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Building an Apple-1 From Scratch — Just Like Woz

Posted by Soulskill on from the is-that-the-one-the-president-flies-on dept.

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.'"

5 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. Authorized replica? by MartinSchou · · Score: 4, Informative

    It was made in 1976. That's 33 years ago. Any relevant patents should have expired about 13 years ago.

    1. Re:Authorized replica? by NormalVisual · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yes, actually you do. A patent (in the US, anyway) gives the holder the right to keep others from "making, using, offering for sale, or selling" whatever is covered under the patent, unless it's a patented process, in which case it's "using, offering for sale or selling throughout the United States, or importing into the United States, products made by that process".

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  2. There is a book by captjc · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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  3. Re:"Authorized" reproduction by kgagne · · Score: 5, Informative

    There are some details about the legal hurdles behind the Apple-1 replica in this 2002 article from Wired: http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/news/2002/11/56426

  4. Re:That is a great project by Gordonjcp · · Score: 3, Informative

    The inverter regulation could fail and the memory/logic is zapped with 40+V before it fries and takes itself out of commission.
    As a result, there are relatively few operational ZX Spectrums around, despite how massively popular and successful they were.

    Actually, what happens is that one of the 4116 memories for the lower 16k fails by shorting its 12V line to ground. This kills the chopper transistor in the very simple inverter. The key symptom of that is flickery garbage with a distinct stripe in each square on the screen and no colour. The failed chip always seems to stick the output high, and the rest of the memory produces random values. The video is greyscale because the 12V line is also used to supply the colour modulator. It's trivially easy to fix this - find and replace the failed memory chip, and then replace the ZTX650 chopper tranny.

    As for there being relatively few operation ZX Spectrums around, this is just plain untrue ;-)