The Apple II Age

How the Computer Became Personal

By: Laine Nooney

Narrated by: Krystal Hammond

Skip the iPhone, the iPod, and the Macintosh. If you want to understand how Apple Inc. became an industry behemoth, look no further than the 1977 Apple II. Designed by the engineer Steve Wozniak and hustled into the marketplace by his Apple cofounder Steve Jobs, the Apple II became one of the most prominent personal computers of this dawning industry.

The Apple II was a versatile piece of hardware, but its most compelling story isn't found in the feat of its engineering, the personalities of Apple's founders, or the way it set the stage for the company's multibillion-dollar future. Instead, historian Laine Nooney shows, what made the Apple II iconic was its software. In software, we discover the material reasons people bought computers. The story of personal computing in the United States is not about the evolution of hackers—it's about the rise of everyday users.

Recounting a constellation of software creation stories, Nooney offers a new understanding of how the hobbyists' microcomputers of the 1970s became the personal computer we know today. The Apple II Age offers an unprecedented look at the people, the industry, and the money that built the microcomputing milieu—and why so much of it converged around the pioneering Apple II.

©2023 Laine Nooney (P)2024 Tantor

Boring, tedious, sanctimonious and badly narrated

It takes a lot of effort to turn a book on the era of the Apple II computer into a boring slog, but this author spared no effort in doing so. When she isn't bashing you over the head with icons of the industry (Jobs, Wozniak, Gates, et al) getting where they got thanks to 'male, white, middle-class, Harvard-educated privledge' and taking shots at the entire industry and hobby of computing's 'whiteness', the author is inflating her word count by taking four sentences to say something that could be relayed in two. Her constantly meandering, overly verbose prose caused me, more often than not, to lose interest and my attention to begin drifting.

And the narrator was a horrible choice. If you are going to have a book that reads more like a scolding, pompous lecture than an entertaining work on the Apple II era and why it was so important to the history of personal computing, DO NOT have it read by someone who sounds like a breathy, slow, dime store cheesy romance novel narrator. The narrator's drawn out phrasing and pauses added at least three hours to the length of what this audiobook should have been.

Give this book a pass and hope for something better.