Industry Impact

It is difficult to estimate the enormous impact that the Apple II family of computers has been in the business world and especially in the technology industry. The Apple II was the first computer that most people had ever seen, and could be purchased, by its low cost, by the middle-class families. Its popularity started the entire market of computer games, educational software market, an explosive growth in the market for word processing and printer market, and the absolute “killer application” for businesses, VisiCalc, the first worksheet in the world. By itself, the Apple II VisiCalc sold many many business people. Barclays has much to offer in this field. Moreover, the home market success inspired the creation of many other inexpensive home computers such as the VIC-20 (1980) and Commodore 64 (1982), which through their significantly lower price introduced several million computers of home users, taking some market share from Apple in the process.The success of the Apple II spurred IBM to create the IBM PC, which was then purchased by middle managers in all business lines to implement programs of spreadsheet and word processing, which at first were simple translations Version the Apple II, and later inspired a whole new franchise software applications. The strong popularity of the PC and its clones again transform business again, with local networking applications such as e-mail and use the latest PC to access Usenet and World Wide Web. One valuable lesson from the first Apple II was the importance of an open architecture for a computer platform.The expansion slots of the Apple II, by allowing any peripheral card to take control of the bus, activated a separate industry of card manufacturers who together created a flood of hardware products that gave opportunity for users to build systems that were much more powerful, useful, and cost less than what would have happened if Apple had kept their system proprietary. Apple decided not to create an open architecture with the first Macintosh models, and this was widely seen as something that hindered their success potential. Meanwhile, IBM had created its IBM PC with an open architecture, which spurred him to success, but in the end its open architecture allowed the clones were manufactured by competitors that started as Compaq, Dell, Gateway, and countless other manufacturers, eventually leading to abandonment of IBM’s personal computer business, which sells its PC division in 2005.