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There are a lot of misconceptions about the early days of Apple. I would like to clarify some of them.

- The recent attention on Steve Jobs is only partially warranted. Yes, it's true that without Jobs there would be no Apple. However, the movies imply that Jobs' role was to make Woz realize the potential of the personal computer. That is false. Woz knew the potential: he just didn't particularly care. Woz was only interested in making one for himself, and if anyone else cared then he happily shared the schematics. Jobs deserves every bit of credit for convincing Woz to quit HP and go all-in at Apple, and also for making Apple a commercial success, but let's not insult Wozniak. He "got it". But "it" wasn't his priority.

- Apple's debut was not at the 1977 West Coast Computer Faire. Apple debuted the year prior at the Personal Computing '76 conference in Atlantic City, New Jersey. This is well documented. Woz himself , PC '76 founder John Dilks (>a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8P_I5H_9uvU">video), and Stan Viet have all discussed it.

- The Apple 1 was far from being "the first personal computer". What made the Apple 1 special was its packaging. There were many other single-board computers at the time including plenty also using the MOS 6502 processor. There were also plenty of other microcomputers at the time which got input from QWERTY keyboards and displayed output on CRTs. However, most other SBCs only had hexadecimal keypads for input and LEDs for output, while most of the computers with full keyboards and CRTs back then cost five figures and were intended as engineering workstations. What did Woz do that was special? He found ways to put the engineering workstation technology into the hobbyist/SBC price point. The packaging, not the technology itself, was the important breakthrough.

- Woz built the Apple 1 and all the commercial Apple 1s in Jobs' parent's garage. False and false. Woz designed the computer mostly in his cubicle at Hewlett Packard, Jobs outsourced the board manufacturing, and Woz usually only stopped by the Jobs household when there were glitches with the boards that the first few employees couldn't solve. Woz was still employed full-time at HP.

Lol... I need to understand that, huh? You're hardly in an exlusive club, pal. If we're going to start measuring hardware penii I'm sure I could match you connector for connector...

It's not about having the biggest electronic wang.* It's about knowing what I'm talking about, because I've been around the block a few times. There's lots of people who have owned more different kinds of computers than I have, many many people with more IT experience, blah blah blah.

I know whether various Macintosh computers were well-built because not only have I been inside of them, but I have a whole lot of basis for comparison from the other computers I've been inside of, not because I know more than any living human.

* This is not a picture of my wang.

There are a few replicas available for those of us who can't afford a real Apple 1. The least expensive is Briel Computers' "Replica 1" which is not a cosmetic replica but more of a "work-alike" computer. Applefritter.com's Tom Owad wrote a book based on that kit. On the other extreme is Mike Willegal's "Mimeo 1" which is an extremely accurate reproduction. I know the people behind these kits/sites and they're all very hobby-centric.

Yeah. Mike Willeagal (creator of the Mimeo-1, and owner of the Apple 1 Registry site) even went to the trouble of creating a custom font for the silkscreen layer. I asked him if he X-Rayed the original board, and he said "No", and that he simply took a LOT of high-detail photos, and then went back and forth, printing out his board and laying it on a light table with the original.

I don't know much about the Replica 1; but it isn't a cold-copy of the original, like Mike's is. It's so close that I asked him if anyone has tried to auction one of his off AS an original. He said he deliberately put a marking on his board to prevent that from happening...

And yes, as an owner of an Apple 1 myself, it IS that close.

There are a few replicas available for those of us who can't afford a real Apple 1. The least expensive is Briel Computers' "Replica 1" which is not a cosmetic replica but more of a "work-alike" computer. Applefritter.com's Tom Owad wrote a book based on that kit. On the other extreme is Mike Willegal's "Mimeo 1" which is an extremely accurate reproduction. I know the people behind these kits/sites and they're all very hobby-centric.

Tom rules.

What? Nobody's suggesting the good ol' Macquarium?

Mac's never had green monochrome screens...

Well, except for the Super Duper Green Jade
[green monochrome display, 128MB RAM, 33Mhz 68030, 10BaseT enet,
dual HDs, dual booting NetBSD 2.6.1 and A/UX 3.1]

MacQuarium!

Put a little Time Travel Arch in there. Magic!

"Has there ever been a major OS that simply went away, period?"

How about A/UX - that went away when the Power Macs arrived. There are a handful of machines on the net still running it.

It's debatable whether you could call it a "major OS," but it's an SVR variant (definitely major) with BSD extensions. It was a reliable and highly-polished OS sold by a major vendor. Today, you'd have to get it on eBay along with the 680x0 Mac to run it.

Then what you want is the Apple I Replica Creation book. The point of the article was that even someone who doesn't know how to solder at the beginning can, with a little help, build a functional replica using the full kit, and therefore learn skills they can later use for a more complicated project while having something cool to show off and feel proud of. If you've got the skills to hack away starting at the PCB instead, that's an option too, but it's a bit unreasonable to expect that beginners to this area (which include just about all the kids who wander past my lawn) are going to start there.

A/UX also had Commando, plus a terminal and command line. Check it out if you want to see what a true Unix workstation with a Mac GUI looked like in the early 90's:

http://www.applefritter.com/ui/aux/index.html

...only problem is, like most commercial Unixes at the time, it cost $$$ - not including the high-end Apple hardware needed to run it effectively!

I remember seeing the TLC. Unfortunately, the box made it seem like any other so-called "pre-computer".

A description is at http://www.applefritter.com/node/239

I have a G5 tower and an itouch now and have had a classic and an LCIII in the past and they are pretty much OK. OTH I was pretty bummed when my 1200 dollar iBook only lasted a couple of years due to the infamous logic board problem:

http://www.applefritter.com/node/10193

I also had the original SATA drive fail on my G5 tower and it makes the infamous power supply beep, beep, beep, sound...

While I think OS X is the best OS going I've never had those sorts of hardware problems on a P.C. I'd love to be able to LEGALLY put OS X on cheap and cheerful p.c. hardware, I know it won't happen but I do think it would be better and cheaper.

It's not for your phone, but you do know about the Replica I board, right?

http://www.applefritter.com/briel

Source.

Nothing is easier than building a green PC, just take out the can of green spray paint.

It's an easy retrofit for older tech, too, as this green Apple IIe demonstrates.

I think id Games used to compile on SGIs. I know MS did some development on Xenix/i286 and Xenix/i386 (somewhere, there's an MS quote about how MS-DOS/Win is not suitable for serious development..hah). In fact, the i286 had a memory management unit, but the only OS (that I know of) which took full advantage of it was Xenix. Minix/i286 may have supported it to some extent, as well.
Some emulator pages....mac&ppc, simos (for SGI/IRIX5), DEC 10 and Big Iron, various DEC emulation, Apple Lisa, Z80 sim&development, yaze Z80, Apricot and Amstrad, bochs x86, ... and there's always emulators that run under DOS that you could run under Bochs or QEMU.

Other possibly helpful links:
emulators on freshmeat
OS kernels on freshmeat
OS's on freshmeat
bunches of old OS disk images
CP/M and MP/M
CP/M disks
Lisa Xenix
LisaOS
tandy xenix
elks and uclinux
freevms
freedos
Apple I (not II) development
reactos - winnt clone
MAME stuff and pinball Mame
info about tandy disk images
solaris minix
minix info and version 3
various free (as in beer and/or speech) OS list
The OS list at tunes.org

I'll store personal documents on my old mac plus. (the one which I haven't still transformed into a macquarium) All was on floppy disk back then. AFAIK those floppies, once formatted for the macintosh Superdrive could not be used/read/reformatted anymore by any pc. That could be a great way to encrypt data. Try to find a superdrive nowday!

Dude: Apple eMate, circa 1997.

Well I did find this flaming Dell.

Here is the flaming ibook.

Or, you can follow these directions to make your old iBook black, pink, or any color you want. I did this and made mine clear.

Hey Jason! Long time, no speak...

To answer your question... yes, there are a few. Tom Owad (of AppleFritter fame comes to mid when you ask. He double majored in CS & History specifically to combine the two. Interesting guy.

Am I the only one who thought it would be a working PC, with the case made out of legos? That'd be a lot cooler, IMHO. The mouse might be a little annoying to hold, though...

You mean something like this? Or maybe you prefer Mac? :-)

White House statements have been pretty vague on reasons for avoiding use of available court authorizations. While they imply it only affects those on the end of overseas calls, court authorizations could have covered those. Court authorizations don't scale well. How big could this be? Phil Zimmermann showed considerable insight in his statement on why he wrote PGP. Here's a portion:

"The 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) mandated that phone companies install remote wiretapping ports into their central office digital switches, creating a new technology infrastructure for "point-and-click" wiretapping, so that federal agents no longer have to go out and attach alligator clips to phone lines. Now they will be able to sit in their headquarters in Washington and listen in on your phone calls. Of course, the law still requires a court order for a wiretap. But while technology infrastructures can persist for generations, laws and policies can change overnight. Once a communications infrastructure optimized for surveillance becomes entrenched, a shift in political conditions may lead to abuse of this new-found power. Political conditions may shift with the election of a new government, or perhaps more abruptly from the bombing of a federal building.

A year after the CALEA passed, the FBI disclosed plans to require the phone companies to build into their infrastructure the capacity to simultaneously wiretap 1 percent of all phone calls in all major U.S. cities. This would represent more than a thousandfold increase over previous levels in the number of phones that could be wiretapped. In previous years, there were only about a thousand court-ordered wiretaps in the United States per year, at the federal, state, and local levels combined. It's hard to see how the government could even employ enough judges to sign enough wiretap orders to wiretap 1 percent of all our phone calls, much less hire enough federal agents to sit and listen to all that traffic in real time. The only plausible way of processing that amount of traffic is a massive Orwellian application of automated voice recognition technology to sift through it all, searching for interesting keywords or searching for a particular speaker's voice. If the government doesn't find the target in the first 1 percent sample, the wiretaps can be shifted over to a different 1 percent until the target is found, or until everyone's phone line has been checked for subversive traffic. The FBI said they need this capacity to plan for the future. This plan sparked such outrage that it was defeated in Congress. But the mere fact that the FBI even asked for these broad powers is revealing of their agenda.

Advances in technology will not permit the maintenance of the status quo, as far as privacy is concerned. The status quo is unstable. If we do nothing, new technologies will give the government new automatic surveillance capabilities that Stalin could never have dreamed of."

Of course mining of other types of data should be expected too. Even the average person can do some surprising things with public data.

And obviously it is quite simple to crossreference this info with data available in other databases. On a final note, the FBI is now hiring computer scientists to implement a project that sounds very similar to what I just did.

And this speculation from yet another Mac Rumour Site should be taken with how many grains of salt too?

This thread should prove interesting

Here's a similar homebrew system for the Apple II:

http://www.applefritter.com/node/1542/

Since this site is down for the count, here are some more Mac related hardware mods:

    AppleFritter

and some software ones too:

    ResExcellence

Enjoy. Hopefully someone will post a mirror of the orginal.

this guy.

1. http://www.machacks.com/
2. http://www.applefritter.com/hacks

Anyone remember the Tiger Learning Computer they used to sell at Toys R Us? Oddly enough, it was basically an Apple //e.

http://www.applefritter.com/node/239

Thanks to all the recent traffic to the replica 1 site I moved the pages here: http://www.applefritter.com/briel/ Most people would agree that I can't give a biased reply to the review. So, I will just tell you that the type of feedback I'm getting is all positive. People have told me this is exactly what they are looking for. Nothing to involved that they don't understand it. Does the replica compliment the book or the book compliment the replica, yes. I've never come across a tech book that I later felt I needed more information. You can't put 2 years of electronic engineering courses into 1 book, there's just no way. Overall, if I was a student again, this would be a great book to get started on. If there is anything negative to say about it, I didn't like the Mac hacks, it was off subject and never listed as "bonus material". If it had been listed as bonus material I would have no objections. I can not tell you why the reviewer doesn't like the book, only that everybody has a differnt opinion. It is good to read reviews but in the end you need to do your own research to determine if the product is right for you or not.

I was actually expecting 3/4 of the book to talk about how to lathe the wooden case and apply a nice varnish stain.

Larry Nelson wrote a detailed guide about just that topic, as a matter of fact:

Building a Case for the Replica I

My own description of the book can be found here:

www.applefritter.com/replica

The same thing has been done with several older macs also.

The same thing has been done with several older macs also.

can be found here [applefritter.com]. nxa

+5 funny but there's really no elegance to this frame, he just ripped open the lcd clamped a frame to it and then flipped the laptop on its keyboard.

this one is much nicer
http://www.applefritter.com/hacks/duodigitalframe/

can be found here [applefritter.com]. hs

can be found here [applefritter.com]. ut

I knew if I had the physical addresses of these spammers blah blah blah, links his moderngeek.com website, /me does a quick google or 2, hilarity ensues
Slashthugz. Listen, bad boy... I don't think that you, or your friends have the spammers quaking in their proverbial boots. I would be more scared of getting pwned, or molotov cocktailed from your types. Nice macquarium, though.

I really wish Apple would bring this back... just because it is so damn cool an idea.

This page has more information, halfway down.

Mac users don't throw out computers. We convert them into Acquaria.

can be found here [applefritter.com]. kf

... I already did that to one of mine:

My MacQuarium

:)

I can't wait for Apple to release one

The closest Apple product would probably be the Apple Newton Emate 300. This was a large PDA with a touch screen you could write on. Here is a description: www.applefritter.com.

It came out around 1997, several years before MS's tablet PC initiative, but was killed along with the rest of the Newton line.

I hope (fingers crossed) This. I doubt it though, Apple seems tied to including a monitor with thier consumer line :P

this one is a Mac G4 Cube made of cardboard but it works.

on Applefritter.com:

Like the (gorgeous) Old Time Radio Case.
Another Old Time Radio case.
The (fugly) Popsicle stick case.
The (just homely) plain wood box.
OK, and the just plain whacky, like a Mac in a Floppy Disk Box!

Check out the other stuff, that site is seriously cool.

on Applefritter.com:

Like the (gorgeous) Old Time Radio Case.
Another Old Time Radio case.
The (fugly) Popsicle stick case.
The (just homely) plain wood box.
OK, and the just plain whacky, like a Mac in a Floppy Disk Box!

Check out the other stuff, that site is seriously cool.

on Applefritter.com:

Like the (gorgeous) Old Time Radio Case.
Another Old Time Radio case.
The (fugly) Popsicle stick case.
The (just homely) plain wood box.
OK, and the just plain whacky, like a Mac in a Floppy Disk Box!

Check out the other stuff, that site is seriously cool.