Apple: Our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free (1976)

http://apple1.chez.com/Apple1project/Gallery/Gallery.htm

64•janandonly•1h ago

Comments

aaronbrethorst•1h ago

What's up with all of the weird typos, such as:

"APPLE Computer Compagny"

"Palo Atlt"

chocochunks•1h ago

Probably OCR'd with no editing.

fsckboy•42m ago

it appears to be a website in the french tongue

amelius•56m ago

The full sentence:

> And since our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost, you won't be continually paying for access to this growing software library.

titzer•23m ago

They forgot to mention that the growing software library is also shrinking as they deprecate support for older OS versions and hardware. On the one hand they go to heroic lengths (fat binaries, Rosetta 2) to enable a migration to a new hardware platform but get bored in ~5 years and drop support.

"Growing software library" it ain't.

renewiltord•9m ago

It’s been half a century of Apple. At this point if FireWire, Flash, and a half dozen other things didn’t convince you that Apple deprecates then removes old functionality pretty rapidly I don’t know what to say.

gignico•55m ago

At $666.66 this must have been a diabolic deal!

jagged-chisel•35m ago

More devilish

esafak•5m ago

Same thing.

bigyabai•33m ago

Not really. The Apple I was discontinued within a year of release, if you saved that money until 1978 then you could get an Apple II that would be supported for almost 20 years give-or-take.

tracerbulletx•29m ago

But very really if you bought it and kept it until now.

chocochunks•7m ago

Part of the reason the Apple I is so rare, is that Apple offered an Apple I trade in program. Apple would destroy the boards of Apple Is that were traded in for Apple IIs.

* Not that there was really many to begin with.

CharlesW•28m ago

~$3,800 in 2026 dollars.

jrochkind1•47m ago

A lot of corporate "philosophies" are actually just business models. There have been times between then and now they charged for the OS. They do charge for other software. But largely it's been a good business model for them.

wlesieutre•32m ago

In the 2000s I remember the OS releases being $130, which (depending on exactly what year you start from) is equivalent to $200-250ish today.

Not a yearly cadence because back then they only released a new OS version when it was done and had features worth releasing, but even every two years that wasn't a cheap update.

subtlesoftware•46m ago

"Compared to switches and LED's, a video terminal can dis- play vast amounts of information simultaneously."

The beginning of the end.

dlcarrier•29m ago

I worked at a place that tested software releases on a VM of every supported operating system, including OS X. We didn't have any Apple hardware, because no one wanted to deal with that, but someone had brought in the chassis of an old Apple computer and the host computer was inside it. We didn't run it by any lawyers or anything, but as far as we could tell, running OS X inside a computer that had all of its guts replaced was entirely within the license requirements.

rpastuszak•27m ago

Haha, excellent timing:

I opened HN just now because:

1. I got tired of waiting 2h for my app to get notarized because

2. I can't sell it on the AppStore in the EU... because

3. the AppStore Connect page gets stuck at their DSA compliance form (it's been 10 days).

And, to add insult to injury, the whole thing could be a PWA, without any compromises in the UX whatsoever.

I misread the title, but I still posted this comment as an example of confirmation bias* in the orange book for posteriority. Time to step away from the computer!

* (sunk cost fallacy)

echelon•24m ago

> the whole thing could be a PWA

Apple neutered the web as best they could to force you to use their rails.

I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks, kids especially, to make animation, games, and mini apps, and deploy them as single binary blobs.

A single swf file could be kept and run anywhere. For the younger generation: imagine right clicking to download a YouTube video or a video game you'd see on itch.io. And you could send those to friends.

You could even embed online multiplayer and chatrooms into the apps. It all just worked. What we have now is a soup of complexity that can't even match the feature set.

titzer•21m ago

Flash was cool, but the plugin was full of bugs and a constant source of pretty serious vulnerabilities. I too miss the flash games era of the web at times, but it wasn't some utopian thing.

marcosdumay•16m ago

Just like Microsoft before them.

But flash specifically deserved to die.

tliltocatl•12m ago

Flash was cool, but it was also a spectacular dumpster file. Honestly I'm sort of glad Google&Apple killed it. Yes it was an amazing medium, but it feels almost like Adobe kept thinking about it as an animation studio and didn't care to run it as an application platform with all the concerns it entails (i. e. security). And support of anything that's not Windows, while technically present, was abysmal. HTML5, with all it sins and warts, is a better platform, even if it has much higher entry barrier.

echelon•9m ago

Creativity dropped off a chasm with HTML5.

During the Flash era, creativity flourished. It was accessible, too. Seven year olds could use it.

Flash was getting better and better. It could have become an open standard had Jobs not murdered it to keep runtimes off iPhone.

The companies that filled the web void - Google and Apple - both had their own selfish reasons not to propose a successor. And they haven't helped anyone else step up to the plate. It would be impossible now.

Imagine if apps for mobile could be deployed via swf. We'd have billions of apps, and you could just tap to download them from the web.

Smartphones might have pushed us forward, but the app layer held us back.

The 1990s and 2000s web saw what AOL and Microsoft were trying to lock us into and instead opted for open and flexible.

Platformization locked us into hyperscaler rails where they get action on everything we do. This has slowed us down tremendously, and a lot of the free energy and innovation capital of the system goes to taxation.

hyperhello•53s ago

The security issue could have been addressed by simply running it in a sandbox.

teaearlgraycold•2m ago

On the other hand you're okay with Adobe having that level of control over the web?

Maybe one day we'll see a JS/WASM framework that is just as portable.

pcl•23m ago

Have you built a PWA solution for it? If not, why not?

candiddevmike•17m ago

I can't sign into Apple without going incognito in Chrome. I put in my email, and it throws and error before asking me for my password. It's not an extension, it's not a cookie, idk what it is.

And then when I do get past he password, it sends a OTP to a Mac Mini I never use and have to tap around to get it to generate a SMS code. No option for external TOTP, and no way to remove the Mac Mini I don't use from OTP without signing out of it.

epistasis•7m ago

I use PWAs on iOS and they're pretty great. That was the original plan for apps on iOS, before Apple was pressured into creating an app store.

wmf•15m ago

There was discourse in the 1970s about whether software should all be free or if paid software would be better. Apple and Micro-Soft had different perspectives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists