Recently some Apple documents from 1978 have been discovered from the DigiBarn computer museum in California, which have revealed how the technology giant managed to develop its first ever disk operating system. These old documents were actually discovered by CNET, which has later used them to publish an article titled “Apple booted up.” The documents includes contracts signed by the late Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to devise pages and specs of code and schematics and divulges that when Apple II was launched back in 1977, it did not have a disk drive. In fact, Apple II only had a cassette drive that was dependable and also took a lot of time when users tried to load anything.
Therefore, both Jobs and Wozniak agreed that they needed to develop an efficient and powerful disk drive along with a disk operating system in order to run it. As a result of that the company laid down the foundation of a more “expansive sales and marketing strategy”.
“The difference between cassette and disk systems was the difference between hobbyist devices and a computer,” said Lee Felsenstein, the creator of the Osborne I, the world’s first portable computer. “You couldn’t have expected, say, VisiCalc, to run on a cassette system.”
“VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, was one of — if not the — single-most important pieces of software in PC history. As Paul Laughton, who wrote Apple’s DOS, put it, VisiCalc was “the thing that [made] microcomputers take off.” [..]”
“Bricklin [the co-creator of VisiCalc] explained that he and his publisher released VisiCalc for the Apple II first, in part because his publisher, Dan Fylstra, was an Apple fan…”
VisiCalc remained the exclusive software of Apple for a year and even at that time the company sold roughly a thousand copies of the product during a month. However, the real game changer was for Apple was the disk controller that Wozniak designed for computer during the Christmas holidays of 1977, which really turned things around for the company. The innovative thing about the controller was that it was made compact by utilizing the software whereas Apple’s competitors stuck with the hardware to make their controllers compact. According to iPhoneinCanada it does not “matter how great its disk controller was, Apple had no OS or any way to build one of its own.”
“On April 10, 1978, the contract was signed. For $13,000 — $5,200 up front, and $7,800 on delivery, and no additional royalties — Shepardson Microsystems would build Apple’s first DOS. And hand it over just 35 days later. For its money, Apple would get a file manager, an interface for integer BASIC and Applesoft BASIC, and utilities that would allow disk backup, disk recovery, and file copying.”
“The project was based on specs Apple’s legendary co-founder gave Laughton [Shepardson employee] for how to create a boot disk.”
Even at that time, developers were very well aware of the fact that know Apple is not an ordinary company, as they recognized the brilliance of Wozniak from the designs of the disk drive interface card and Apple II.
Source: iPhoneinCanada
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