 1977, the Apple II, the Commodore PET, and the TSR-80. These innovations were driven by a combination of technical developments in fabricating microchips, experience of users with older larger computers in industry and university etc. and the work of enthusiastic electronic hobbyists who appreciated the technical challenge of building their own computer even if they did not have much to do with it. The second chapter looks at how the Apple II was conceived and marketed by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs and how its technical features played to the needs and capabilities of typical users and laid the ground work for the origins of the software industry which is the focus of the rest of the book.

The subsequent chapters each use one piece of software as the focal point for a story about the origin of a type of product and the way these software products reflected and more often drove the way computers were being used. So there is a chapter on the first spreadsheet program Visicalc, on Sierra On-line's first adventure game Mystery House, on the copy protection evading utility program Locksmith, on the home publishing software Print Shop and the educational software Snooper Troops. The focus of the chapter is less the individual piece of software and more the market conditions it found itself in and drove. Before Visicalc the potential of the personal computer in business was often unclear, the spreadsheet encouraged executives to obtain their own computers outside of existing corporate computing resources, driving computer sales, and use them in new ways for planning and analysis. Likewise Print Shop was a vanguard of new way of using a home machine for uses that were neither business nor niche electronic hobbyists activity. In the case of the chapter on Locksmith much more time is spent considering the culture of copying software in the computer field and the response of the industry rather than considering the details of the relatively obscure utility program Locksmith itself.

I have a background in the history of computers although my work focused on much earlier developments, I have meant Laine Nooney at various conferences over the years and this informs my sense of this book. Nooney's account has a solid grounding in both the technical details of the period, the coverage in specialty and popular press at the time and subsequent written accounts. Many interviews with key people who wrote the software also inform the details of the book. The chapter on Sierra on-line's Mystery House benefits from Nooney's extensive earlier scholarship on the company and its games. The book gives a clear account of the development of the personal computer as a phenomenon that was shaped by the culture and economy around it and that shaped those things in turn. It is the story of how abstruse technical innovations were given form by a series of different communities of users and how the machines, software and institutions so created then enabled new communities of users to emerge creating the personal computer as we came to know it subsequent to these formations in the early 1980s.

Nooney distinguishes the book's fully embedded account of the computer from the reverent pedestal old machines and classic software may be placed on by later memorialists erecting a mythology for our current age and retroenthusiasists interested in machines bereft of most if not all their context. However in this book and my interactions with Nooney at conferences and on Twitter I have always detected a keen appreciation for these products and the role they played in peoples lives, not least Nooney's own life. The ambitious narrative is not only convincingly assembled but also is entertaining and I think relatively approachably laid out even for a reader not steeped in the intellectual culture of social and economic analysis. So it should be an interesting read for anyone interested in learning more about developments in the era.

I had an ePub version of this book (not the Kindle version), purchased from the publisher and read it on my Kobo eReader. I had trouble accessing the links to the footnotes (endnotes) on my eReader at my preferred text size. Also the preview footnote feature was not active, this meant reading the footnotes was a somewhat involved activity. Otherwise the eBook functioned well and I did not have any problems.

[Murilo Queiroz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an amazing book, but not for the reasons I picked it up. Its eye-opening perspective is completely different from other classics like Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer, and The Soul of a New Machine. This isn't a book about the Apple II, either. Actually, fans might be offended by the exposed opinions: it's not about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak being geniuses in their areas, or Apple's success being inevitable.

I'm really into retrocomputing (and retrogaming). After spending some time messing with electronics (following popular magazines from the early 1980s), I got my first 8-bit microcomputer (a cheap clone of the Sinclair ZX81) when I was nine years old. Then, I got a clone of the Tandy Color Computer (also known as CoCo), learned BASIC and assembly, went to college, and graduated in Computer Science. I also earned a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering (Reinforcement Learning using Spiking Neurons, in 2004), worked in many startups, and now I've been working at Big Tech for over twelve years.

And I always believed in the common narrative that the microcomputer revolution was "inevitable" – that the mere existence of microcomputers democratized technology and inspired everyone who touched one, much like the commercial Internet later and Artificial Intelligence today.

But the author, a historian with a background in economics, shows that this idyllic vision is simply not true: from the very beginning, microcomputers were developed by and sold to privileged (if not rich, at least well-connected and influential) white men, baby boomers (or Ivy League professors or alumni), and their children. Nobody knew what to do with them.

It took investors, venture capitalists, and developers of hardware and software interested in getting rich to drive microcomputer adoption. And from the very beginning, this was the main drive, not some "hacker ethics."

This narrative is particularly relevant to the United States, but I lived through similar experiences in Brazil. During the military dictatorship here, it was forbidden to import foreign technology, so many small companies created their own clones of popular machines (a few TRS-80, dozens of Apple II, II+, and even IIe, and really, an improved original Macintosh). Popular software was translated into Portuguese and sold by these companies under different names.

But at the end, the reasons were the same: the pursuit of profit at all costs, and the anxiety that marketing and zeitgeist created in consumers. If you and/or your kids didn't master this new "computer thing," they would never be able to compete in the job market or survive all the globalized crises (the Cold War and the Oil Crisis at the end of the 1970s, Climate Change, and "The Rise of Artificial Intelligence" these days). It was never about learning for its own sake; it was always about transferring money from consumers to big companies.

The hackers, hobbyists, and enthusiasts? They are still here. The old ones like me revere obsolete hardware, are obsessed with exploring machines with limited resources in more extreme and exciting ways, and are nostalgic about an era seen with rose-tinted glasses, almost like a religion. The young ones do the same, but with new tools, hardware, and programming languages that, in due time, will become "retro" too. Meanwhile, the titans of the industry accumulate more money and power, and normal people are still anxious about tech, spending money on equipment and training that won't help, and using computers for video games and social networks.

[Take Taishi · Rating 4 out of 5]

The personal computer’s evolution is shaped by historical events and context, as Laine Nooney highlights in this detailed study of the Apple II. Here, Nooney argues against the popular myth that microcomputers were designed for personal use from the start. Instead, they show how broader historical conditions, rather than individual genius, drove the shift to personal computing. In this book, Nooney questions the widespread belief that Apple's success was solely because of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. For them, it was not just their talent but also changes in society and the economy at the time that helped computers become popular personal items, not just technical tools.

Nooney’s book focuses on the redefining period between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s when 'personal computers' officially started to become a thing. In the 1970s, most potential Apple II buyers were not actually into computing. At that time, computers were still mostly huge, expensive machines used mainly by the government and big businesses. However, advances in microcomputing, time-sharing, and processors made computers more accessible, sparking a *hobbyist* culture that laid the groundwork for personal computing. This early interest, coupled with commercial opportunities, helped shape the development of microcomputing.

Chapter 2 takes a look at Apple’s early days, emphasizing how *Jobs’s business acumen* and *Wozniak’s technical skills* came together to create a product that appealed not just to hobbyists (tech nerds, in other words) but to a broader market of regular people. Here, Nooney argues that Apple was not just some accidental invention from a random garage; it was a well-planned business venture, fueled by capital investments, growing demand and knowing what people wanted. Apple II, for them, was positioned as both a technological tool and a commercial product, with Jobs’s business focus driving its success.

The subsequent chapters explore how the personal computer evolved beyond business tools into something that addressed personal needs and desires. Software like VisualCal helped business users, while games like Mystery House shifted computers into the realm of home entertainment. The Apple II thus became not just a tool for work but a source of leisure and creativity, further broadening its appeal.

The book also explores challenges, such as software piracy, and how these tensions underscored the economic foundations of the emerging software industry. Nooney argues that the development of personal computing was intertwined with commercial interests, and that products like Print Shop helped cement computers as everyday household items, rather than merely niche hobbyist tools.

Nooney concludes by stressing that *business motivations were always central to computing’s evolution, even during the theatrical presentations of Apple’s later products*. They argue that financial speculation and market-building were as important as technological innovation in shaping personal computing. The book offers a nuanced understanding of how historical, cultural, and economic factors made computers personal, challenging the oversimplified view that attributes this shift solely to individual innovation. Through their analysis, Nooney opens up new possibilities for understanding the history of consumer technology and its future directions.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I lived through the Apple ][ age, so I’m always game for books about the time when computers came home. While the book uses the Apple ][ as its focus, the themes are for personal computing as a whole during the late 70’s to late 80’s. I found some of the chapters a fascinating perspective of how an application type changed the world. Other chapters became dull as the book went on. It may have been the chapter topic, such as educational software.

The three best chapters are about VisiCalc, games in general and Locksmith. As a kid, I didn’t have a clue just how revolutionary all of it was. I just knew I could play Wizardry and write my essays instead of handwriting on binder paper.

I didn’t realize VisiCalc was released in 1979. I thought it came a couple years later. The developers picked the Apple ][ as it had a disk drive and could easily accomodate more memory. The author dives into just how revolutionary VisiCalc was for businesses. The ability to “run the numbers” seems normal today. But in 1979, it took a lot of people to do it. Someone I worked for in the 1990’s told me of her first job out of college in the 1970’s. She was the mentat for a VP at a big company, who would ask her to “run the numbers” while in a meeting. She could do it all in her head and quickly write it out. VisiCalc changed her job so that she could focus on the strategy (she became a huge advocate of the Apple ][ & /// in business). Now anyone with a bit of training could make forecasts and run complex calculations quickly on an 8-bit computer! It changed the business world & it changed Apple.

The author attempted to track down the original developer for Locksmith. At this time it remains an anonymous person. At school every kid with an Apple ][ knew about Locksmith. But we didn’t know where it came from or why. It was just there. A bit of mystery that made publishers angry. Publications had to apologize for running ads about it. The waves of resentment mirrored previous incarnations of copying, from VCRs to cassettes, eventually to Napster. Some publishers didn’t bother copy protecting their software, such as Beagle Bros. I remember the cool posters they’d put in their utilities to help us wannabe assembly coders. But for most, it was super important to keep their software locked up. As a kid I didn’t understand like I do as an adult looking back. It is neat to see how Locksmith became the lightening rod as software went from something freely shared to sold in boxes in a store.

The book isn’t about the Apple ][ itself, but how certain applications changed how people understood what a computer could do. Was it a toy, a hacker delight or a serious business tool? The computer was the first universal tool, with its capabilities changing as easily as one changes shoes. It is why I could play Wizardry at night, write my reports after school and my dad calculate mortgage payments on the weekend. The Apple ][ demonstrated that a computer could be anything you could imagine and paved the way for all other machines afterwards.

[William Mihalo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Overall an excellent book. The author covers the background for the development of the Apple II. I ordered an Apple II in Sept. 1978 and it arrived in December 1978. The machine had 16K of RAM and mass storage consisted of cassette tapes. The machine came with an RS232 serial card. At the time, I was an Assistant Professor at Indiana University Northwest.) I was able to dial in to a local number and communicate with the CDC computers at Indiana University Bloomington through the State University Voice Operated Network--SUVON. I did statistical analysis on the CDC computers.

Applesoft Basic was easy to learn. I already had a background in FORTRAN and some other languages. Some things omitted from the book includes a discussion of the Apple II Red Book that shipped with Apple II computers. This book had interesting details about software code that you could run on the Apple II and schematics describing the Apple II's circuitry.

Also omitted was Apple obtaining a license for the UCSD p-system which ran Pascal and FORTRAN. The p-system worked best with two disk drives. It also required a memory upgrade was required. You had to upgrade the system RAM to 48K and add a 16K memory card in one of the expansion slots on the Apple II resulting in 64K of RAM. (Ironically, the UCSD p-system was still around in 1990 and I was helping people in a lab run this software that was part of a proprietary system. The software had migrated to a newer computer and was no longer running on an Apple II.)

The author gives an excellent description of the history of VisiCalc on the Apple II. This lead to the development of Lotus 123 on the IBM PC and later to the development of other spreadsheet software.

Also covered are early computer games which were later, migrated to the IBM PC and developed further with VGA graphics and sound cards on IBM PC's.

In the late 1970's and through the 1980's many computer professionals regarded microcomputers as a fad that would eventually disappear. These types of computers never did disappear. In fact, some of the operating systems that can run on these small computers have the ability to run on computer clusters and on cloud computers.

[Big Endian · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've spent my life in technology, and I date from roughly around the period of this book, slightly younger. I've read most of what there is to read in this genre from this period, and I was excited to get my hands on this book. I thought the approach of avoiding the hagiography was an interesting one, and it's clearly stated up front that this is an academic book.

This for me, on both of those aspects, is where the book falls down. The academic approach is a failure for me. There are various attempts at points through the book - although not consistently - to apportion responsibility for the success of various big players to their whiteness, their maleness, and/or their Harvardness. This was mostly an exercise in logic chopping and fact selection. Something I found particularly odious was the attempt to claim that Steve Wozniak's successes with the Apple I and II were primarily down to his white maleness, and not his technical genius. This was incorrect, borderline offensive, and undermined the credibility of the author. I questioned whether she really knew much about the field in which she claimed to be an academic expert.

And that leads us onto the second failure, which the avoidance of hagiography or to be honest an avoidance of any story whatsoever. This made the book boring and highly repetitive. It was also extremely isolated, with little attempt to link together the threads between subjects.

I stuck with this book to the end, but began skipping sections (or not re-reading them) as I didn't feel there was some big revelation coming - and there wasn't.

Leslie Berlin's coverage of the era just before and after this period is much more complete, more interesting (although still dense), and focuses on positives instead of whining about perceived unfair privilege. I found Berlin's treatment of Sandra Kurtzig, the first woman to take a technology company public, to be both fascinating and inspiring. Nooney's complete failure to even mention Kurtzig underlines the fact that Nooney started from a conclusion and worked back to a premise, rather than the reverse.

[Mynt Marsellus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easiest way to put my thoughts here is that the genre of academic monograph (even in this more readable popular form) gets in the way of the more radical possibilities of Nooney's project as is shown in their excellent epilogue. There are so many references in this book to a nebulous "consumer demand" but it's never really explored when it seems to be the real linchpin between Wozniak's hacker mindset and Jobs' closed system that just works when you turn it on. There's an unanswered question here about whether we would be where we are today without the hacker side (that is, with microcomputers not reaching the levels they reached in the early 80s for another decade or two) and I suspect the answer is we would anyways. The government and military wasn't going to stop needing computation and the cultural image of it would have continued to spread even without the stories in this book, and what follows from that, I suspect, is that the consumer desire for tools that work but don't require you to understand how is much more powerful than the specific shapes and contours the marketing of this or that product suggests. I think that the question Nooney is answering is not how the computer became personal, but how the personal colonized computation (and I think some comments in the epilogue back up this assumption). The lack of any theoretical or philosophical approach trying to really grapple with the stories they tell leave this book feeling half complete, much more interested in chronicling a history than offering an interpretation of it that might help us understand the world we presently live in. I'm almost tempted to say this book has a Wozniak theory of history, (expandable, detailed, highly contingent and open ended) but what it needed was a Jobs theory of cultural interpretation (jumping out ahead of where we are even if it risks being wrong or out of step with the time).

[Ernie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book frustrating. I agree with the author's market analysis and conclusions and appreciate the documentation of that part of the history. Some distracting technical nitpicks, but they don't harm the thesis.

BUT: I don't understand or appreciate her enthusiasm for dismissing the excitement around the devices themselves (see, in particular, the epilogue). Something you could own that can be different, can do new things, every time you turn it on? Just by changing the arrangement of the software bits inside? That can let you take a new approach to solving a problem that would have been previously tedious? Just because that part of the story has been told before, how is that less than thrilling? You don't need to re-document it, but I don't think you need to try to refute it either while capably exploring other aspects of the history.

To have been there early on, while this was emerging, was exciting then and is still exciting to reflect on now. She's right to ding it for (like everything else in history) being elitist, classist, racist, sexist, exclusionary... but for those privileged enough to have access it was pretty amazing. I can't imagine anything else making me stay in the classroom during lunch and after school like an Apple II did.

=== updated a few days later ===

This review bothers me, and the book bothers me, so maybe it was more effective than I gave it credit for. Again, I think the analytical work here is super solid and interesting. I think it's important to separate the overheated mythological aspects of early computing days from the real truth, and I don't want to put that part of it down. I just think a part of that truth is that these things (not just STEVE JOBS løøk!!, but also the incredibly less sexy TRS-80 stuff and everything else) were really cool. That was a legitimate part of it for a lot of people and while it doesn't get the tech to ubiquity it had a role. Would the iPhone have put a data-reliant device in the world's pockets if it didn't seem a little like magic? I don't think you can chalk it up to straight utility.

[aberamentho · Rating 3 out of 5]

An ambitious and unconventional take on the history of personal computing. Rather than retelling the familiar Steve Jobs-centered mythos, Nooney zooms in on the overlooked but formative role of the Apple II, and more provocatively, on the software company Softalk and its founders. The book isn’t so much a history of hardware as it is a cultural and economic history of a moment—when the personal computer was still uncertain, undefined, and full of potential.

What makes the book stand out is its insistence on a different lens: Nooney treats the personal computer not as an inevitable invention but as the product of specific social, cultural, and business decisions. The archival detail is impressive, and the focus on "Softalk" magazine and its surrounding community offers a genuinely fresh angle.

However, the book’s strengths are also its weaknesses. The decision to center such a niche subject gives the story originality, but sometimes at the cost of broader relevance or narrative momentum. Readers expecting a fuller picture of the Apple II’s technical evolution, or its role in shaping the personal computing market, may find the scope unexpectedly narrow or even idiosyncratic. There are moments where the cultural theory weighs heavy, and the prose can occasionally drift into academic abstraction.

In the end, The Apple II Age is a thoughtful contribution to computing history, best appreciated by readers interested in the intersections of media, business history, and critical theory. It’s more about how people thought and talked about personal computers than how the machines themselves worked. A valuable perspective—but one that may not fully satisfy readers seeking a more comprehensive or accessible account.

[Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked the structure of this book: some hardware background, some Apple history, and then a tour through the world of software available for the Apple II in the late 1970s and early 1980s through a deep dive into representative titles from different categories. It's a thoughtful arrangement that allows Nooney to provide appropriate context, plus color and detail about a ragtag collection of individuals staking out a new field, and then trends that emerge from the set. It certainly helps that Nooney's writing is engaging, curious, and very empathetic.

I don't remember how this one landed on my reading list so I didn't know much of what to expect heading into it. I've read a lot of books about the history of computing. This one was livelier and more engaging than many of the other academic texts, maybe in part because it could bop around to different casts of characters working in the same general context. I could imagine a reader frustrated that this wasn't a straight monograph about the development of a piece of influential hardware, but I was much happier with this interesting book.

Also: It may be a little thing, but I read this one as an ebook and the formatting around the (extensive! informative!) footnotes and (excellent!) photo illustrations was great throughout.

[Taciano Dreckmann Perez · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yet Another Look at the Apple II Era

The Apple II was my first computer, and I still have deep affection for it. I even run a YouTube channel where I teach BASIC and assembly programming for this machine. So when I saw The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal, I didn’t hesitate to pick it up.

The book looks at different categories of software—games, business applications, utilities, educational programs—and chooses one example from each to trace how the software market, and the idea of a “personal computer,” developed from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s. I enjoyed how it challenges the assumption that people naturally wanted a computer at home, showing instead how hardware and software makers shaped the narrative that made adoption possible.

What worked less for me was the conclusion. It downplays the Apple II’s role and questions the broader impact of computers, but in a way that felt inconsistent with the rest of the book. The ending left me more puzzled than convinced, almost as if it had been tacked on after the fact.

[Dav · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very refreshing treatment of the history of personal computing. I've read quite a bit of these histories. It is something I lived through, so I am both nostalgic for it and aware that there is a lot missing in the mythological treatment these histories often get.

I started programming on the Commodore 64 in 1982 and in 1984 I won 3rd place in the state-level High School Science Fair for a program that displayed interactive graphics taken from lessons in our physics textbook that was coded and displayed on an Apple II. I was too young to appreciate the contemporaneous business, social and economic forces at play, but after three decades working in tech I appreciate learning about how the realities of those forces shaped the world I grew up in.

[Gary Schroeder · Rating 3 out of 5]

The title is deceptive to a degree. This isn't so much a book about the development of the Apple II as it is a book about the early software business and how software was marketed to individuals as something that would be useful in their personal lives in an era when computers were largely seen as corporate tools for accountancy. While some history of the development of the Apple II is included, the bulk of the book is about the business and marketing end of software sales. If reading about how software moved from being a boutique basement product made by amateur enthusiasts to being produced by major publishing houses doesn't sound intriguing, this book probably isn't for you.

[John Mihelic · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this book, Nooney looks at the Apple II computer and the software packages that helped the computer move from a business machine to a usable terminal for everyday people at work and home. It was interesting since this transition happened right before I was born, so computers were a part of the world when I was a kid, but for my parents, this was a thing that was just happening. (I missed the Apple revolution. My parents bought a Tandy from Radioshack in 1986 or so, and it was the Christmas present for the whole family.) My favorite part was the chapter about VisiCalc, which was compelling to me as someone who spends a lot of time staring at spreadsheets.

[Vincent · Rating 1 out of 5]

I strongly disliked The Apple II Age. Instead of an exciting take, this is written in a fairly dry, almost academic style (don't believe the jacket blurbs). It felt to me like the writer only knew about the advent of home personal computers through research and with no personal connection to the hobby, and did not seem to have much technical background, or at least I disagreed with some of their explanations and analogies.

Go to some of The Apple II Age's sources for a better idea of what home computing was like during that time. The final section of Hackers, for example, or Accidental Empires. Ditto for early issues of Byte Magazine or later issues of Creative Computing.

[Haydngoseek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb, original, and much welcome. This is much more than your boilerplate revisionist Silicon Valley history - Nooney successfully upends the popular obsession with hardware specs, the Apple Macintosh, and the "1984" commercial, to focus on the actual story of what people _did_ with the computers. To explore this story, we get a series of chapters that each discuss a particular software category by using a single product as a focus, including some old favorites like The Print Shop. Exhaustively researched. Yes, at times the prose can get a trifle academic, but it never truly drags.

[Kasey (Mir) · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was really cool to see how the computer evolved and to see it not glorify Gates or Jobs. I also had no idea that a lot of open source software was made and share by hobbyists. I would like to joke and say that Bill Gate's An Open Letter to Hobbyists was and is part of his villain origin story. S/o to Capitalism for doing what it does.

Joking aside, the book is pretty dense, which is to be expected. If you have a particular interest in computer history, I'd recommend it.

[Raphael De Lio · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book for anyone interested in computer history and how we got to the current panorama. It demystify some ideas, such as the one that computers became a popular machine over night, and also gives us interesting insights, such as that user experience wasn't as straightforward as it is today. Reading long manuals was normal before or while using any software you would buy from a a magazine advertisement. I particularly enjoyed reading it.

[Greg Langmead · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even though I lived through this era, I knew next to nothing that was reported in this book. Hearing about the people and the deals and the money that launched “home computing” was truly eye-opening, and tapped into my skepticism of capitalism. I love how the book was structured, and I appreciated the at times sour tone.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good history of the first “personal computers” especially the Apple II, and in particular the business development of the software industry that supported it.

Brings back a lot of memories of the early home PCs.

[Will · Rating 4 out of 5]

Provided with applications along with the history of Apple(no many Apple stories), more about applications' stories
From Business, Games, Utilities, Home and Education to describe the early stage of Apple II ecosystem and how does it make impact to Apple in the future

[Terence · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great and easy read that fill sin the gaps of Apple II creation and how it got its way into our homes and classrooms by way of software, gaming and peripherals. I really enjoyed reading this and about the divide between cassettes to floppy disk. If you like tech history it is good.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first computer was an Apple ][ Plus so this was an interesting walk down memory lane of my early years of computing.

[Andy Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was so interesting! VisiCalc and Mystery House sound so cool, I wish I could play with them.

[Evan Suggs]

A book that loses its through line. I was hoping that we would keep the edge and meanness, it's dislike of what Apple has become and maybe what it always was. No dice, but entertaining enough

[Peter Mueller · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF did not care for her word choices or sentence construction. Made the topic more boring than it should be

[Liz Davidson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at an age of computing I didn't know much about, and that I now appreciate much more. Definitely worth the read.