The two computers that made Apple

Today on the flagship podcast of third-party operating systems: The Verge's David Pierce chats with Laine Nooney, author of The Apple II Age: How The Computer Became Personal. Later, lead video producer Will Poor chats with David about The Verge's new documentary Lisa’s Final Act: How Apple invented its future by burying its past. To end the show: a hotline question. How to transfer playlists from Spotify to Apple Music, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, or Tidal Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. We'll be answering a question every Wednesday! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Pierce?

  Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of third-party operating systems. I'm your friend David Pierce, and since we're a little under a week out from WWDC, Apple's annual developer conference, I have begun a ritual I like to call "the charginging." I pull all my phones, tablets, old phones, old tablets, old Macs, everything I can find, out of storage and get it all updated and charged. Takes a lot of time, giant pain, but it's worth it, because I am going to spend a lot of this summer, inevitably, testing new stuff from Apple, and a lot of it's going to break everything, and I need a backup plan. Anyway, Apple is the focus of today's show, but we're actually not going to

• 0:43David Pierce?

  talk about WWDC. We're going to do a lot of that over the next week, so we'll hold off for now. Instead, we're going to look backward at Apple and tell you two stories about two computers from the 70s and 80s that can actually tell us an awful lot about how Apple and the tech industry as a whole work now. And in case you're wondering, no, I don't think either of these computers will support iOS 17, or macOS, we joke, or whatever else gets launched next week. But we're going to get into all of the rest of it in just a second. This is The Vergecast. We'll be right back.

• 1:18Speaker 01

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• 2:32David Pierce?

  Welcome back. The first Apple computer I want to talk about today is the Apple II, which Apple introduced back in 1977.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  Watch what you can do with this Apple II personal computer and any color TV. You can print your own reports, talk to other computers and get information like Dow Jones reports, chart your biorhythms, teach your children math, improve your chess game, and there's lots more.

• 2:53David Pierce?

  1977 was a huge year in the history of computing, for reasons you'll hear about in a minute. And the Apple II is probably the most important device that was released that year. Lain Nooney just wrote a whole book about why.

• 3:07Speaker 04

  I'm Lain Nooney. I'm an assistant professor of Media Industries in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University.

• 3:14David Pierce?

  Lain's book is called "The Apple II Age: How the Computer Became Personal." It's a history story, but it's also a culture story, and it really goes through all of how computers came to take over our lives, and why it was not at all inevitable that it did so. There's a lot going on here. We've got a lot of spreadsheets to talk about. Let's just get into it.

• 3:36David Pierce?

  Let's just kind of lay the land a little bit. When this story starts, it's like the middle of the 1970s. Give me a sort of very brief picture of like what's happening, bigger picture, like in the world right now, because it actually turns out to matter more than I expected.

• 3:50Speaker 04

  So, the 1970s are a decade of real political, social, and economic concern in the United States. The 70s are when we really start seeing the outcomes of like deindustrialization, of the movement of factory labor out of the United States. There's a tremendous amount of anxiety about what is the future, you know, of this country that built its back on the idea of the factory, of labor. You know, in the 1960s, America was producing the majority of the world's manufactured goods, and that really starts to trickle down and shrink over the course of the 1970s. You also have a number of economic recessions,

• 4:29Speaker 04

  oil shocks, mass unemployment. Sound familiar? Uh, there was, it was a real kind of moment where there wasn't a clear picture for a lot of Americans about what comes next, and how do we restore this sense of national pride that had been so core to the American idea of itself in the post-war and the Cold War era.

• 4:53David Pierce?

  And then out of that comes a phrase I had never heard before. You call it the Holy Trinity. Take me through like, what was the Holy Trinity? Like, why was this kind of a thing that happened all at once that like changed the computing industry forever?

• 5:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, so what you're referring to is the 1977 Trinity, and this is a term that's used commonly among computer historians or retro computing enthusiasts, but totally people in like a general populace would have no reason to use it. But the 1977 Trinity refers to the simultaneous release that year of the first three, what we could call consumer-grade microcomputers, or a more comfortable term might be personal computers. And that includes the TRS-80 that was released by Radio Shack, the Commodore PET, and the Apple II, which was Apple's first real commercial product or consumer-oriented

• 5:44Speaker 04

  product, we can say. And these three computers were a really dramatic change from the way that consumer computing was imagined even just a couple years earlier in like 1975, which is to say, there wasn't really an idea of a commercial or a consumer-oriented computer. The personal computing, as we understand it, comes out of like radio hobbyism, electronics hobbyism. It was like a nerd of nerd of nerd-ums, if that makes sense, right? This was an extremely niche activity that kind of took off in the mid 1970s, right? There was this big question of like, why would anyone want a computer in their home? But there were a set of companies, quite a wide-ranging

• 6:26Speaker 04

  set of companies, that thought there might be economic opportunity in this moment. And so in 1977, there's both the, I think, technical, kind of the prices have reached a threshold where these aren't goods that anybody can buy, but at least upper-class people can buy them. And also, there's enough ambient investment interest, right? From venture capitalists, from investment firms, there's a number of things that change, kind of, you know, economically with regards to like, changes even in laws around capital gains tax and where money can be invested, that helps juice the idea that this might be a thing worth peddling to a new American consumer.

• 7:08David Pierce?

  I was trying to think if there are other examples in sort of the history of technology where there's been that much progress that immediately. And there's so many stories that you can tell of like things that happen very fast. They happen over the course of a few years and big things change. But the idea that basically three different approaches to functionally the same thing landed at basically exactly the same time is just crazy to me. Like, was that as much of like a sonic boom of a moment as it seems like to me all these years later?

• 7:37Speaker 04

  I'm not sure. I mean, if we look at something like television or radio, there was certainly multiple companies vying at the same time to release fundamentally different but more or less similar products. And personal computing definitely has a much slower lag time in a lot of ways. But it was interesting that it sounded, it seemed to sound a bell within these communities that maybe it was possible for this idea of computing hobbyism to get away from the workbench in the garage and maybe come into the home, to have a broader range of applicability or to be more useful to more people.

• 8:16Speaker 04

  And I think the three systems that come out in 1977 point toward at least that imagination. I think we often see what I might call speculative concurrence, right? That more companies than we think are going to try and like boom rush a new technology, but most of them are not going to sustain, right? We don't talk about Commodore anymore as like a relevant computing company. Radio Shack is a nostalgic icon. Only Apple, right, kind of survives from that moment.

• 8:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, so is that why you picked the Apple II to write about? Because I think there's a way you could have sort of gone back to the beginning of the story and written about the Trinity and kind of that moment in technology. You could have followed the Radio Shack story, which is probably much less complicated over time. It like did very well and then it died really fast. Was it the sort of long, successful history of Apple that was what drew you to like, let's look at the Apple II in particular?

• 9:09Speaker 04

  That's a great question. I think there's a couple variables that, as I say in the book, made the Apple II an optimal historical object. I was always very clear with myself that I was not trying to write a celebration of a particular piece of hardware, but I was trying to find a piece of hardware that could open up a bigger story. If I was trying to write about multiple microcomputers at the same time, that gets a little unwieldy just in terms of book length, right? History is all about scope. It's like, what problem am I gonna choose and how am I gonna take a lateral slice through it?

• 9:43David Pierce?

  Right. Yeah, you'd have to have like two chapters just about like different ideas about keyboards, if you wanted to. Yeah, it'd be a lot. Yeah.

• 9:49Speaker 04

  Exactly, right? You make yourself accountable to a lot of things. I'm trying to get tenure. I had to get this book out. Like, it can't, it can't be all of my hopes and dreams, right? But the Apple II was such an interesting computer for a number of ways. It wound up by 1983 having the largest amount of software released forward of any personal computer on the market. It had about 2,000 programs, which meant, you know, from where I was standing, if I want to ask a question about how did the computer become personal, it's not really a question about the computer hardware person. It's a question about what did people do with their computers? And that's a software question. And so with the Apple II, what you actually

• 10:29Speaker 04

  had was access to the broadest possible range of software available to an American's consumer, like, in the country, right? And so Apple seemed like a really good target. There was also one really relevant publication that a lot of the research in the book is grounded on, which is a magazine called Softalk that ran software sales listings that were done in a, a kind of very accurate way and are probably the closest we have for having any sense of what sales records even really were, given that distribution records have not existed from this time. And so there was this cool confluence that Apple both kind of had the

• 11:09Speaker 04

  best records and also had the most software. And then the machine itself as a piece of technology is a really interesting case because it was a machine that was robust enough for people who wanted to use it as a serious business appliance, people who wanted to hardware or software hack or program, but also if you wanted to just like not have to know how your computer worked. You could kind of maybe get away with that on an Apple II. It straddled a home and office divide that very few other computers could get away with.

• 11:41David Pierce?

  Totally. One of the things that jumped out to me reading the book was that I couldn't decide how much of what you just described, Apple did on purpose. Because you rewind back and like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak are like flailing, trying to figure out something to build, some way to make a business, something that's going to happen. And you have Steve Jobs, who's just like trying to fund the thing and you know, kind of going nuts about it. And then Steve Wozniak, who's just this like happy tinkerer in his garage, who just sort of like builds fun things for other people to play with. And what I couldn't decide is if inside of that feeling is this like grand vision about giving that kind of access to other people, and that's why Apple went so open? Or if it was just a happy accident that Steve Wozniak was not like a controlling capitalist who wanted to, you know, ruthlessly control everything that got sold on top of his device?

• 12:26David Pierce?

  Like if you put yourself in, you know, 1976 Steve Wozniak brain, would he have guessed and foreseen what was coming over the next five or six years in that run where Apple went from being like a relatively small player to like the arbiter of this gigantic software ecosystem that is ultimately what made the Apple II work?

• 12:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I think if you were Steve Wozniak in 1976, one, I think that he was absolutely intent for this to be an open system because Steve Wozniak is maybe the epitome of a hobbyist's hobbyist. This is a guy who, you know, the commercial aspirations were not what was motivating him. And I think that's also why if you were Steve Wozniak in 1976, you're not having a fantasy about what this is going to turn into necessarily. I think that there was a kind of monocular, intense engineering focus that Wozniak brought to the engineering of that system and that kind of blocked out, I think, a lot of the

• 13:26Speaker 04

  stuff that Jobs was far more attracted to, interested in, had a better vibe for feeling? You know, I don't know if I could say that Wozniak was sitting there trying to figure out how to please consumers. I think Wozniak was trying to figure out how to please himself and in a funny Way that turned out to be, what did he want? He wanted a system that was elegant, usable, accessible and open. And that's where the Apple two kind of like strikes all of the chords at just the right time. Uh, in terms of its both the, the kind of quality and caliber of its engineering as well as its openness or availability for people who maybe aren't computer engineers to like, understand how to use something like that.

• 14:11David Pierce?

  Yeah. What, what did that look like? Again, thinking about, you know, folks who are newer to Apple than 45 years ago. Everything you just described sounds absolutely nothing like Apple. Apple is the most closed, the most controlled, the most precious company on earth about what its products are and how you use them. It's full nuts to read this book and realize how completely the opposite it used to be and how much the early success of Apple depended on that. So like sort of brass tacks tactically speaking, like what about the Apple two was more open than some of its competitors? Like, why was it that people gravitated to it in a different way?

• 14:49Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Yeah. And everything you're saying about Apple, you know, if you want someone to blame, that's Steve Jobs, right? I mean, there's a somewhat infamous clash about the design of the Apple two between Wozniak and Jobs and Wozniak wins. And I think it has everything to do with kind of one of the reasons that platform becomes successful. But an important thing to understand is that a lot of the initial interest and let's say speculative engineering that first created some of these systems comes out of electronics hobbyist communities. And these hobbyist communities are not interested in using proprietary tools. They are accustomed to engineering at the level of like wires and transistors, right?

• 15:30Speaker 04

  That's the engineering history you're talking about here that then begins to apply themselves to technologies like microprocessors that become the foundation for something like a personal computer. And for them, for hobbyists, the idea is that the spirit of the activity is about trying to press up against the boundaries or the limits of. The technology itself, right? So you want that access, you want that documentation, you want to be able to get into your computer and either program at the lowest level, right? Program really close to the metal or to be able to hardware hack it if you want to. And Wozniak brought that sensibility into the machine.

• 16:11Speaker 04

  One of the most remarkable parts of the Apple II was that you could literally just lift the lid off. There was no screws, there was no like funky class mechanism. The whole thing just comes off and you can put your hands inside of it and also look down directly into the board. This was necessary because the Apple II had a bay of expansion slots, which were things that would allow users to add anything from sound equipment to joysticks, to printers, to floppy disks. Imagine almost like universal USB in the, in the kind of deepest sense of the word, right? And compared to other computers at that time, there was a real set of trade offs that companies were looking at about how much access

• 16:54Speaker 04

  do you give a user, particularly a non-technical user? So the TRS-80, for example, you can't open it. It's screwed shut. There's no hardware manipulation you can do. If you want to expand the machine, you have to go buy an extra peripheral set for that. And the TRS-80, those things opened like the hood of a car, like the whole sheet metal case lifted off. And so you couldn't like get your head into it or it just wasn't very conducive, right? But there was something so shocking and I think surprising for people to, to kind of take the, the top off this Apple II and that they could really directly access these components. That was extremely compelling and necessary for hobbyists.

• 17:34Speaker 04

  And I think that's a, a space where the Apple II earned its credibility as a serious machine, even as there was definitely a growing subset of consumers who did not want to take the lid off that thing at all.

• 17:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, one of the questions I wrote down as I was reading the book is, is this book sneakily about how open access to floppy disks actually invented the future of computing? And the longer I think about it, the more I kind of think it is about that. That it's like, what this did was say, here's a thing that you can put other things into and it's easy and you can do lots of things with it. And it is kind of nuts in retrospect to how big a change that was.

• 18:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:09David Pierce?

  I would say you picked these five examples of different kinds of software that really tell the story. And I think, I think I'm right in saying Visicalc is probably by far the best known of the five, right?

• 18:18Speaker 04

  Undoubtedly, yes.

• 18:19David Pierce?

  Okay, it's like the prototype spreadsheet software. It's the one that sort of made everybody want one at work. It was like the thing.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:25David Pierce?

  But I think the story that interested me the most was locksmith. And I want to get into why in a second, but can you just sort of quickly explain like what locksmith was and why it was very controversial? Cause it ended up being controversial in ways that are like even today unsettled and super fascinating.

• 18:39Speaker 04

  Yes, so the book's main organization is that it chooses five different software categories and tells a story of both each category, kind of how it grew from this diffuse kind of what are we supposed to do with a computer to something that was recognizable by consumers. And to tell that story, I focus on a specific case in each one and tell the development history of a specific piece of software. locksmith was basically copy protection breaking software. At least if you were a developer or publisher in the industry, that's what you would have understood it to be. Software that helped you commit piracy. At a very technical level, we would call something like the locksmith a bit copier or a nibble copier,

• 19:21Speaker 04

  which meant that it allowed users to basically create duplications of the data pattern on a floppy disk, onto a blank floppy disk so that they could make a backup or as many in the industry were concerned, you could pirate your software.

• 19:37David Pierce?

  Okay, and this starts a whole fight that ends up being very sort of philosophical about essentially like who owns your stuff? It's just very funny to me that this quickly we go from, well, I guess not even this quickly, like simultaneously we're saying, this thing is very open and accessible and that's a huge part of why it's successful. And, and we're bringing this stuff along and it's been very valuable to people. And there's this whole tinkering culture, wouldn't this all be great? And then kind of right over the top, you have a bunch of people saying, nope, close it down. This is a business, I'm in charge. And if I'm understanding correctly, the, the reason why is just as simple as money, right? Like suddenly this became a big business for a lot of people and a lot of people suddenly had an interest in protecting that money. Is it that simple?

• 20:18Speaker 04

  It is really that simple. The concern was that if no one paid for software, that if piracy took off and people got more comfortable pirating software or freely sharing it, no one would pay for it. And then how do you have someone employed in doing it? Right? It is on the surface, an understandable argument, right?

• 20:39David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 20:39Speaker 04

  Is that people want to be paid for their labor and that people will leave if there's not a way to self-support, right? But the amount of, like, on the surface, reasonable argument, that reasonable argument then becomes made by companies that are beginning to make millions of dollars, beginning to take serious investment capital, beginning to go public. And there's a great suspicion between the consumer base and these kind of, you know, industry publishers, industry developers about contesting over who should have power over software, how much financial gain is too much financial gain. And these debates really go back to kind of the origins of personal computing, right? This was, you

• 21:23Speaker 04

  know, Bill Gates, right, rather infamously blew up at the entire hobbyist community for pirating the first software that he made, which was an interpreter of BASIC for the Alter 8800. So there was always this question of like, no one could quite decide what the appropriate financial remuneration should be, or how much profit is too much. And it was quite a difficult thing for these different parties to communicate with one another. So software magazines become this really interesting site where one of the only places where those contestations actually become kind of visible and archival in a way that's really useful for a historian.

• 22:03David Pierce?

  Totally. Where did the locksmith fight end? Obviously, I think the bigger picture stuff you're talking about, like, who deserves to be compensated and how much and open versus closed, I think still very much goes on today. But I think we've, as a society, sort of landed on, you should be able to make lots of money and things should be closed. But I think we're still, we're not 100% in either of those directions yet. But the locksmith story ended, right? Like, how did it end?

• 22:29Speaker 04

  Well, the locksmith, what made this particular piece of software a case that was different from any of the others I wrote about was that no one really knows who designed it. There's some kind of speculative rumors about it, but we don't have, there's no archival evidence about its actual author, right? That kind of person sort of is drifting off into anonymity. And once the software kind of just, as the industry figures out how to tighten up, particularly after the launching of the Software Publishers Association, which is an industry trade organization precisely dedicated to using the power of the law to hunt down not just people doing software, but also to come after companies like locksmith

• 23:12Speaker 04

  that are providing ways for people to duplicate their software, that locksmith's history kind of, it just, the software just kind of fades into anonymity. There's a few versions of it into the mid 80s, maybe into the late 80s, but the company that was running it sort of disappears. There was such an embargo against its existence that it was very hard for it to get any kind of mainstream coverage in the computing news and computing journalism. And so unless you were really kind of in the weeds in the industry and knew these sort of insider arguments and stuff like that, it was the kind of thing you probably didn't even know existed. It certainly wasn't the kind of thing that you were probably going to pick up at a Radio Shack also, right? Because there was a lot of different ways

• 23:55Speaker 04

  that the industry was embargoing software or preventing consumer access to software that they thought would threaten their own bottom line. So that's an issue to retailers, that's an issue to publishers, it's an issue for journalists, and they all kind of, in a uncentered but weirdly coordinated way, operated together to protect what they felt was a burgeoning but not yet kind of solidified industry.

• 24:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, well, and that one of the things that amazed me about that story is how quickly that thing flipped because I want to talk about sort of mainstream consumer people in a second because that's a big part of kind of the journey of computing is what happens when more and more people get access. But even this group of tinkerers and hackers, the people had been going to homebrew computer clubs, like the people who built these things specifically for the fun and joy of it, it's like as soon as $10 showed up, the whole industry changed. And I guess to some extent, maybe that's inevitable that when money gets involved, all of the conversations change. But I don't know, it just really struck me how quickly everyone's mind changed about even the things that they had built themselves as soon as these other interests got involved.

• 25:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think there's a careful needle I'm trying to thread with the book where one of the things I'm really trying to do is not give us the impression that commercial interests were an after effect or kind of side bet on computing, but were there in various forms from the moment that it gets instantiated, right? I mean, even the electronics hobbyist industry was a multimillion dollar project, right? There was always the expectation that you were going to pay to buy transistors and wire and microchips and stuff like that. Software was a much harder and more, I think, confusing issue because the question of where is the labor is more diffuse, right? There isn't an object in the obvious sense.

• 25:49Speaker 04

  And so I think the number of people for whom there was really no financial interest was fairly slim. I think there were a lot is a fairly low number. I think a lot of people, what they wanted was to provide themselves with sustainable, reasonable incomes. I think that was a lot of the initial energy. What happens is that you get, in order for these industries to truly reach a tipping point of mass scale, mass consumerization, what the strategy becomes that you have to take outside capital, right? That trying to grow yourself or that the companies who are willing to take outside capital are going to do that scaling.

• 26:31Speaker 04

  Faster. So if you want to scale two, if you don't want to get left behind, you need to also go out and seek that, right? And so it creates this kind of self-producing churn where maybe you weren't necessarily worried about being one of the top companies in the industry, but you realize very quickly you're going to get left behind if you don't do the thing that everybody else is doing, right? All you need is a few people chasing a huge payday for the entire industry to follow in that jet, that kind of jet stream. And it creates a very, I would say, self-perpetuating system where the whole project gets kind of instantaneously rationalized among its many actors.

• 27:13David Pierce?

  Yeah. What, what was the guy's name who was building the like education software for his middle school class and then?

• 27:18Speaker 04

  Oh, Tom Snyder.

• 27:19David Pierce?

  What a perfect example, right? He goes from, I'm going to build this small thing for the people who need it to, I'm going to make a sort of cottage business out of this to all of a sudden I have to be a multinational corporation or else a multinational corporation will come after me and shut down my lifestyle.

• 27:34Speaker 04

  Or yeah, a multinational corporation comes in and basically pays him to do work for them. And so he changes his entire approach to how software is built. He has to in order to make his software make sense to a company that doesn't want to sell software for groups of children in a school, but wants to sell individual units of individual floppy disks to individual families because that's a better market run.

• 27:59David Pierce?

  That's, it's super interesting and it does, there's so much in your book where the question of like, is this inevitable just kept coming up to me. It's like, and I think the money thing is the closest thing to inevitable of, of all of it, that it's like, and I've just, I've been covering this long enough that I'm just so trained to like, understand that as soon as venture capital appears, all the incentives change, all the business models change and you either get big or you die and that changes everything. And it was just interesting to watch that get traced through this entire process as well. But the other piece of software that I, I thought was particularly interesting was the print shop, which is, I think fundamentally a story about like how to teach regular people how to use computers, right? And this, this point you make over and over is that at the beginning, people had to be

• 28:41David Pierce?

  Taught not just how to use computers, but why they would give a crap about having one. Which I think is, it goes back to the same point of like, these things were not like inevitable societal goods that we had been waiting for and emerged perfectly to solve all of our problems. They showed up and I forget, you even say at one point, like, most people's response to computers is basically like, eh, okay, whatever, I'm gonna go back to my life, like, I don't care. And, and there's this big industry push to basically say, here's what you need them for, which is one side of it, but then also here's how you use it. And I think the here's how you use it story is very much kind of, well, I guess to some extent, both of them are a print shop story. It seems like it did a better job of answering both of those questions for regular people than almost anything. So same thing, can you just give me like, sort of the, the very brief background of, of what the print shop was?

• 29:26David Pierce?

  And I guess still is, is it still around?

• 29:28Speaker 04

  So there is like a weird vestigial tale of that software. It's owned by a different company, you know, the two developers kind of cast off their ownership of it many, many years ago, but I, I believe that you can still buy it.

• 29:44David Pierce?

  It's fantastic.

• 29:45Speaker 04

  Print Shop Deluxe 6.4 is still available for $49.99 on the Broderbund website. And it's like, what is Broderbund as a company today? Just like, it's like that, this is just an IP.

• 29:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think there's this mythology that in particular, the contemporary tech industries want us, need us to believe, right? Part of the fuel here is that we all have to invest in this faith of the idea that the future is inevitable. And so I think we've been fed this idea that people saw personal computers and they were like, oh yeah, gotta have this, right? I need one in my home, obviously, this is gonna change my life. And that was just not true. None of the statistics bear that out. Computer adoption was perilously slow in actual people's homes. You could force people to use computers in schools and offices, but you could not force people to buy a computer for their house.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  And there was all of these ideas about, you know, part of the, the, why there was so much software was because so many people were trying to answer the question, what do you even do with a computer? And there was all sorts of weird answers to this, right? A lot of them to answer the question, what would you do with a computer in your home? Was this idea of, well, we digitize household activities. So, oh, you have a physical address book? We're gonna make software so you can have a digital address book or a digital recipe keeper or here's software that can track your gas mileage or chart your biorhythms, software that can intervene in your sex life, you know? There was this great ambivalence, right? And people really had to be taught not just how to want a computer, but I think how to desire one.

• 31:24Speaker 04

  There was definitely like an emotional aspect to wanting to get people to imagine how to computerize their lives. But the home software sector had really struck out. They could not really make a compelling case beyond word processing was super useful. If you had a, were in a profession or had a hobby that really required a lot of typing. And then otherwise, maybe you needed a spreadsheet software. So the Print Shop is a wonderful, almost kind of diss or punk or kind of trolls the prompt, right? Is how I think of it is that this software, which, you know, begins development, I believe in 1982. It is co-developed by a gay couple who were in San Francisco.

• 32:08Speaker 04

  One of them was an employee at Broderbund at the time and had a lot of background in graphics programming. Marty Kahn and David Balsam, who were both in their kind of, you know, early, late twenties at the time. And, you know, they're in this hub of activity in San Francisco, watching everyone else get rich. And they're like, well, we've got skills. We know how to program. We've got ideas. Let's figure out what we can do. And they create ultimately through various iterations, the Print Shop, which is, some people call it a proto desktop publishing software. But it was, it was really a piece of software that allowed you to do this kind of very rudimentary printed objects.

• 32:50Speaker 04

  So you could create banners, you could create greeting cards, you could create letterhead and things like, you know, you could create signs. And basically it just, the whole design experience was on a rail. You chose what kind of thing you wanted to make. And then you decided, well, this is the graphic I'm going to use. This is the font. This is the border. You know, it was highly formulaic. You typed in your little message and then you sent it to print. And this blew people's minds and they had so much fun with it. And it was a program that was really advertised on the premise that you did not even need to read the manual. That's how well-designed it was.

• 33:31Speaker 04

  And getting people, computing was, it's, it's hard to express how confusing computing was, right? It was just, it was terribly complicated, you know, even for people of like modest or decent technical skill. It was very frustrating and the print shop really promised this idea of what we might call a user-friendly experience that also made you, gave you the ability to take something that you made on a computer and bring it into the world. And that was really powerful, I think, as a, as a gesture, as creating a kind of visual culture of computing that people had never handled or experienced themselves to make material, this stuff that was trapped on a screen, felt, I think, transformative.

• 34:16Speaker 04

  It was a real aha moment, I think, for a lot of home users.

• 34:20David Pierce?

  That's interesting. It's, it's a very funny counter to the way that things developed after that, which is, I think, computers became so much about simplicity and consumption and like, printing now is something I do like when I have concert tickets, right? Like, that's, that's about, that's essentially what it's for, right? But I think there, there was this idea, and to some extent, we're, we're getting back to this idea of marrying technology and physicality with like, AR and all that stuff, but that's, that's a whole separate thing. But I, I think the idea that like, this is a thing that is useful in the rest of my life and not kind of as its own thing that exists entirely inside of its screen is really interesting. And I feel like we could, we could use more of that perspective in our world right now.

• 35:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think in a moment when computing was an extremely foreign object to so many people, there needed to be a different pitch than, well, what if you typed your papers rather than, you know, rather than using a typewriter? Or what if your checkbook was on your computer? A lot of people's response to this was, who cares? But the print shop allowed people to do something that otherwise was really kind of impossible, that they could like feel and touch and share. And it was about friendships and communities and, you know, small businesses and things like, it was about, you know, little kids making these weird computer cards for their grandma and banners for their birthdays and. Putting up a sign in your town that said a yard sale and that suddenly it wasn't for like

• 35:46Speaker 04

  serious printing, but it allowed the computer to exceed the boundary of the screen itself and in a way that was instructive, I think I want to emphasize for new users.

• 35:57David Pierce?

  Totally. And I think that point about it being a truly new behavior is really interesting. And I had not thought about this until just now, but that kind of unites all the software you talk about, even even Visicalc, right? Where you have all your numbers on a screen and you can update one and all the rest update. Like that is a that is a new thing that was not possible before. And even games was like you can do a different thing collaboratively with your schoolmates than you've ever been able to do before. And that idea of like one by one, the software developers finding not just like take a thing that exists and do it on a computer, but and I think a huge amount of software over the years has been take a thing that exists and do it on a computer, right? But it seems like the stuff that is really transformative is the stuff that is like actually like a net new capability

• 36:41David Pierce?

  that you have because you are doing this thing on a computer.

• 36:44Speaker 04

  Yes, that it activities that kind of render the power of computation in a way that is very different from what we do in a in a physical setting.

• 36:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I think that's really interesting. And it makes me wonder, one of the sort of unknowable hypotheticals I kept coming back to over the course of this is like if all of these things had just sort of stayed resolutely complex. And it's like, no, you have to learn how to speak computer language in order to use a computer, but we're going to add more and more of these cool capabilities. Like if the print shop had been just as cool as it was and much harder to use, would everyone have eventually come around and would there been have been like two generations earlier that would have learned to code as a result? And obviously unknowable, but it's a really different future of it that like we sort of computers learn to be human much faster than we learned how to speak computer.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:31David Pierce?

  And I wonder what would have happened if we had gone the other way.

• 37:34Speaker 04

  I mean, I think that what you would need is a society that is actually interested in being structured in that way, right? Like, as a, as like a step one, what are the incentives and structures that are going to support people learning how to be highly advanced in computer use when we have problems with like literacy rates, right?

• 37:55David Pierce?

  For sure.

• 37:56Speaker 04

  And so it really becomes a, a question of like, where do you want, what are our social, like the, I think the social problem is the thing that's harder to imagine. Sometimes I encounter students in like a computing engineering degree or something who have this fantasy of like, if we all just learned how to program. And I'm like, you mean if we lived in a fundamentally different society? Right? Like this idea that somehow that is supposed to be a thing that I as a person want, or will teach myself, free from a society that's going to make or provide an adequate amount of scaffolding for that, is a problematic fantasy ambassador, one that really centers the idea that we think that these technologies do things on their own, which they so resolutely do not.

• 38:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, I think that's, I think that's absolutely right. Okay, one more thing, and then I'm gonna let you go here. You talk a bunch about this idea of a personal computer, and I get the sense you sort of hate the phrase personal computer. You like, you spend most of the time in the book calling it a microcomputer, which I think for a bunch of technical reasons is totally fair. But you kind of at the beginning and end reckon with, like, what is a personal computer? And I think, right now, that question is more interesting than ever, right? We're using platforms we don't control. We have apps that can be pulled from our devices at any time. The content I stream doesn't belong to me. The content I buy often doesn't belong to me. Amazon can just pull books off my Kindle. I can't open up my computer without voiding the warranty. All this stuff, and it feels like our devices are, we still call them personal computers, but they feel less personal than ever. So

• 39:20David Pierce?

  I both wonder, A, if it feels that way to you, and B, kind of as you've spent all this time, how do you define a personal computer as the, have this, like, in the 1977 definition, or even in 2023?

• 39:32Speaker 04

  Historians always think of language as a moving target, right? Like, there's nothing that personal computer is, aside from the assembly of what most people think it is at a given moment in time. And we still use, I think that the target has moved with personal computing precisely for all these reasons that you're talking about. And many of these things I kind of hedge and hint at, or sometimes very directly say in the book about the sort of long-tail consequences of proprietary platforms of these mega corporations that just have basically leveraged these technical systems to own more and more and more of our creativity, of our interaction, of our communication and our collaboration with other people, right?

• 40:16Speaker 04

  And so the thing that is, you know, when my students, if I were to ask my students, what makes your computer personal? They would probably say that it's the interface for interacting with their lives, right? Like, they would think of probably their smartphone as a personal computer. It has all their images, it has all their social networks, it has all their chat, it has all their Gmail. They do, they watch TV on it, they play games on it. That's an extremely personal object. It contains all of their data. It is also a funnel for taking that data and sending it all over the place, right? To all sorts of places that, or basically that data, you know, in many cases, may not even be on the phone at all, right? It's just a tap into a server, God knows where.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  And so, you know, and perhaps Apple is, you know, one of the most guilty culprits here in that they have secured this idea that what makes computing personal is the reduction of the computer itself to an assembly of like files or interactions that are about our lives, rather than about the way that we maybe relate or even understand. How these objects, devices, technologies work?

• 41:30David Pierce?

  Would it be better if we understood it better? I mean, this goes back to the like, we should all learn how to code thing. And I think to some extent, this is like an intractable problem, right? If you want to set up your own email server in such a way that you have all of your emails on your own server and no one else can touch them, you can, but nobody does because it's a pain in the ass and I can just sign up for Gmail and it does a bunch of things that my own email server couldn't. And so, part of me wonders if we've just deliberately chosen convenience and power over that kind of like personality and ownership. But part of me also thinks that this next decade of technology is going to be about reckoning with that decision and whether we can pull some of it back. And I think, I don't know, I just, I saw so much of the like Steve Wozniak in the 70s

• 42:13David Pierce?

  ethos in the people I talked to about like the Fediverse and the open web and this idea about like, what if you had things that were yours again? That like actually, truly yours? And it does, it seems like we're about to reckon with kind of that, you know, 45 year history in a big way going forward. It's gonna be fascinating.

• 42:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think the "we" is doing a lot of work here, right? You know, we just want to talk about like you and me or people who, we are structurally disincentivized or actually structurally incapacitated from negotiating around these systems, except at great financial, personal, time cost, right? And that is to the advantage of corporations that want to make these interactions seamless, smooth, easy. I mean, the Apple II is a funny case, right? That is a computer that anyone who used it would have said that it was one of the easiest to use, right? Even though, but it gave you total access to, um, to the system itself.

• 43:15Speaker 04

  The sort of incremental, how do I quite want to say it? Is that I do, I really reject the proposition that this is a consumer failing or that somehow we need to like vote with our dollars or something, something like that, right? Like, I think that really underserves the tremendous power and authority that these corporations have, right?

• 43:37Speaker 04

  And the and the kind of levels of accountability that that need to be put in place that often we don't because we're so busy thinking that the market is a transparent reflection of people's desires. Right. You know, as for the history component of it, I do think in general, historical literacy is bad.

• 43:58David Pierce?

  Agreed.

• 43:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, I just started teaching a very large 240 person lecture class in my own university. It's a history of media and communication. And I dedicate about half the semester to the 20th century forward. And for most of these students, no one has ever explained to them how a computer works, what it is. You know, their technical literacy is extremely poor because there has been no concerted educational effort to try to make it accessible to them. And because the people who really control a lot of the cycles of conversation about computer history are people who either want to have a nostalgic celebration about it, or are the kind of same financial actors who got us into this problem to begin with. And so if there's something my book is really trying to do,

• 44:44Speaker 04

  it's make this conversation relevant to people who maybe don't care about computers or don't see them as formative to their identity. And then if we could just kind of wrench open our understanding of what actually happened beyond this sort of, you know, nostalgic masturbatory festival we all seem to keep wanting to be having about person about the history of computing, that, you know, maybe there's a net gain there.

• 45:07David Pierce?

  Yeah, I love that. All right. Well, I could talk to you about this for hours, but I should let you go. This was incredibly fun. Thank you so much for doing this with me.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  David, this was a total pleasure. Thank you so much for this interview.

• 45:18David Pierce?

  All right, we need to take a break and then we're going to talk about another much less successful, but maybe just as interesting, Apple Computer. We'll be right back.

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• 47:01David Pierce?

  Welcome back. So 2023 is the 40th anniversary of a computer you may have heard of called the Apple Lisa. If you haven't heard of it, that's fine. In the grand legacy of Apple, it tends to be kind of overlooked, which is actually exactly why we're going to talk about it today. A few of the folks on The Verge's video team have spent the last few months working on a documentary about the Lisa. What it was, why it flopped, and why everyone remembers the Macintosh, which came out a year after the Lisa, so much more fondly. It's a weird story, and rather than spoil it for you, I just grabbed Will Poor, The Verge's lead video producer, to tell me all about it.

• 47:40David Pierce?

  Hi Will.

• 47:41Speaker 05

  Hello.

• 47:42David Pierce?

  I feel like I have been hearing about this mysterious Apple story you've been working on for several decades now.

• 47:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's been a long time.

• 47:49David Pierce?

  What was the occasion for this? I actually don't think I know the beginning of this story. The first thing I heard was just like, oh yeah, Will's going to Utah to see a dump. I was like, alright.

• 47:58Speaker 05

  That's kind of the extent of it. We had gotten this tip via the Computer History Museum about the Apple Lisa's 40th anniversary was this year. And we were interested in finding fun stories around that anniversary. And someone had, I think someone there had given us a tip that there are a number of Apple Lisa computers buried somewhere in Utah. And they were like, we heard that. Go see if there's anything to that. And we poked around online and we found this one article. It's not even an actual article hosted on a newspaper website. It was like the text of an article from 1989 that was copied and pasted onto this defunct tech blog type website.

• 48:41Speaker 05

  It was all very, very sketchy, but this article had the basics of this weird thing that had happened wherein in 1989, there were like 2,700 Lisa computers that were dumped unceremoniously in this landfill in Logan, Utah. And there was a used computer dealer who was involved. And there was this sort of strange business arrangement that he had with Apple. And there was talk of a tax write-off and the dealer was sad.

• 49:10David Pierce?

  This feels like the first act of a really great true crime documentary.

• 49:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, that's what kind of we were like, maybe this is exactly what that is. So we started to look into it. So what really happened that day? To get answers, we went back 40 years. Get a shovel and start digging. To find the people who brought Lisa to life.

• 49:29Speaker 06

  Well, it was really exciting. This was the new foundation, the new frontier.

• 49:33Speaker 05

  To figure out why it really flopped. There definitely was an element of revenge. And to understand why Apple would bury its own past, literally.

• 49:43David Pierce?

  So I want you to tell me the story, but I realized in preparing for this that I don't really know anything about the Lisa. I know it was a computer. I know it didn't really do much.

• 49:52Speaker 05

  I mean, it did a lot in 1983.

• 49:55David Pierce?

  That's fair, but it wasn't like in the history of like vaunted Apple devices. I don't feel like anybody talks about the Lisa. Like, what was this thing? Why does nobody talk about it?

• 50:03Speaker 05

  So I didn't, I mean, that's about as much as I knew about it myself until I started to look into it. And people still talk about it today insofar as it was this milestone thing for Apple. It came out in 1983, a year before the Macintosh comes out.

• 50:20Speaker 07

  Presenting Lisa, a 16-bit dual-disk drive personal office system from Apple Computer, the next revolution in computing.

• 50:30Speaker 05

  The Apple Lisa was really the first big mass-market computer to introduce all of these new ideas for personal computing to the masses. So it's the super big deal, but then a year later, the Macintosh comes out, and for a lot of reasons that we can get into, that's the one that succeeds. And the Macintosh goes on and, you know, is the Macintosh that changed everything for personal computing, whereas the Lisa just kind of went away. And then the burial is just sort of like the most extreme version of "just went away." It's sort of in keeping with this feeling that like the Mac won and the Lisa is just in a dump in Utah.

• 51:09David Pierce?

  So, and of course, as you would, you, in order to figure out what happened, you went to a random tiny town in Utah, like people do to find all good stories about the history of technology.

• 51:18Speaker 05

  Well, that was the whole point. Yeah, we're like, you gotta go to the dump. So if we just take this road up and around, when we hit that bend, we'll be kind of right in the middle of where they were. And so if we park near that bend and then just walk... Out and up. We'll be there somewhere. 130 years of garbage, so yeah. But we got there and it was like, I don't know, a reality hit. We like walked up this mountain of decades of garbage. We talked to this guy that was driving a dump truck around and he was like, oh yeah, 1989, that's like 50 feet down.

• 51:53David Pierce?

  Oh, wow.

• 51:54Speaker 05

  And it's December, it's snowing, it's the place is completely desolate and we're like, oh, there's no earthly clue that we're actually going to dig these things up. And we later found out after talking to a bunch of the people who were there, that the folks at the landfill went out of their way to run all the computers over with the dump trucks before they buried them to like make sure they were dead.

• 52:15David Pierce?

  Oh, wow.

• 52:15Speaker 05

  Which may have been an instruction given to them by Apple, depending on that that's like a thing that we don't know, but like those computers are dead.

• 52:24David Pierce?

  I have so many questions about why a company would choose to do that. But I think back up a little bit in the story because I think in the documentary, there's this guy Bob Cook, who becomes a sort of main character. And it seems like a lot of the like a surprising amount of the story of the Lisa runs through him. Tell me about him.

• 52:39Speaker 05

  Yes, so he is sort of the other half of the Lisa story. There's a whole half of the Lisa story that is well documented, well understood. It's about the development and the launch of this thing. Steve Jobs's role in leading the development and kind of sabotaging it and then walking away from it, all this stuff. So all of that happens, the Lisa launches anyway. It's $10,000, its hardware is a little flaky. It's aimed at the business market and Apple's not great at dealing with the business market. IBM's kind of like already got the market cornered there. So Apple cans the Lisa in 1985. This story picks up because while that's all happening, there's this guy in Utah, Bob Cook.

• 53:22Speaker 08

  I was reading in the computer magazines and there was an advertisement that said, become an Apple dealer. Fill in this form and mail it in. And I did that.

• 53:30Speaker 05

  He was an Apple reseller in the late 70s, early 80s. He was struggling with that, but he kind of happened onto this idea of selling older discontinued computers. And this was right around the time that there were older discontinued personal computers because personal computers were so new. But there was this Apple computer, the Apple III, that was a flop for Apple. It was supposed to be the successor to the Apple II, but it was expensive and people didn't really buy it.

• 53:58David Pierce?

  Yeah, another one nobody really talks about in the history of Apple.

• 54:00Speaker 05

  Right, exactly. And, and we're not going to really talk about it, but there were a bunch of leftover Apple IIs at Apple HQ that this guy Bob found out about. And he kind of whined them and dined them over a period of time and eventually convinced them to just sell him all of their old Apple IIs that they didn't totally know what to do with. And so created this business for himself, selling kind of outdated, failed Apple hardware.

• 54:27Speaker 08

  There was a lot of people that were selling brand new equipment. Computers are supposed to be leading edge. Nobody was thinking about selling the trailing edge of high technology.

• 54:37David Pierce?

  I kind of love that.

• 54:38Speaker 05

  Yeah. And that's like a thing we all think about now, now that computers are expensive and they last and we are cheap and we want to, you know, save a little bit of money. But that just wasn't a thing as much back then. So he makes this, he does this deal with the Apple III and it goes really well. And then according to him, Apple called him after this Apple III deal and said, can you just, can we just do this all again with the leases? Because the Lisa had just flopped and it was the same story all over again. Apple didn't know what to do with all of its unsold leases. So they put them all in a truck and shipped them off to Utah. So that's how like the story of Lisa takes this turn to northern Utah out of nowhere.

• 55:18David Pierce?

  So Apple has now completely moved on, but there's people in Utah who are buying and using leases.

• 55:26Speaker 05

  There's people all over the country who are now buying and using leases because this guy Bob operated a mail order business. He had 800 phone lines and mailers that he sent out everywhere. And so, yes, the Apple computer is off selling the Apple II line and off selling Macintoshes. And out of this one kind of warehouse in northern Utah, the Lisa is like back to life. Bob is upgrading it. He's like putting new hardware into it. He modified the system software so that it would work more like a Macintosh Plus. It could actually run the most, the latest version of Mac OS. So it sort of, the leases actually kind of function like Macintoshes and sold them at a super steep discount. So they were

• 56:09Speaker 05

  competitive with the Macintoshes that Apple was offering, but they had this nice big screen like the Lisa had. It was, there was a whole separate product line, basically.

• 56:19David Pierce?

  Right. Well, that's super fascinating because my, my initial impression from the way you described it was that it was, he was running something like sort of a second hand store, right? Where it's like, it's not the best thing, but it's cheaper. But what you're describing is actually like somebody sort of taking and turning Apple products and being like, actually, I can maybe do this better and more usefully than Apple is doing. Like, did this work? Like, was this, was this like a, like a genuinely successful business?

• 56:41Speaker 05

  It was for him. You know, it's like compared to Apple, obviously, no. But like, he had really hit on something. He, he called these things the Lisa professional because he put so much time and energy into the hardware and the software. He added this whole kind of branding campaign and moved a bunch of them. Yeah, his, his business grew. He was selling these computers all over the country. His customers loved him. He was helping to support the existing Lisa user base through repairs and replacement parts and things like that. And Apple notably, you know, one of the reasons he says that they really liked the deal is because they kind of washed their hands of the entire product line. They, with the Apple III and the Lisa both, they would just send tech support calls directly to

• 57:26Speaker 05

  him.

• 57:27David Pierce?

  Oh, wow.

• 57:27Speaker 05

  For either of those models. So like, he, he sort of became this-

• 57:31David Pierce?

  He's like a de facto Apple executive.

• 57:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just a like, you scratch my back, I scratch yours. Apple's getting rid of these computers that they are not good at selling, one way or the other, and he is making them marketable and finding a, a market for them that Apple never did.

• 57:46Speaker 09

  Sun generated $4 million last year and drew the attention of Newsweek magazine. And after the article hit the streets, sales skyrocketed.

• 57:54Speaker 08

  There was a lot of people that saw the Newsweek article. I mean, that was huge.

• 57:58David Pierce?

  This sounds like a win-win. Everybody should be happy, but at some point, this story has to go horribly wrong, right?

• 58:04Speaker 05

  Well, yes, at some point, like, all roads lead to the landfill.

• 58:08David Pierce?

  We know the end of this story, which is the dump.

• 58:10Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 58:11David Pierce?

  Act three has got to be a doozy here.

• 58:13Speaker 05

  I mean, honestly, it's super abrupt. What happened caught Bob by surprise. He says he just got a call one day. He says that Apple loved him for what he was doing, and then one day got this call from Apple lawyers that said, "Hey, we're coming to get the computers."

• 58:29Speaker 08

  He said, "We've decided that we want to exercise our clause in the contract to pick up the computers that we own."

• 58:36Speaker 05

  An important detail is that he had most of these on consignment.

• 58:39David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 58:40Speaker 05

  There was a clause in their contract that said, "We can just come pick these up at some point." And so they did. There were a bunch of, as he describes them, very large men showed up.

• 58:53Speaker 08

  They were ex-Marines. They're all six foot six, you know? And they're just these muscle men. They started loading up trucks.

• 59:02Speaker 05

  He thought they were headed back to Cupertino, but he says he got in the car and followed them and ended up at the landfill in town.

• 59:09David Pierce?

  Wait, he just got in the car and he was like, "I'm going wherever these computers are going. Let's see what happens."

• 59:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, this was, I mean, this was like, he really banked his whole business on these computers.

• 59:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:19Speaker 05

  So when Apple threw this curveball, yeah, he says he was very, very invested in understanding what was going on.

• 59:26David Pierce?

  You can just picture the moment where they're driving down the street and it's like the highway is to the left and the dump is to the right. And he's like, he puts on his left signal to turn, and instead the truck goes to the right, and he's like, "What is happening?"

• 59:36Speaker 05

  And this is, I mean, like, with a little bit more budget, like, these are the reenactments that we really needed to have done.

• 59:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, this is an animated series waiting to happen here, man. I'm just telling you.

• 59:46Speaker 05

  I know, I know.

• 59:47David Pierce?

  Okay, but not only did they then take these computers to the dump for ostensibly no reason, but they like beat them to death, it sounds like.

• 59:55Speaker 05

  They were just kind of mean about it. And this is the, this is like kind of one of the central mysteries of this story because they told the reporter who wrote this article that it was this business decision. They didn't want to be on the hook for spare parts any longer through Bob or anyone else. They could probably claim a tax write-off for the inventory that they were destroying. And they were just like, yep, that's, that's what we're doing. But the, the weird thing about it is that it just all seemed sketchier than that. Bob and we, we found the reporter and the photo editor. The photo editor and Bob both described the people who showed up to take these computers to the dump as, one of them called them toughies.

• 1:00:36Speaker 10

  It seemed like the mob had come to town, you know? So it was, it was a very strange day.

• 1:00:42Speaker 05

  They were very intimidating. They were big guys who were, seemed like they were charged with keeping people from following the action.

• 1:00:51David Pierce?

  So this is not like Apple's accounting department coming for a tax write-off?

• 1:00:55Speaker 05

  No, it is not. Yeah, it's, it's very unclear who these people were, other that they were affiliated with Apple and they were trying reasonably hard to prevent anyone from watching what they were doing. So the newspaper got tipped off to this from the landfill. We probably wouldn't know anything about this, except that the landfill tipped off the newspaper.

• 1:01:14David Pierce?

  Can you imagine getting that tip? Like, we're, we're both journalists. Can you imagine getting a tip from a landfill? You gotta come see what's being dumped here.

• 1:01:21Speaker 05

  I mean, I dream about that every day.

• 1:01:24David Pierce?

  That is true. There's no downside to that story.

• 1:01:26Speaker 05

  No, you just, you just wait at your phone for a call like that. But yeah, so they show up and they stand their ground and they, they get the story, but they watch as these dump truck operators run these computers over with the dump trucks and then drop them in a hole in the ground and bury them. So, you know, if it was a tax thing, what's that all about?

• 1:01:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:46Speaker 05

  It's all just very, very fishy feeling.

• 1:01:50David Pierce?

  Did you get any kind of information from Apple, by the way? Like, did you, did you ask them what they think about all this? Okay.

• 1:01:55Speaker 05

  We asked very nicely and they said, quote, "We are declining to participate." They just, they just like gave us a wave.

• 1:02:02David Pierce?

  Fair enough.

• 1:02:03Speaker 05

  And that was that. We were praying that they would give us something because after 30-plus years, it's, we had enough trouble nailing down the, just the particulars of what actually happened, let alone the like, "But why did you really do that? And why were you so weird about it?"

• 1:02:19David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, that's one of the things that I found myself wondering is like, is this, is this like an urban legend in Logan now? Like, people go to diners and everybody has a theory about what was going on? Because they're really, at least what you described, there's basically like, this one guy and this one primary document. And kind of, other than that, we have essentially no information. I can just imagine this being the kind of thing, especially in a town like Logan, Utah, where everyone in town would have a theory about what happened here. And somebody would have been like, "I think I saw Steve Jobs that day." Like, he was there, he did it himself. Is it kind of a myth in that story in that town now?

• 1:02:51Speaker 05

  There is surprisingly little of that there. And I suspect it is because it just wasn't a big deal when it happened.

• 1:02:58David Pierce?

  That's fair.

• 1:02:58Speaker 05

  There was that one article, we found a letter to the editor about a week later in the same paper complaining, like, "Why didn't these computers go to the schools?" Like, "The schools need computers. Why'd you destroy them?" Like, that was sort of the extent of the response to it. And I think everyone just kind of shrugged and moved on with their lives.

• 1:03:15David Pierce?

  If I were to just wildly prognosticate based on nothing except the story that you've told me.

• 1:03:20Speaker 05

  Yes, I love it.

• 1:03:21David Pierce?

  What I would think is that this is pure vindictiveness from Steve Jobs. That not only does Steve Jobs want to kill the Lisa with the Macintosh, he wants to stamp it out of history, to literally like, like, I wouldn't be surprised if he was at the landfill that day, like personally driving a stake through the heart of the Lisa, as if to say, like, "I won. The Macintosh won. I am Steve Jobs." And as far as I understand, this would not have been out of character for Steve Jobs in the 80s to go fly to Utah and do that.

• 1:03:50Speaker 05

  Not in the slightest.

• 1:03:52David Pierce?

  So, do you think that sort of that corporate intrigue fueled any of this? Again, like, we don't know it's an old story, but I have a hard time not seeing those two things as very connected to one another.

• 1:04:03Speaker 05

  Well, so I like, that is the most natural thing in the world to think and and Bob, the computer reseller, like, that's always been at the forefront of his mind. He like feels personally persecuted by Steve Jobs.

• 1:04:14David Pierce?

  So he's like, Steve came for the last of these.

• 1:04:17Speaker 05

  Exactly. The funny thing is that Steve Jobs had left the company in 1985. This all happened in 1989.

• 1:04:24David Pierce?

  Oh, that's right.

• 1:04:25Speaker 05

  Steve Jobs, he was running next. He had his own computer company. He was literally just like doing, so he was not officially anywhere near the decision-making process for any of this stuff. So there's, and we found no evidence that he was pulling the strings from afar or anything like that.

• 1:04:42David Pierce?

  It's a shame. That really puts a damper on my theory.

• 1:04:44Speaker 05

  Well, here's what I can tell you is that we talked to a guy named Bruce Daniels, who was a manager on the Lisa team and was around for a lot of the the rise and fall of Steve in the 80s. And one thing he told us was that Steve had so poisoned the well at Apple against the Lisa, had spent so much time badmouthing the Lisa and preventing anyone from saying anything good about the Lisa, that he was like, that probably lasted.

• 1:05:14Speaker 06

  Well, certainly whilst Steve was there, I mean, already he was saying, you know, the Lisa was terrible and horrible and not worth it. And so it couldn't help but kind of permeate the thinking around there. I mean, if I were there, I would, just for your own job security, you wouldn't say anything good about the Lisa. And you'd say good things about the Mac and the wonderful leadership the Mac Group had.

• 1:05:36David Pierce?

  And also, I'm assuming like publicly, this thing was something you you would rather have not in existence, even made by a retailer, like, like, Apple in 1989, if I have my timeline right, is not doing great. Like, the Macintosh is pretty good, it's pretty successful, but Apple is still in pretty tough straits as a company.

• 1:05:55Speaker 05

  You're absolutely right. They're selling good computers. They're selling expensive computers, and they're not selling very many of them. So they're building this reputation for themselves of being this fancy niche computer business, and they're under a ton of pressure to release cheaper computers to compete with IBM compatibles and just claw back some of the market share that they'd lost over the course of the 80s. And so you can see how a super expensive, business-oriented, flopped computer that just won't go away could feel like a thing that they might want to make go away once and for all. It's at a small scale. It's just this one reseller. But he's punching above his weight. This guy is making the rounds at Macworld Expos.

• 1:06:40Speaker 05

  He got written up in Newsweek. He was sort of the face of this trailing-edge business.

• 1:06:48David Pierce?

  Oh, man. See, that actually makes a lot of sense, because I can absolutely see, if I'm John Sculley, the CEO of Apple, and I'm looking at this and it's saying, "Apple couldn't make the Lisa any good, but this dude in Utah can."

• 1:06:58Speaker 05

  But this guy did. Yeah, absolutely. And there's just article after article in magazines, these trade publications, just like, "The Lisa's second shot. The Lisa rides again." There's just all of this, like, "Lisa's back, everybody," which I can't imagine is useful at Apple.

• 1:07:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:15Speaker 05

  So again, 100% speculation. Apple was not super forthcoming. We had a really hard time finding anyone who was at Apple at that time and was in any of the rooms where this kind of thing was discussed. But it all kind of lines up in that way.

• 1:07:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, so you didn't find the... How many thousands of Lisas was it again?

• 1:07:36Speaker 05

  About 2,700 of them.

• 1:07:38David Pierce?

  Okay, so you didn't find the 2,700. How close do you think you got? Like, you stood in the landfill. Could you feel the vibes of the 2,700 Lisas? Like, did they call to you?

• 1:07:47Speaker 05

  I mean, there were ghosts. There were... Also, it was cold and windy, and it just stinky. It had a vibe about a place. So we were ready to go. I don't know if that was the anguished cries of the Lisas driving us away, but it was not a super pleasant environment.

• 1:08:03David Pierce?

  All the slow processors saying, "Get out of here."

• 1:08:07Speaker 05

  But it did feel like we at least proved out the basics of the story, which does have this sort of like tech urban legend kind of feel to it. We, we went to the Utah State Archives and like found the actual microfilm print of the article to prove that it like was actually an article and not this like, you know, pile of text on this blog. And they actually had scans of, of all the photos that the photographer took that day. So we got to just like click through photo after photo of just like dumpster bulldozer. And there's like this one photo of a, just a bulldozer and a keyboard, just like a sad keyboard in the garbage with a like bulldozer coming up over it.

• 1:08:48David Pierce?

  It feels like an album cover for like a really sad piano band.

• 1:08:50Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:08:51David Pierce?

  Yeah. Like a Ben Folds Five album, just that.

• 1:08:54Speaker 05

  Ballad of the Lisa.

• 1:08:55David Pierce?

  Yeah. I love that. So what, what do you take away about this as like a story about Apple? Cause it's a really interesting time because Apple is obviously this like untouchably ascendant company right now. But it's also a really funny moment because everybody thinks they're about to launch a headset that is also potentially, we're back in this kind of like thing before the thing moment where it's like, is this going to be when Apple like reinvents the future? Or is this going to be the dumb disastrous, too expensive thing before somebody actually figures this out? So to some extent, like history is repeating itself a bit, but also Apple is like this untouchably gigantic company that feels dominant in a way that it wasn't obviously in the eighties. And the whole idea of Apple like working with an outside dude to make their computers

• 1:09:38David Pierce?

  better is so like hilariously impossible at this point. But like, what do you take away as a, as a person who thinks about Apple as a company now? What'd you learn?

• 1:09:47Speaker 05

  I've been thinking about the, you know, the pending release of this headset too. Not least of which because I just realized that the, this documentary is about the Lisa is going to come out. And then like a week later, it's going to be completely buried by the news of whatever Apple releases. And like, that's so perfect for this story about the Lisa, that it's going to have this like very brief window of play. And then it's just going to be buried under this avalanche of Apple news.

• 1:10:12David Pierce?

  And then 30 years later, somebody will find it and they'll be like, gosh, remember in 2023 when the Verge made that documentary?

• 1:10:18Speaker 05

  And then the whole cycle will start anew and someone will come find me and I'll be like, I was there. But yeah, I think you kind of hit it because I also have this feeling about Apple that they are completely unstoppable, untouchable, and I feel just like a plaything of Apple's as their customer. And this story was really interesting to dig into because it wasn't always like that. It's just like this completely different portrait of this company that does not have its shit figured out, that is willing to work with whoever comes calling with an interesting idea that can make these colossal mistakes and just try something else. It

• 1:11:01Speaker 05

  just sort of brings them down to earth a little bit. And I think that's valuable, and it's especially valuable as they and whoever knows else is going to take this next leap to try to like figure out what comes next after the smartphone. And like the story beats of this story, which just feel quaint and from a very different time, could be super relevant again. And it could be, you know, history could absolutely repeat itself. And so I think in this era of huge infallible tech companies, that's always a good reminder because nothing lasts.

• 1:11:37David Pierce?

  It kind of makes me think about the like, the vanishing thinness of the line between getting it right and not getting it right. And it's like the alternate history where the Lisa was the one that worked and like the computer in front of me is a Lisa Book Air instead of a MacBook Air is like not crazy. And there's a handful of what seems like relatively minor and often not product related things that made one work and not the other.

• 1:12:01Speaker 05

  Absolutely. And it's seeing the two of them side by side really drives that home. People really like honestly, seriously talk about one of the reasons the Macintosh was more successful than the Lisa was that it's just cuter. Like, people actually say that, you know, like designers of these computers say that. They're like, well, yeah. Mac was just kind of cuter and people kind of went, oh, Mac. And like, that's kind of all you have to go off of when you're looking at the two computers side by side is that Lisa was like a little bit bigger and bulkier and like looked like it belonged in an office to do important office things. And the Mac is like jazz. And it's like, that's really stupid that they're so similar, but there is something to it somehow.

• 1:12:43David Pierce?

  Totally, yeah. The line between changing the world and being in a dump is always smaller than you think. How's that for a life lesson right there?

• 1:12:49Speaker 05

  Just everyone remember that. Just carry that one around with you.

• 1:12:53David Pierce?

  All right, well, the doc is awesome. Everybody should go watch it. We'll link it in the show notes. It's on the verge.com. Congrats on being done with this. The story's super fun. I'm really glad you got to go to a dump in Utah and figure it all out.

• 1:13:03Speaker 05

  Thank you, thank you. Thanks for chatting about it.

• 1:13:06David Pierce?

  We'll be right back.

• 1:13:23Speaker 11

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• 1:13:53Speaker 12

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• 1:14:37David Pierce?

  All right. Before we go, we have a question from the Vergecast hotline. We're going to start answering one of these every week because we just get too many fun ones to save them all up and do an episode every once in a while. Sometimes I'll have an answer, sometimes I'll grab someone else who knows better. Let's just hear the first one and we'll find out.

• 1:14:54Speaker 13

  Hey Verge, this is Josh from Texas. I have a question about music streaming services. And why is there not an easier way to switch to other streaming services? It kind of seems like we're in a world where companies are providing tools to help you switch your phone or your desktop operating systems, or even trying to make things work together, kind of like what's happening with Matter. But it seems like on the music streaming services side, it's like none of the providers are interested in solving this problem. And we're just kind of stuck with third-party services. So my questions are, are any of these third-party services good to switch? And also, why are these companies not giving us the tools to help us get to their platform? Y'all are the best. I love the show. Thanks.

• 1:15:39David Pierce?

  All right, I can actually answer this one. I just did this recently. This is perfect. The first thing that I should mention is that these services have absolutely no incentive to work together. Josh mentioned the smart home thing, and actually, all those companies have a huge incentive to work together, because the easier your smart home is, the more likely you are to use more smart home stuff. It's the exact opposite with music services. It's so similar from one music service to the next, what content you actually have access to, that switching is too easy for all of these companies. If they made it easy to switch, the price would go down. Everybody would have to build new features, because it's all just a music library. None of these companies want to make it easy for you to switch, because they don't really have any moats otherwise.

• 1:16:21David Pierce?

  That said, there are some tools that make it easier. I used one recently called Soundies, S-O-U-N-D-I-I-Z. And it worked surprisingly well. I ended up paying five bucks for a month of Pro, but then I basically was able to just check next to all of my Spotify playlists and kind of all at once create identical playlists on YouTube Music. That's all it moved. It can't really grab every other part of what's going on inside of my Spotify, but at least I had all of my playlists. That was pretty good. There are also tools like Free Your Music, Song Shift, and Tune My Music that have their own spin on kind of that same idea. We actually have a good how-to story that I will link in the show notes on how to switch between a bunch of different music services. None of them are

• 1:17:04David Pierce?

  perfect, but you can do pretty well. The downside is you can't really teach a new system to know you like the old one does. You can't transfer your listening history, the algorithms don't transfer. So I now have, I don't know, more than a decade of Spotify listening, and the service just knows me really well. And you are going to have a very real cold start problem, no matter what you do with a new service. It would be great if it was better and you could just move between the music services as you want to, but I wouldn't hold your breath. All right, that's it for The Vergecast today. Thanks to everyone who came on the show, and thank you so much for listening. There's a whole lot more from this conversation at theverge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes to Lian's book and to the doc, but just go to theverge.com. It's a cool website. And like I said, we are going to have

• 1:17:47David Pierce?

  an awful lot of Apple coverage through WWDC and all of next week. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, predictions for WWDC, or anything else on your mind, you can always email us at [email protected], or call the hotline 866-VERGE11. Like I said, we're going to answer a question on this show every week, and we're probably going to do a hotline episode pretty soon. So keep them coming. This show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge Production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about, well, probably WWDC, plus all of the other tech news going on this week. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

• 1:18:34Speaker 11

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.

• 1:19:05Speaker 14

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