Apple into Australian small business market

The Sydney Morning Herald — Computers - March 3, 1981 [OCR text]


Last week in Sydney, Electronic Concepts began selling the Apple III computer and thus finally entered the crowded small business computer market on even terms with its competitors. Before the arrival of the Apple III, the company had concentrated much of its efforts in the personal computer market, with considerable success. The personal computer, as opposed to the hobby computer, has been established in Australia as a viable entity mainly by the work of Rudi Hoess, of Electronic Concepts Pty Ltd. Even with the great energy and marketing skills of Rudi Hoess, the personal computer concept couldn't have become accepted here unless the right hardware was available and at the right time. Rudi had the Apple III's predecessor the Apple II, and this machine virtually made the personal computer acceptable in Australia. This is in no way a criticism of the efforts of Dick Smith with his various machines and of at least two organisations to establish the Commodore range in Australia. Here one has to make a distinction between the hobbyist who usually wants to get into the hardware and introduce his own design concepts, and the personal computer buyer who usually only wants to play software at its own game.

Apple II looked the part, it threatened no one and it provided a great deal of computing power for what was really not a great deal of money. In addition, it, by virtue of its companion small colour video display, began to suggest to its users that graphic output might be preferable to masses of print-out. The Apple II is easily portable and even the larger Apple III with integral floppy disc drive is not either too bulky nor too heavy to be carried to Australia as cabin luggage by the man from Apple. This graphic output concept mentioned above is one that has been far too long coming. For too long, most computer-prepared output reports followed in the footsteps of traditional accounting reports, in that they were only partially processed and required the recipient to do some processing of them himself to finally extract the information from the data.

The availability of a colour graphic display, without initially the ability to provide hard copy, virtually forced the systems designer and the programmer using early Apple IIs to provide fully processed reports. Once it was realised that the tiny machine had commercial possibilities. But that benefit is only peripheral to the main one which was to remove from the minds of many executives the panic at the thought of a computer actually knowing their secrets. Apple II is about the size of a practically sized, portable typewriter. It has an extended keyboard compared with that of a normal typewriter and can be fitted with a small page printer, a colour video display, some form of relatively large scale magnetic storage device, a graphics tablet and many more devices.

Apple III has all this and more. For example, it offers fairly advanced word processing and rather more commercial software. Few people who are buyers of this class of computer care very much about exactly what goes on inside the computer. They prefer to be able to operate it themselves with about the same sort of technical involvement as they show when switching on a household appliance. Apple III thus differs from Apple II in the way that it will have to be marketed: Apple II users have largely been dedicated computer hobbyists, while the Apple III user may in fact be a computer hater or, at the best, a reluctant user who has had the need for a computer thrust upon him.

Thus Apple III looks rather different. The keyboard is no longer integral with the central processor unit, but the floppy disc drive is. The colour video display is still much needed, but a small thermal printer now rides on top of the CPU box in many cases, while the CRT has to stand on its own four feet on the desk. All the Apple II peripheral units can be fitted by using the III's intelligent interface facility. This also allows for some clever communications and networking links. Store on the III is normally 96K bytes, but this can be expanded to 128K bytes with the added memory still contained in the CPU box. Backing store available on the III can be expanded from the single integral floppy drive to a total of four, with three drives being external. Since this machine is not intended to be used by professional-computer people, just professional managers, that is about all the hardware detail that is relevant. Software on the other hand is vital and Apple recognises this because it calls the Apple III and software package the "Information Analyst Package". In its entry level form, the package has one Apple III computer with built-in floppy disc drive, a calculator-style numeric key pad, keyboard, system clock calendar, serial Centronics and Apple thermal printer interfaces, plus 96K RAM. For some commercial analysis, larger backing store capacity may be needed. Then there is the 30 cm video monitor that in the US is usually B and W, but Electronic Concepts in Australia always offers colour. Then the software includes Visicalc III a forecasting and modelling, an operating system, Pascal, Apple Fortran, Business Basic and a library of utilities. All are intended to be used by non-computer professionals with a minimum of training and familiarisation.

 

Apple III advertisement (March 1982 BYTE) 300dpi

Apple /// ad (March 1982 BYTE) [300dpi scan]

 

Apple I, II, III & Lisa - A History of Personal Computing brochure

Apple I, II, III & Lisa — A History of Personal Computing

  October 1990 Apple Computer Australia

 

 FURTHER READING 

NB: Electronic Concepts first began importing Apple III to Australia in early 1981.  Owing to "production difficulties" with the early machines, a revised, more reliable Apple III was officially launched at Applefest Sydney in January 1982.

 

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