Unleashing the Legend: The Apple IIe and the Disk II!In this episode, we're diving into a true titan of early micro-computing: the legendary Disk II floppy disk system for the Apple II. Designed by the brilliant Steve Wozniak, the Disk II wasn't just another peripheral—it was a seismic shift in engineering ingenuity. Its streamlined, cost-effective design fundamentally unlocked the full potential of the Apple II, tearing down barriers that shackled game devs. Simply put, it was THE key ingredient that propelled the Apple II to greatness.
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Hi Chris T -
I watched your video, very nicely done. But here is one thing I must criticize due to possibly giving a wrong impression to the unwary / uninformed watcher:
While it is true that the hardware design of the Disk II system undoubtely is the finest achievement of Woz (and it certainly is "genius" level), your video names a few other contenders (like Mr. Shugart) and criticizes that their solutions needed much more chips (such like the 50 TTL "graveyard" to make a typical floppy disk controller, and the massive amount of electronics on the drives themselves) and I think this may give your audience the wrong / false impression that these other designers were incompetent insofar as they they arrived at overly complex and expensive designs. This is simply not true and shines a wrong light on these other contenders. Let me explain what really happened:
In Y1973, IBM introduced the IBM 3740 Data Entry System which was the first use of 8" floppy disks. It used a peculiar FM (Frequency Modulation) recording method and a proprietary IBM format for the diskette media. THIS set the "industry standard" for any follow up floppy disk based system and any contender in this new field of storage devices just had to be compatible to be able to sell their hardware and software. Up to today, the "IBM3740" moniker which was the name for IBM's whole "Data Entry System" comprising several devices is used to designate the FM modulation method and the proprietary IBM formatting. This is confusing for most.
Back then, the host systems used relatively complex "channels" to allow the OS to "talk" and "listen" to the floppy disk drives. With the CPUs being relatively slow, DMA techniques were typically used. The OS would request a sector to be read or written via the "channel" protocol and the floppy disk controller card would handle the rest. Inevitably, this meant great complexity for these cards. And the drives themselves also were semi-smart and would not only turn step / direction impulses into stepper motor phases but also had logic to prevent the head from banging into the mechanical stops, which also required sensors etc. The drives also had signal conditioning logic to take and make "industry standard" write and read pulses. Which are a different thing from what happens on the read/write head.
Woz had no intent (or need) to follow the "industry standard" in any way so he was able to "think outside of the box" and - I dare a guess here - that it was the greed of Steve Jobs which nudged Woz into throwing out all the "unnecessary" parts like the stepper motor phase generator and the Track 00 sensor etc ... so it is indeed possible to destroy a DISK II drive with malicious programming, although it would take quite a while until the damage is done.
In other words, Woz was able to do it his way and this allowed him to arrive at the cheapest possible floppy disk system at the time being, while still having an obscene profit margin. The price for that was payed later when they (Apple) found out that they could not increase the clock speed of the Apple II above the measly 1 Mhz without major complications. They did find a way only in the Apple IIgs. You always pay a penalty when you move timing critical I/O functions into software. Although initially, it is cheaper.
I think this is a more balanced point of view which does all sides justice.
And finally, it was not gamers who embraced the DISK II. The majority of Apple II / Disk II buyers (at the beginning) were small businesses which could run accounting and inventory etc., and VISICALC was the "killer app" which probably sold more Apple II than any game. The 80 column card was another important enabler of the great success the Apple II had with small business users. This is where the money was. And not some pimpled teenager who wanted to play computer games ... the "want" was certainly there, but not the money.
IIRC, the Apple II game scene took off only when the first "affordable" Apple II clones "Made in Taiwan" appeared on the scene ... much to the dismay of Apple, of course. But this is another story.
- Uncle Bernie
P.S.: and to the best of my knowledge, Alan Shugart did not invent the floppy disk. This was done by a team at IBM which reported to Alan Shugart (he was IBM's "Direct Access Storage Product Manager"). But he obviously saw the business opportunity and went on to found Shugart Associates. Which is the company which "invented" the minifloppy disk drive (5.25").
Thanks for the clarification Bernie, lots of extra in-depth info/context there.As you have watched my video, you will see it is over one hour long. Originally I had planned for it to also cover ProDOS and also the UniDisk Floppy drives from Apple. I decided that a dry tutorial showing how to install a drive and then use AppleDOS would not be that entertaining. A good retro video (like in the BBC motto) should inform, educate AND entertain. So I felt a dose of (fun) history would make it more interesting.
As I went on and recorded, I soon found I had well over an hours worth of footage, so choices had to be made about the history of the drive. Another focus was the tutorial, AppleDOS contains the concept of VOLUMES, and the manual explains this. But I decided that it was something the average modern Apple II user would not need. Anyone more techy can read the manual and learn it there. I HAVE to make choices to keep the video length to a reasonable size. These means I HAVE to sometimes boil down the history, sometimes by quite a mark.
Is my video 100% accurate, based on all of the possible info out there? Probably not, is it intentially deceptive, certainly not.But I decided to focus on Woz's genius and the impact the DiskII had on game development. I'll explain why later.
I WAS aware that Shugart was not necassarily the engineer designing the Shugart 8" drive, I read that he was a manager at IBM. Managers at tech companies tend to be techy (not always) but they leave the low level stuff to the people who can hack it. So I assumed Shugart was more of a team-leader. So I assumed when he left IBM to go to, where was it Sanyo? He was poached to head up a project for (a lot) more money for them. Then flush with said cash he saw a market developing for Micro computers, and decided to try and make an 8" drive "for the masses" aka 30 beardy chaps (mainly in CA) stroking their S-100 bus machines....
Now, DID Woz design the controller card for Job's greed? I've not heard Woz say anything to that effect. Woz designed an overly complex micro, the Apple II, not in its design, but in its provision of Slots. This COST to design and COST a LOT to manufacture and this made the Apple II the most expensive of the big three when launched. Woz is a perfectionist, but also an inherent optimizer. But he appears to not shy away from extra features if it suits his vision. I think he just wanted to make a controller as a challenge when at HP. And when he had to use that design in anger, he had to justify its simplifications vs utility and decided the compromises it would require were not bad. SURE someone could write code to damage a drive, but for the average user it was "good enough'. Using the CPU was also I think a GOOD choice. It DID lock the drive into the CPU speed. But really Apple could easily engineer a new drive (as they did) for faster machines when the time comes.
As for the Apple II and gaming, I disagree with your point. A Computer is multi-purpose, and certainly sales of the Apple II WERE drivenby businesses, of course, it was a crazily expensive machine. As I said in my video, in 77 a 48KB Apple II cost $7000+ extra just for that 44KB of RAM. That being said, its undeniable that many early complex video games WERE pioneered on the Apple II, I'm looking really mainly at RPG. Because in 79-80 the rest of the potential gaming micros, were no where near capable of this kind of game (with colour graphics...forget ASCI/PETSCI). Richard Garriott (Ultima series) was a rich kid, the son of an Astronaut. He was VERY unusual, being able to get his own Apple II at such an young age. But he did, and the platform allowed him to express his own personal genius.
I was a gamer initially, but always wanted to be a game developer. I don't know if you know this, but I worked for The Bitmap Brothers, a famous Atari ST/Amiga games dev in the early 1990s. I wanted to be a game designer, but that did not work out. Still, I tend to come at retro from that background. And thats the facet of the Apple II I decided to focus on in my video.
Certainly I COULD have said that VisiCalc was the killer ap for it, I have read the stories. And indeed data-base software, etc was only really viable on a Disk based micro. But so were role-playing games, where character stats have to be stored and updated and then saved repeatedly, where locations have to be loaded into the game engine on the fly, where game events have to be flagged as completed etc.
From your viewpoint, the business "serious" side of the story is the focus you would prefer, but I prefer to focus on gaming, well, at least for this video.
Hope that all makes sense.
Well made, informative and entertaining. Subscribed.
Rather than take a gratuitous swipe at a dead man who can't defend himself, I'd guess that it was Woz alone who made the design decisions regarding the approach to building the Disk II, for no other reason than it made the Disk II more affordable than competing alternatives; and, incidentally, profitable. That is to say, I don't think greed had anything to do with it. I think it was a desire to see your product in as many hands as possible, because you were proud of your work and wanted to share it with the world. Making a little coin at the same time was certainly a plus though.
I also understood that you were commenting on the Disk II's impact on gaming.
FWIW, I was a 25 year old commissioned officer in the United States Navy when I bought my Apple ][+ from ComputerLand in 1982, not some "pimply-faced teenager" (who could afford $8400 in today's dollars?), and most of the programs I bought were games and Beagle Bros disks. I later added a Videx 80 column card, Hayden's PIE:Writer word processor and a printer. At my semi-monthly user group meetings, it was nearly all people my age or older there, copying disks, mostly games. And I'd say that nearly all of those folks were home users, which is probably what you'd expect since they'd spent their own money on the machines. I'm sure some of them used them in some business capacity, but I don't recall any presentions on the ROI of buying an Apple II.
The disk copying was always a point of contention. We later decided that you could only copy disks at the mid-month meetings. Those were usually better attended, unless we had someone doing a demo at the beginning of the month. I recall seeing Lode Runner demo'ed pre-release and being blown away by the iris transitions. It was playable, but I don't think they had all the levels finished, or the level editor maybe. I just remember I couldn't buy it yet.
Anyway, good times. Nice video.
This statement is 100% accurate in my opinion.
The Apple II+ was most certainly a business machine when combined with the 16K memory expansion or "Language" card, 80 column card, and Disk II/controller.
The killer app was indeed VisiCalc, and also software like AppleWriter, PFS and . The Z80 card brought more business related software tot he Apple II at the time.
The other side of the market was the education system, which Apple flooded very effectively in the 80s, which of course led to its popularity (or desirability) in the home market which:
Uncle Bernie is 100% correct that the Apple II market did not explode until the flood of cheap Taiwanese clones came to market in the USA and Canada.
There was no way anybody outside of the business world (okay there were some affluent types that did have Apple II+ machines in their homes) could afford what amounts to a $7500 (in today's dollars) machine combination.
The clones cost less than $100 at the time, clone drives $85, clone 80 col cards $29, and clone language cards $19. THAT certainly led to the proliferation of the Apple II, and by the time the IIe came along, prices had dropped in the relative sense, and then the IIc dropped relative prices even further, including in a single form factor, all the expansion listed above, save perhjaps the Z80 which was pretty much opsolete by the time anyway.
Well done on the video. Good work.
It is interesting. I've only watched about 1/2 so far. I did notice some mistakes and it is obvious that the narrator was not an Apple person back in the day because the way they go about doing a lot of things is not always idiomatic. I'm not going to nit pick at this point but if someone cares I could make notes of the nits.
Nit pick away, in a constructive manner please. I'm hoping to learn from it, and that benefits everyone. Maybe....
I'll have to watch it again from the beginning to remember everything. One thing I remember off my head is that on the original Apple ][, not only does it not have the Autostart F8 monitor ROM, it doesn't drop you to BASIC like a ][+ or //e does, it drops you right into the system monitor.
Another thing, perhaps I didn't watch far enough, but when you save "LOADER", it isn't saved as the greetings program name for the disk you initialized. Unless you have a 3rd party tool you can't change that greeting program name once you have initialized the disk. Also you don't need to use MASTER CREATE to make a floppy be bootable with a custom "HELLO" program, what MASTER CREATE does is make a disk bootable on machines with different size RAM, 16K, 32K or 48K. It is largely academic since few machines have less than 48k these days. But if you init a disk on a 48k machine you can't boot it on a 16K or 32K unless you make it a master and if you init a disk on a 16K or 32K without making it a master and you boot it on a machine with larger memory it will load DOS at a lower location and you won't be able to use all of the memory in BASIC like intended. Generally most people would either LOAD the program they want to be the "HELLO" before they do the INIT or would SAVE or copy the BASIC program to the floppy under the name it was INITed with as the greetings program name, Idiomatically most people usually followed Apple's example and made it "HELLO", but there isn't a reason other than convention why really. Also it is possible with a 3rd party app to make a binary program execute as HELLO, but by default it is going to need to be either Applesoft or Intbasic, and whatever it is needs to be available in ROM because the trick of loading it into RAM doesn't work unless it can load the HELLO first. The BASIC could be on either the motherboard ROMs or an Apple ROM card (which was originally usually put in slot 0, but can be used in other slots, albeit with a modification required to fit in slots that the switch does not line up with the rear panel accesses). Also it is worth noting that on a ][ or ][+, the SYSTEM MASTER will only load the other BASIC into RAM if the machine has a 16k RAM card. The //e of course comes with 64K standard and doesn't have slot 0 because the "language card" is built in.