**The Vergecast**

In this episode of The Vergecast, we're going to dive into some interesting conversations about technology and tech trends.

**Life Lesson Right Because Just Everyone Remember That...**

Well, the doc is awesome everybody should go watch it. We'll link it in the show notes, it's oniverse.com. Congrats on being done with this, the story is super fun I'm really glad you got to go to a dump in Utah and figure it all out. Thank you, thank you, thanks for chatting about it. We'll be right back.

**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.

Hey, Verge, this is Josh from Texas. I have a question about music streaming services and why isn't there 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. My questions are: are any of these third-party services good to switch to? Also, why aren't these companies not giving us the tools to help us get to their platform?

**A Response from Liam James Brook**

I can actually answer this one. Just did this recently, and 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 good reason otherwise.

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 works 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 it once create identical playlists on YouTube music. That's all it moved; 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 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, and 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. 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 music services as you want to but I wouldn't hold your breath.

**That's It for Today**

Thanks to everyone who came on the show and thanks to all our listeners out there. There's a whole lot more from this conversation at The Verge.com; we'll put some links in the show notes to Leanne's book, and to The Doc. Just go to The Verge.com; it's cool website.

We are going to have 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 vergecast@theverge.com or call the hotline 866-verge11. We're probably gonna do a hotline episode pretty soon so keep them coming.

This show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James Brook. Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production, and part of the VOX media podcast Network. Niliz Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about well probably WWDC.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enforeign cast 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 charging 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 talk about WWDC we're gonna 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 Mac OS weed 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 foreign welcome back the first Apple computer I want to talk about today is the Apple 2 which Apple introduced back in 1977. 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 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 Leon nuni just wrote a whole book about why I'm Lane nooney I'm an assistant professor of media Industries in the department of media culture and communication at New York University Lane's book is called the Apple 2 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 got a lot of sheets to talk about let's just get into it let's just kind of lay the land a little bit when the 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 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 de-industrialization 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 oil shocks mass unemployment sound familiar uh there was it was a real kind of moment where 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 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 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 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 a 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 a nerd of nerdums uh 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 like why would anyone want a computer in their home but there were a set of companies quite a wide-ranging set of companies that thought there might be Economic Opportunity in this moment and so in 1977 there's both the I think technical all 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 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 and but the idea that basically three different approaches to functionally the same thing landed at basically exactly the same time it's just crazy to me like was it was that as much of like a sonic boom of a moment as it seems like to me all these years later I'm I mean if we look at something like television or radio multiple companies vying at the same time to release fundamental my friend but 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 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 that more companies than we think are gonna 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 it's like a relevant Computing company Radio Shack is a nostalgic icon only apple right kind of survives from that moment yeah so is that 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 the Radio Shack story which is probably much less complicated over time it like did very well and then it tied really fast was it the sort of long successful history of Apple that was what Drew you to like let's let's look at the Apple II in particular that's 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 right yeah you'd have to have like two chapters just about like different ideas about keyboards if you wanted to yeah it could be a lot yeah exactly right you make yourself accountable to a lot of things I'm trying to get tennis book out like it can't it can't be all of my hopes and dreams right yeah yeah but the Apple 2 it was such an interesting computer for a number of ways it wound up by 1983 having the largest amount of software released for it 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 per se 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 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 Soft talk 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 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 too it straddled a home and office divide that very few other computers could get away with 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 in 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 like if if you put yourself in you know 1976 Steve Wozniak brand 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 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 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 stuff that jobs was far more attracted to interested in had a better Vibe for feeling you know I 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 me what did he want he wanted a system that was elegant usable accessible and open and that's where the Apple II 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 yeah 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 tax tactically speaking like what about the Apple II was more open than some of its competitors like why was it that people gravitated to it in a different way absolutely yeah and everything you're saying about Apple you know if you want someone to blame that Steve Jobs right I mean there's a somewhat Infamous Clash but about the design of the Apple II 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 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 close to the metal or to be able to Hardware hack it if you want to and Wozniak brought that sensibility into the machine one of the most remarkable parts of the apple tube is 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 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 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 too and that they could really directly access these components that was extremely compelling and necessary for hobbyists and I think that's 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 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 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 yeah yeah I would say you you pick these five examples of different kinds of software that really tell the story and I think I think I'm right in saying visit calc is probably by far the best known of the of the five right undoubtedly yeah it's like the the Prototype spreadsheet software it's the one that sort of made everybody won't want to work it was like the thing yeah 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 it very controversial because it ended up being controversial in ways that are like even today unsettled and super fascinating yes so so the book's main organization is that it chose 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 the computer to something that was recognizable by consumers and to tell that story I focus on a specific case in each one until 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 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 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 quick 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 it is really that simple the concern was that if no one paid for software that if 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 sure is that people want to be paid for their labor and and that people will leave if there's not a way to self-support right but the amount of like on 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 know Bill Gates Right rather infamously blew up at the entire hobbyist Community for pirating the first software that he made which was a which was an interpreter of basic for the Altair 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 uh and it was it was quite a 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 totally where did the locksmith fight end obviously I think the 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 either of those directions yet but the the locksmith story ended right like how did it end 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 an 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 that are providing ways for people to duplicate their software that locksmith's history kind of it just the so far 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's a lot of different ways 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 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 ten dollars 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 yeah I I think there's a careful needle I'm trying to thread with the book where one of the things I'm I'm really trying to do is not give us the impression that commercial interests were an after effect or a 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 multi-million 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 in the obvious sense 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 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 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 just that kind of jet stream and it creates a very I would say self-perpetuating system where the whole project gets kind of instantaneous they rationalized among its many actors yeah what what was the guy's name who was building the like education software for his middle school class and then oh Tom Snyder 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 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 no school but wants to sell individual units of individual floppy disks to individual families because that's a better Market run 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 trans to like understand that as soon as Venture Capital appears all the incentives change all the business models change and you either get bigger 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 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 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 was basically like 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 I guess to something that 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 very brief background of of what the print shop was and I guess still is is it still around so there is like a a weird vestigial tale of that software it's owned by a different company you know the two developers kind of cast first off their ownership of it many many years ago but I I believe that you can still buy it it's fantastic print shop Deluxe 6.4 is still available for 49.99 on the broader bun website and it's like what is broderbund as a company today just like it's like that this is just an IP yeah 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 going to 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 buy a computer for their house 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 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 um dis or Punk or which 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 one of them was an employee at broader Bund at the time and had a lot of background and Graphics programming Marty Khan and David Balsam who are both in their kind of you know early late 20s 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 chop 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 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 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 the screen felt I think transformative it was a real aha moment I think for a lot of Home users 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 was this idea and to some extent 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 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 yeah I think at 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 set a yard sale and that suddenly it wasn't for like 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 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 physical 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 these software developers finding not just like take a thing that exists and do it on a computer but and 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 that you have because you are doing this thing on a computer 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 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 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 yeah and I wonder what would have happened if we had gone the other way 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 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 for sure and so it really becomes a question of like where do you want what are our social like that 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 it 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 and best of one that really centers the idea that we think that these Technologies do things on their own which they so resolutely do not 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 micro computer 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 uh all this stuff and it feels like our devices are we still call them personal computers but they feel less personal than ever so 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 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 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 I kind of hedge and hint at or sometimes very directly say in the book about the 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 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 and so you know I 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 a 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 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 if we've just deliberately chosen convenience and power over that kind of like personality and ownership but part of me also thinks 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 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 uh 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 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 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 and 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 in this country yeah you know I just started teaching a very large uh 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 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 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 that 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 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 David this was a total pleasure thank you so much for this interview 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 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 willpore the verge's lead video producer to tell me all about it I will hello I feel like I have been hearing about this like mysterious Apple Story You've Been Working on for like several decades now yeah it's been it's been a long time what was the occasion for this I actually don't think I know the beginning of this story like the first thing I heard was just like oh yeah Will's going to Utah to see a dump it's like all right 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 they were 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 like 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 it was all very very sketchy but it had this article had the basics of this weird thing that had happened wherein in 1989 there were like 2700 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 this feels like the First Act of like a really great True Crime documentary yeah I mean that's what kind of we're like maybe this is exactly what that is so we so we started to look into it so what really happened that day ticket answers we went back 40 years we had a shovel and start digging to find the people who brought Lisa to life well it was really exciting this was the New Foundation the New Frontier and to figure out why it really flopped but there definitely was an element of Revenge and to understand why Apple would bury its own past literally foreign 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 I mean it did a lot in 1983. 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 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 presenting Lisa a 16-bit dual disk drive personal office system from Apple computer the next revolution in Computing the Apple Lisa was 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 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 uh it's sort of in keeping with this feeling that like the Mac one and the Lisa is just in a dump in Utah 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 well that was the whole point yeah we're like you gotta go to the dump 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 I open up we'll be there somewhere under 30 years of garbage so yeah but we got there and it was like I don't know 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 oh wow 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 oh wow 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 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 Allah lot of like a surprising amount of the story of the Lisa runs through him tell me about him 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 ten thousand dollars it's 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 corner 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 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 and I did that he was an apple reseller in the late 70s these 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 3 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 yeah another one nobody really talks about in the history of apple right exactly and and we're not going to really talk about it but there were a bunch of leftover Apple threes at Apple HQ that this guy Bob found out about and he kind of wind them and dined them over a period of time and eventually convince them to just sell him all of their old Apple threes that they didn't totally know what to do with and so created this business for himself selling kinda outdated failed Apple Hardware there was a lot of people that were selling brand new equipment computers were supposed to be Leading Edge nobody was thinking about cell in the trailing edge of high technology you know I kind of love that 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 3 and it goes really well and then according to him apple called him after this apple 3 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 so Apple has now completely moved on but there's people in Utah who are buying and using Lisa's 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 offselling 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 would work more like a Macintosh Plus it could actually run the most the latest version of Mac OS so it sort of the lease is actually kind of function like macintosh's and sold them at a super steep discount so they were competitive with the macintoshes that Apple was offering but they had this nice big screen like the Lisa had it was there's a whole separate product line basically 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 secondhand 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 do this better and more usefully than Apple is like did this work like was this was this like a like a genuinely successful business 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 gave 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 3 and the lease of both they would just send tech support calls directly to him oh wow for either of those models so like he he sort of became this he's like a de facto Apple executive 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 market for them that Apple never did son generated four million dollars last year Andrew the attention of Newsweek magazine and after the article hit the streets sales skyrocketed there's a lot of people that saw the Newsweek article I mean that was huge this sounds like a win-win everybody should be happy but at some point this story has to go horribly wrong right well yes at some point like all roads lead to the landfill we know the end of this story which is the dump like right right act three has got to be a doozy here 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 he said we've decided that we want to exercise our claws in the contract to pick up the computers that we own an important detail is that he had most of these on consignment okay 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 uh showed up they were ex-marines they're all six foot six you know and they're just these muscle men they started loading up trucks he thought they were headed back to Cupertino but he says he got in the car and filed them and ended up at the landfill in town wait wait he just got in the car and he was like I'm going wherever these computers are going let's see what happens yeah this was I mean this was like he really banked his whole business on these computers so when Apple threw this curveball yeah he says he was very very invested in understanding what was going on you can just picture the moment where they're driving down the street and it's like the highways to the left and the dump is to the right and he's like he puts on his left signal to turn and it said truck goes to the right and he's like what is happening and and this is I mean like with a little bit more budget like these are the reenactments that we really needed to have done yeah this is an animated series waiting to happen here man I'm just telling you I know I know okay but not only do they then take these computers to the dump for ostensibly no reason but they like beat them to death it sounds like they were just kind of mean about it and this is the this is like kind of one of the central Mysteries of the 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 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 tuffies it seemed like the mob had come to town you know so it was an it was a very strange day they were very intimidating they were big guys who were seemed like they were charged with keeping people from following the action so this is not like Apple's accounting department coming for attacks right off 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 can you imagine getting that tip like we're we're both journalists can you imagine getting a tip from a landfill just being like you gotta come see what's being dumped here I mean I dream about that every day that is true there's no downside to that story 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 yeah it's all just very very fishy feeling did you get any kind of information from Apple by the way like did you did you ask me what they think about all this okay we asked very nicely and they said quote we are declining to participate they just they just like gave us a a wave fair enough 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 yeah well that's one of the things 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 describe it 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 if he was married he did it himself is it kind of a myth in that story in that town now there is surprisingly little of that there and I suspect it is because it just wasn't a big deal when it happened that's fair there's 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 if I were to just wildly prognosticate based on nothing except the story that you've told me yes I love it 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 leesa as if to say like I won the Macintosh one 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 not in the slightest 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 yeah I have a hard time not seeing those two things as very connected to one another 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 okay he like feels personally persecuted by Steve Jobs so he's like Steve came for the last of these exactly the funny thing is that Steve Jobs had left the company in 1985. this all happened in 1989. oh that's right 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 it's a shame that really puts a damper on my theory 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 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 well certainly while 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 then you'd say good things about the map and the wonderful leadership the Mac group had 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 yes timeline right is not doing great like the Macintosh is pretty good it's pretty successful but apple is still in pretty tough straights as a company 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 like fancy Niche computer business and they're under a ton of pressure to release cheaper computers to compete with IBM compatibles and just like 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 like won't go away could feel like a thing that they might want to make go away once and for all you know it's it's at a small scale it's just this one reseller but he's punching it above his weight this guy is making the rounds at Mac World Expos he's he he got written up in Newsweek he was sort of the face of the this like trailing Edge business oh man see oh okay that actually makes a lot of sense because I can absolutely see if I'm you know John Scully 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 came but this guy did yeah absolutely and there's just article after article in in magazines these trade Publications just like the 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 is useful at Apple yeah uh so again like 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 yeah that makes a lot of sense okay so you didn't find the how how many thousands of Lisa's was it again about 2700 of them okay so you didn't find the 2700 how close do you think you got like you stood in the landfill Could You Feel The Vibes of the 2700 Lisa's like did they call to you I mean there there were ghosts there were also it was like cold and windy and it just like stinky it had a Vibe about a place we were ready to go I don't know if that was the like anguished cries of the leases driving us away but it was not a super Pleasant environment all the slow processors saying get out of here yeah 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 it feels like an album cover for like a really sad piano right yeah like but Ben Folds Five album just that Ballad of the Lisa yeah so what do you take away about this as like a story about Apple because 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 80s and the whole idea of Apple like working with an outside dude to make their computers 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 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 gonna 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 that is just going to be buried under this Avalanche of Apple news and then 30 years later somebody will find it and they'll be like gosh remember in 2023 documentary 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 apples as as their customer and this story was really interesting to dig into because because it wasn't always like that it's just like this completely different portrait of this company that does not have its 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 just sort of brings them down to earth a little bit and I think that's valuable and it 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 it 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 it history could absolutely repeat itself and so I think in this era of huge infallible tech companies that's always a good reminder because because nothing lasts 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 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 Mac was just kind of cuter and people kind of went ah 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 at least it was like a little bit bigger and bulkier and like looked like it belonged in an office to do important office things and the mech is like jazz and it's like that's really stupid that they're so similar but there is something to it somehow totally yeah the line between changing the world and being in a dump is always smaller than anything how's that for a life lesson right because just everyone remember that just carry that one around with you all right well the doc is awesome everybody should go watch it we'll link it in the show notes it's oniverse.com congrats on being done with this the the story is super fun I'm really glad you got to go to a dump in Utah and figure it all out thank you thank you thanks for chatting about it we'll be right back thank you 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 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 yellow zest I love the show thanks 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 uh 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 emotes otherwise 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 works 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 it 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 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 Leanne's book and to the doc but just go to the verge.com it's cool website and like I said we are going to have 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 vergecast at theverge.com 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 gonna do a hotline episode pretty soon so keep them coming this show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James Brook minters is our editorial director of audio the vergecast is a Verge production and part of the VOX media podcast Network nili Alex and I'll be back on Friday to talk about well probably wwc plus all of the other Tech news going on this week we'll see you then rock and roll thank youforeign cast 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 charging 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 talk about WWDC we're gonna 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 Mac OS weed 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 foreign welcome back the first Apple computer I want to talk about today is the Apple 2 which Apple introduced back in 1977. 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 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 Leon nuni just wrote a whole book about why I'm Lane nooney I'm an assistant professor of media Industries in the department of media culture and communication at New York University Lane's book is called the Apple 2 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 got a lot of sheets to talk about let's just get into it let's just kind of lay the land a little bit when the 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 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 de-industrialization 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 oil shocks mass unemployment sound familiar uh there was it was a real kind of moment where 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 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 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 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 a 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 a nerd of nerdums uh 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 like why would anyone want a computer in their home but there were a set of companies quite a wide-ranging set of companies that thought there might be Economic Opportunity in this moment and so in 1977 there's both the I think technical all 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 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 and but the idea that basically three different approaches to functionally the same thing landed at basically exactly the same time it's just crazy to me like was it was that as much of like a sonic boom of a moment as it seems like to me all these years later I'm I mean if we look at something like television or radio multiple companies vying at the same time to release fundamental my friend but 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 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 that more companies than we think are gonna 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 it's like a relevant Computing company Radio Shack is a nostalgic icon only apple right kind of survives from that moment yeah so is that 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 the Radio Shack story which is probably much less complicated over time it like did very well and then it tied really fast was it the sort of long successful history of Apple that was what Drew you to like let's let's look at the Apple II in particular that's 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 right yeah you'd have to have like two chapters just about like different ideas about keyboards if you wanted to yeah it could be a lot yeah exactly right you make yourself accountable to a lot of things I'm trying to get tennis book out like it can't it can't be all of my hopes and dreams right yeah yeah but the Apple 2 it was such an interesting computer for a number of ways it wound up by 1983 having the largest amount of software released for it 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 per se 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 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 Soft talk 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 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 too it straddled a home and office divide that very few other computers could get away with 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 in 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 like if if you put yourself in you know 1976 Steve Wozniak brand 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 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 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 stuff that jobs was far more attracted to interested in had a better Vibe for feeling you know I 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 me what did he want he wanted a system that was elegant usable accessible and open and that's where the Apple II 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 yeah 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 tax tactically speaking like what about the Apple II was more open than some of its competitors like why was it that people gravitated to it in a different way absolutely yeah and everything you're saying about Apple you know if you want someone to blame that Steve Jobs right I mean there's a somewhat Infamous Clash but about the design of the Apple II 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 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 close to the metal or to be able to Hardware hack it if you want to and Wozniak brought that sensibility into the machine one of the most remarkable parts of the apple tube is 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 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 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 too and that they could really directly access these components that was extremely compelling and necessary for hobbyists and I think that's 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 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 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 yeah yeah I would say you you pick these five examples of different kinds of software that really tell the story and I think I think I'm right in saying visit calc is probably by far the best known of the of the five right undoubtedly yeah it's like the the Prototype spreadsheet software it's the one that sort of made everybody won't want to work it was like the thing yeah 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 it very controversial because it ended up being controversial in ways that are like even today unsettled and super fascinating yes so so the book's main organization is that it chose 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 the computer to something that was recognizable by consumers and to tell that story I focus on a specific case in each one until 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 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 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 quick 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 it is really that simple the concern was that if no one paid for software that if 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 sure is that people want to be paid for their labor and and that people will leave if there's not a way to self-support right but the amount of like on 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 know Bill Gates Right rather infamously blew up at the entire hobbyist Community for pirating the first software that he made which was a which was an interpreter of basic for the Altair 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 uh and it was it was quite a 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 totally where did the locksmith fight end obviously I think the 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 either of those directions yet but the the locksmith story ended right like how did it end 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 an 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 that are providing ways for people to duplicate their software that locksmith's history kind of it just the so far 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's a lot of different ways 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 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 ten dollars 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 yeah I I think there's a careful needle I'm trying to thread with the book where one of the things I'm I'm really trying to do is not give us the impression that commercial interests were an after effect or a 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 multi-million 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 in the obvious sense 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 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 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 just that kind of jet stream and it creates a very I would say self-perpetuating system where the whole project gets kind of instantaneous they rationalized among its many actors yeah what what was the guy's name who was building the like education software for his middle school class and then oh Tom Snyder 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 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 no school but wants to sell individual units of individual floppy disks to individual families because that's a better Market run 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 trans to like understand that as soon as Venture Capital appears all the incentives change all the business models change and you either get bigger 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 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 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 was basically like 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 I guess to something that 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 very brief background of of what the print shop was and I guess still is is it still around so there is like a a weird vestigial tale of that software it's owned by a different company you know the two developers kind of cast first off their ownership of it many many years ago but I I believe that you can still buy it it's fantastic print shop Deluxe 6.4 is still available for 49.99 on the broader bun website and it's like what is broderbund as a company today just like it's like that this is just an IP yeah 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 going to 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 buy a computer for their house 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 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 um dis or Punk or which 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 one of them was an employee at broader Bund at the time and had a lot of background and Graphics programming Marty Khan and David Balsam who are both in their kind of you know early late 20s 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 chop 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 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 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 the screen felt I think transformative it was a real aha moment I think for a lot of Home users 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 was this idea and to some extent 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 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 yeah I think at 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 set a yard sale and that suddenly it wasn't for like 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 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 physical 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 these software developers finding not just like take a thing that exists and do it on a computer but and 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 that you have because you are doing this thing on a computer 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 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 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 yeah and I wonder what would have happened if we had gone the other way 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 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 for sure and so it really becomes a question of like where do you want what are our social like that 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 it 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 and best of one that really centers the idea that we think that these Technologies do things on their own which they so resolutely do not 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 micro computer 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 uh all this stuff and it feels like our devices are we still call them personal computers but they feel less personal than ever so 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 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 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 I kind of hedge and hint at or sometimes very directly say in the book about the 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 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 and so you know I 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 a 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 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 if we've just deliberately chosen convenience and power over that kind of like personality and ownership but part of me also thinks 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 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 uh 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 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 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 and 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 in this country yeah you know I just started teaching a very large uh 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 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 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 that 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 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 David this was a total pleasure thank you so much for this interview 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 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 willpore the verge's lead video producer to tell me all about it I will hello I feel like I have been hearing about this like mysterious Apple Story You've Been Working on for like several decades now yeah it's been it's been a long time what was the occasion for this I actually don't think I know the beginning of this story like the first thing I heard was just like oh yeah Will's going to Utah to see a dump it's like all right 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 they were 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 like 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 it was all very very sketchy but it had this article had the basics of this weird thing that had happened wherein in 1989 there were like 2700 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 this feels like the First Act of like a really great True Crime documentary yeah I mean that's what kind of we're like maybe this is exactly what that is so we so we started to look into it so what really happened that day ticket answers we went back 40 years we had a shovel and start digging to find the people who brought Lisa to life well it was really exciting this was the New Foundation the New Frontier and to figure out why it really flopped but there definitely was an element of Revenge and to understand why Apple would bury its own past literally foreign 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 I mean it did a lot in 1983. 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 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 presenting Lisa a 16-bit dual disk drive personal office system from Apple computer the next revolution in Computing the Apple Lisa was 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 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 uh it's sort of in keeping with this feeling that like the Mac one and the Lisa is just in a dump in Utah 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 well that was the whole point yeah we're like you gotta go to the dump 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 I open up we'll be there somewhere under 30 years of garbage so yeah but we got there and it was like I don't know 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 oh wow 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 oh wow 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 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 Allah lot of like a surprising amount of the story of the Lisa runs through him tell me about him 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 ten thousand dollars it's 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 corner 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 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 and I did that he was an apple reseller in the late 70s these 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 3 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 yeah another one nobody really talks about in the history of apple right exactly and and we're not going to really talk about it but there were a bunch of leftover Apple threes at Apple HQ that this guy Bob found out about and he kind of wind them and dined them over a period of time and eventually convince them to just sell him all of their old Apple threes that they didn't totally know what to do with and so created this business for himself selling kinda outdated failed Apple Hardware there was a lot of people that were selling brand new equipment computers were supposed to be Leading Edge nobody was thinking about cell in the trailing edge of high technology you know I kind of love that 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 3 and it goes really well and then according to him apple called him after this apple 3 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 so Apple has now completely moved on but there's people in Utah who are buying and using Lisa's 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 offselling 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 would work more like a Macintosh Plus it could actually run the most the latest version of Mac OS so it sort of the lease is actually kind of function like macintosh's and sold them at a super steep discount so they were competitive with the macintoshes that Apple was offering but they had this nice big screen like the Lisa had it was there's a whole separate product line basically 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 secondhand 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 do this better and more usefully than Apple is like did this work like was this was this like a like a genuinely successful business 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 gave 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 3 and the lease of both they would just send tech support calls directly to him oh wow for either of those models so like he he sort of became this he's like a de facto Apple executive 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 market for them that Apple never did son generated four million dollars last year Andrew the attention of Newsweek magazine and after the article hit the streets sales skyrocketed there's a lot of people that saw the Newsweek article I mean that was huge this sounds like a win-win everybody should be happy but at some point this story has to go horribly wrong right well yes at some point like all roads lead to the landfill we know the end of this story which is the dump like right right act three has got to be a doozy here 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 he said we've decided that we want to exercise our claws in the contract to pick up the computers that we own an important detail is that he had most of these on consignment okay 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 uh showed up they were ex-marines they're all six foot six you know and they're just these muscle men they started loading up trucks he thought they were headed back to Cupertino but he says he got in the car and filed them and ended up at the landfill in town wait wait he just got in the car and he was like I'm going wherever these computers are going let's see what happens yeah this was I mean this was like he really banked his whole business on these computers so when Apple threw this curveball yeah he says he was very very invested in understanding what was going on you can just picture the moment where they're driving down the street and it's like the highways to the left and the dump is to the right and he's like he puts on his left signal to turn and it said truck goes to the right and he's like what is happening and and this is I mean like with a little bit more budget like these are the reenactments that we really needed to have done yeah this is an animated series waiting to happen here man I'm just telling you I know I know okay but not only do they then take these computers to the dump for ostensibly no reason but they like beat them to death it sounds like they were just kind of mean about it and this is the this is like kind of one of the central Mysteries of the 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 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 tuffies it seemed like the mob had come to town you know so it was an it was a very strange day they were very intimidating they were big guys who were seemed like they were charged with keeping people from following the action so this is not like Apple's accounting department coming for attacks right off 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 can you imagine getting that tip like we're we're both journalists can you imagine getting a tip from a landfill just being like you gotta come see what's being dumped here I mean I dream about that every day that is true there's no downside to that story 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 yeah it's all just very very fishy feeling did you get any kind of information from Apple by the way like did you did you ask me what they think about all this okay we asked very nicely and they said quote we are declining to participate they just they just like gave us a a wave fair enough 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 yeah well that's one of the things 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 describe it 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 if he was married he did it himself is it kind of a myth in that story in that town now there is surprisingly little of that there and I suspect it is because it just wasn't a big deal when it happened that's fair there's 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 if I were to just wildly prognosticate based on nothing except the story that you've told me yes I love it 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 leesa as if to say like I won the Macintosh one 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 not in the slightest 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 yeah I have a hard time not seeing those two things as very connected to one another 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 okay he like feels personally persecuted by Steve Jobs so he's like Steve came for the last of these exactly the funny thing is that Steve Jobs had left the company in 1985. this all happened in 1989. oh that's right 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 it's a shame that really puts a damper on my theory 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 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 well certainly while 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 then you'd say good things about the map and the wonderful leadership the Mac group had 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 yes timeline right is not doing great like the Macintosh is pretty good it's pretty successful but apple is still in pretty tough straights as a company 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 like fancy Niche computer business and they're under a ton of pressure to release cheaper computers to compete with IBM compatibles and just like 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 like won't go away could feel like a thing that they might want to make go away once and for all you know it's it's at a small scale it's just this one reseller but he's punching it above his weight this guy is making the rounds at Mac World Expos he's he he got written up in Newsweek he was sort of the face of the this like trailing Edge business oh man see oh okay that actually makes a lot of sense because I can absolutely see if I'm you know John Scully 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 came but this guy did yeah absolutely and there's just article after article in in magazines these trade Publications just like the 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 is useful at Apple yeah uh so again like 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 yeah that makes a lot of sense okay so you didn't find the how how many thousands of Lisa's was it again about 2700 of them okay so you didn't find the 2700 how close do you think you got like you stood in the landfill Could You Feel The Vibes of the 2700 Lisa's like did they call to you I mean there there were ghosts there were also it was like cold and windy and it just like stinky it had a Vibe about a place we were ready to go I don't know if that was the like anguished cries of the leases driving us away but it was not a super Pleasant environment all the slow processors saying get out of here yeah 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 it feels like an album cover for like a really sad piano right yeah like but Ben Folds Five album just that Ballad of the Lisa yeah so what do you take away about this as like a story about Apple because 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 80s and the whole idea of Apple like working with an outside dude to make their computers 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 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 gonna 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 that is just going to be buried under this Avalanche of Apple news and then 30 years later somebody will find it and they'll be like gosh remember in 2023 documentary 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 apples as as their customer and this story was really interesting to dig into because because it wasn't always like that it's just like this completely different portrait of this company that does not have its 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 just sort of brings them down to earth a little bit and I think that's valuable and it 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 it 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 it history could absolutely repeat itself and so I think in this era of huge infallible tech companies that's always a good reminder because because nothing lasts 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 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 Mac was just kind of cuter and people kind of went ah 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 at least it was like a little bit bigger and bulkier and like looked like it belonged in an office to do important office things and the mech is like jazz and it's like that's really stupid that they're so similar but there is something to it somehow totally yeah the line between changing the world and being in a dump is always smaller than anything how's that for a life lesson right because just everyone remember that just carry that one around with you all right well the doc is awesome everybody should go watch it we'll link it in the show notes it's oniverse.com congrats on being done with this the the story is super fun I'm really glad you got to go to a dump in Utah and figure it all out thank you thank you thanks for chatting about it we'll be right back thank you 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 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 yellow zest I love the show thanks 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 uh 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 emotes otherwise 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 works 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 it 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 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 Leanne's book and to the doc but just go to the verge.com it's cool website and like I said we are going to have 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 vergecast at theverge.com 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 gonna do a hotline episode pretty soon so keep them coming this show is produced by Andrew Moreno and Liam James Brook minters is our editorial director of audio the vergecast is a Verge production and part of the VOX media podcast Network nili Alex and I'll be back on Friday to talk about well probably wwc plus all of the other Tech news going on this week we'll see you then rock and roll thank you\n"