ver, as Cringley points out, Kildall and Digital were slow to develop supporting language, slow to update CP/M, slow to respond to hardware innovations such as the 16-bit microprocessor successors to the 8080 chip (p. 60). As a consequence, Digital and CP/M were to be eclipsed by more agile players in the marketplace.
Enter Apple, the brainchild of partners Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was a computer hobbyist, and Jobs "nagged" him to build computers for sale. However, their early efforts at marketing and industry innovation were personal rather than business oriented. For example, they created a color screen on the Apple II not as a customer come-on but so that Wozniak could play arcade games on the screen. The floppy-disk drive was the idea of one Mike Markkula, formerly of Intel, who envisioned accounting-data storage (Cringely, 1996, p. 63).
It is important to recognize that Apple/Mac technology was largely hardware-driven, whereas the Microsoft development model focused on language and software. That is significant because of the implications for technology architecture. As Cringely points out (1996, pp. 62-3), Wozniak manipulated the hardware configuration of the early Apple machines to decrease the number of integrated circuits required to run programs. On the other hand, hard-wiring operational features of computing had the effect of insulating the user from (or, alternatively, preventing user access to) the works of the machine and resolving certain problems via software. The hardware technology was also (and remains) proprietary. Equally, the hardware approach to structuring computing functions was more expensive, which explains why Apple/Mac computers are more expensive than their DOS-based counterparts (Stephenson, 1999).
Microprocessing technology would continue to develop around the PC through the 1980s, but hardware was not the only story. Software innovation and development kept up with hardware develop...