Re: There’s a quote:
I was as impressed as anyone here with the Apple II hardware. Wozniac's Apple II disc controller -- a half dozen commodity TTL (RTL?) chips that somehow interfaced to an analog device. And it worked. Four decades later, I remember looking at an Apple II disk controller board, and sort of figuring out how it might work. I was utterly astonished. So count me as a Woz fan.
But I think it interesting that this seems to be the only post that mentions the application that truly separated the Apple II from the crowd of assorted computing devices that were available back in early PC days. Visicalc actually did something unique and useful. And until Lotus-123 was launched in 1983, it was, so far as I know, the only spreadsheet show in town.
I speak from personal experience -- trying to run an office using Apple IIs (not my idea). Other than Visicalc, the available Apple II software was absolutely awful. The word-processors sucked. The leading spell-checker wasn't quite that bad -- as long as you never, ever fed it a file longer than 64K bytes -- which it would promptly trash. IMO, without Visicalc, the Apple II was a hobbiest only computer. And probably not the most cost effective choice for many/most hobbiests.
My life became vastly easier when we switched to PC clones, MSDOS, Word Perfect, etc -- stuff that (mostly) worked when used by normal people.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
