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1200-Baud Archeology

Posted by kdawson on from the when-men-were-men-and-interpreters-ran-in-4k dept.

jamie found this singularly geeky article on reconstructing Apple I BASIC from a cassette tape. It claims to offer the first confirmed perfect dump (BIN) of the 4096 bytes of this venerable interpreter. Terrific fun for the whole family. "The Apple I is extremely rare. Only 200 were built, and less than 100 are believed to be in existence. Neither Steve nor Woz own an Apple I any more, and neither does Apple Inc. The cassettes are even rarer, as not every Apple I came with one... So here is how to decode the signal. Let us first open the audio file in Audacity and look at the waveform... It is now time to write a small program to measure and dump the width of the pulses."

1 of 211 comments (clear)

  1. There is a MUCH Easier Way... by macs4all · · Score: 5, Informative

    I own an Apple 1. ...And a copy of Apple 1 BASIC on cassette, and Woz's Mini-Assembler that is "origin-ed" for the Apple 1. (This is the same Mini-Assembler that was in the Apple ][ ROMs, at $F666). And a few other Apple 1 goodies.

    Do you realize that the cassette interface for the Apple 1 and the Apple ][ are identical?

    Yep, you can read an Apple 1 audio cassette with any old, easy-to-find Apple ][. And from there, you can use any one of a million methods to get the data out of memory and onto another medium.

    Also, you can simply use the Apple ][ to create a NEW cassette for your Apple 1 (if you happen to be lucky enough to have one).

    BTW, I think mine is "serial number" 0064. At least that's what I think the "0064 that is written in Sharpie on the PC board means...