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Building an Apple-1 From Scratch — Just Like Woz
Lucas123 writes "This year at KansasFest, computer fans from around the world gathered to celebrate the Apple II — the computer that put Apple on the map. But the Apple-1 (a.k.a. the Apple I), the machine Steve Wozniak invented and first demonstrated at the Palo Alto Homebrew Computer Club in 1976, has always been near to my heart. In attendance at KansasFest was Vince Briel, who created an authorized reproduction the Apple-1 and showed others how to build their own. 'As a regular KansasFest attendee (and the conference's marketing director), I was one of his students. Follow along as I assemble a fully functional Apple-1 clone.'"
...he will attempt to talk to women!
paintball
It was made in 1976. That's 33 years ago. Any relevant patents should have expired about 13 years ago.
There's something about it that sticks in my craw.
It's "an antique" computer. It's a computer of historical significance. But to require authorization to recreate something that was essentially made of "off the shelf" components? The only thing I can imagine would require authorization would be the right to put an apple logo on it, and they give away apple logo stickers with just about everything Apple sells. Oh yeah, and the BASIC ROM, but I am sure someone could start an OSS project to create a compatible Apple ROM that doesn't infringe on the copyright.
I was hoping for something more in-depth than just soldering stuff on a prefabricated PCB. That's a no-brainer.
Now, go through the steps of doing a schematic, then translating it into artwork and etching the boards and it might be a pretty interesting article.
There is a book (linked in the article) called "Apple I Replica Creation: Back To The Garage" by Tom Owad that basically walks you through the construction of the Breil Computer kit, as well as a crash course in programming it in assembly and BASIC as well a a crash course in electronics design. It is a good read.
All-in-all, this is nothing really special. Anyone who buys the kit can solder it together. I believe he also has fully constructed boards as well. This seems more like an advertisement than an actual story.
Slow Down Cowboy! It's been 1 hour, 47 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
I feel that way about a Compaq 486-DX running FreeBSD 4.2. Boot it a couple times a year. Stupid, irrational, childish. But there it is.
He put the 6502 in upside down. FAIL, uninstall.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
To get the true Woz experience have your best friend steal thousands from you and then lie to you about it.
When I come up with the spare cash I have to order one of these kits. I love putting things together, and I've been looking for a major soldering challenge. This one would probably take me about 1.5 to 2 hours to build.
... can it run BSD?
and I'd like to see more classic 8 bit computers recreated like that.
I'm assuming they copied the Apple I ROM instead of creating one from scratch, and that doing so was authorized from Apple since they don't sell the Apple I anymore and this is a good PR boost for Apple to authorize computer hobysts to recreate their first computer.
I'd like to see the following computers recreated:
Timex/Sinclar 1000 //e
Commodore VIC-20
Commodore 64
Atari 800
TI 99/4A
TRS-80 COCO
Coleco Adam
Apple
IBM PC
IBM AT
CP/M systems by Kaypro
Sinclar Spectrum
BBC Acorn
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I'm not suprised he put the CPU in backwards if he can't tell the difference between an L.E.D. and a D.C. power connector...
I reserve the right to be wrong.
His Hello World program had a bug, good job!
It's one thing to build a copy, it's quite another to build the original.
As someone else has mentioned here, this is a replica of an antique computer. Which set me wondering again, what other working antique computers are out there? Particularly dawn-of-the era mainframes like ENIAC. Has any eccentric millionaire with his own hydro-electric power station built one? Or any vacuum-tube operated computer for that matter.
I did a fairly intensive search a few months ago and came up with nothing.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
No, until you design it from scratch and push the envelope of what is possible before anyone else has done it, you aren't doing it like Steve, you are just copying his work.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
My first home computer from 1978 was a Z80-based NASCOM-1 which also came as a bare board kit. Thing is, back then this was the *normal* way to buy a computer, unless you had the extra money to buy one pre-assembled.
It's kinda sad that nowadays a "news for nerds" site thinks it's newsworthy when someone does something nothing more creative than soldering together a kit computer. OOh, look! Soldering iron! Hard core!
In high school I took a class like that, except it was at a much lower level - we actually worked towards the design of a 4-bit microprocessor based on discrete logic gates and flip flops. We started with simple AND, OR, NOR, NAND gates, the different types of flip flops, moving to using Karnaugh maps to design logic, and covering simple CPU design - things like bus registers.
I remember one week's project was to design and build a hex matrix keypad - it was pretty neat to build something like that out of 74-series logic on a breadboard and actually have it work. I used a string of three inverters (1/4 each of a 7404) with the output of the last inverter feeding back into the input of the first, as my keypad's clock generator. The teacher was surprised it worked, and even more surprised that the 74-series logic was running at 24MHz (this was 1988, and the fastest computer we had in the lab ran at 6MHz).
I also remember building a 7-segment LED display driver circuit, and things like adders and shift registers.
I think the only reason our school was able to offer this class was because there was a State program that offered grants to high schools to improve their electronics labs. The total grant money available for the entire state was $150,000. We were told that the electronics teacher at the school was the only applicant for the grant program and our school had been awarded the entire $150,000. Needless to say, the electronics lab at my high school was better equipped than some university labs I've seen.
Putting moderation advice in your
Finding a monitor may be the most expensive part; a quick check of eBay shows them above $100 and going for a lot more for an original name brand. My first composite monitor was a Sears brand that I got for $79 in 1985. I was so excited to hook it up to the Tandy 1000a I bought that had been the store demo. I could hardly contain myself racing home to get it all hooked up.
no comment
This machine has too many 'improvements' for me to feel like it is an honest replica. Nonetheless, I like the idea. I might get one. I still have my Apple ][+, with the books, green composite monitor, cards including an Apple Cat 212 modem.
I also have some old, 1977 original apple program cassettes. It would be kind of cool to run those on a replica Apple.
Of all the apple books, my favorite was "Beneath Apple DOS", which was enough documentation for me to screw around with DOS 3.3 enough to do some wicked cool things, even crack copy protection.