Jef Raskin's tiny Macintosh team was struggling to fulfill the goal of a '$1,000-person-in-the-street' computer. The components were pushing the overall Macintosh cost closer to $1500 at a time when the TRS-80 was $599. Raskin recalled later that Steve Jobs told him to ‘not worry about the price’ and instead to focus on ‘abilities’.
Jobs suggested features such as a high-quality keyboard, free connection to ARPANET, a cheap attached printer, extra storage, and a selection of programs. Raskin disagreed and sent a sarcastic memo to Apple President Mike Scott in which he listed out dozens of abilities. Very few, if any, were achievable at the time, and just to exaggerate his opposition to Jobs's strategy, Raskin added some that were decades away:
‘Let’s include speech synthesis and recognition, with a vocabulary of 34,000 words. It can also synthesize music, simulate Caruso singing with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir with various reverberations.’
His memo ended with:
‘Starting with the abilities desired is nonsense. We must start with a price goal AND a set of abilities and keep an eye on today's and the immediate future's technology. These factors must be all juggled simultaneously.’
Over the following decades, Apple engineers implemented nearly every capability Jobs requested and many of Raskin's deliberately exaggerated suggestions.
As Jobs and Raskin argued, Apple released useable titles for the Apple II in its Apple Software Bank, a 1979 iteration of the current App Store. The bank was an early program catalog and distribution collection that included user-contributed programs like 'California Driver's Test' - a simulation of the actual test and a ten-pin bowling game called 'Apple Bowl.' The titles were available for purchase (usually $20 each - now $92!) from an Apple dealer, but users had to provide their own blank diskette or cassette tape.
Within a year, John Martellaro created the Peelings II magazine which was devoted almost entirely to Apple II software reviews.
Excerpt from https://books.by/john-buck/inventing-the-future
Use code peelings at check out for a discount.
