An engrossing origin story for the personal computer—showing how the Apple II’s software helped a machine transcend from hobbyists’ plaything to essential home appliance.
 
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 brilliant 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. Not to hack, but to play. Not to code, but to calculate. Not to program, but to print. 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. From iconic software products like VisiCalc and The Print Shop to historic games like Mystery House and Snooper Troops to long-forgotten disk-cracking utilities, 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.

Control-Based Operating System Design describes the application of system- and control-theoretical methods to the design of computer operating system components. It argues that computer operating system components should not be first 'designed' and then 'endowed with control', but rather when possible conceived from the outset as controllers, synthesised and assessed in the system-theoretical world of dynamic models, and then realised as control algorithms. Doing so is certainly a significant perspective shift with respect to current practices in operating system design, but the payoff is significant too. In some sense, adopting the suggested attitude means viewing computing systems as cyber-physical ones, where the operating system plays the computational role, the physical elements are the managed resources, and the various (control) functionalities to be realised, interact and co-operate as a network.