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Remembering the Apple I
harrymcc writes "This month marks the 35th anniversary of Apple--and the 35th anniversary of the Apple I, its first computer. It was a single-board computer that was unimaginably more rudimentary than any modern Mac — it didn't even come with a case and keyboard standard — but in its design, sales and marketing, we can see the beginnings of the Apple approach that continues to this day. I'm celebrating with a look at this significant machine."
When Apple hardware was open. Apple ][ computers had their wiring diagram on the inside of the lid (which required no screws to open!). 8 slots, baby, *eight*, to fill with whatever you wanted. No voiding the warranty by opening it up, etc. I later went Amiga and didn't look back until recently. I got a nice ROM 03 Apple //gs on eBay, and even got a nice TransWarp GS card for it. Hot stuff! :)
Never was a fan of Macs. *shrug*
first!
fail.
Replica I
It's relevant, if you think about it...
Wait a minute when was Linux written? Never mind.
The other computers that could be purchased at that time had rows of LEDs and switches on their front panels, and they needed them. The Apple was quite sophisticated for a single board computer - Altair and IMSAI used that many ICs just to make a CPU chip talk to a bus.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Article: 13 pages! Oh, good, some content!
10 words and a pic, NEXT. 13 words and a pic, NEXT. 10 words and a pic.
Close.
A winner is you!
Early Apples will be on display at the Vintage Computer Festival East 7.0, May 14-15, in New Jersey.
That's what you get when you keep the glorified salesman rather than the technical genius.
A successful company worth billions and a product others are still playing catchup with? Never mind NeXT with a computer ahead of it's time.
Considering the size of the wiring diagramS for my Osbourne, I'm kinda doubting that. Also my ][e had no such info. Clarification please? Like was it a block diagram for the slots 'n' ports or suchlike?
(heresay following, I may be wrong) At one point Steve Jobs said it is cool for 3rd party developers to make applications. This flew in the face of other corporations at the time like ATARI and IBM who were trying to say,"Only the hardware manufacturer had the right to make applications" The world would be a much darker place if only hardware manufacturers could make applications for so many reasons I don't feel the need to list them here. In fact... some of the corporations are trying to backtrack on this today that,"Only some companies can make applications on their hardware."
God spoke to me.
Tom rules.
The Admin and the Engineer
And Apple still does not provide a keyboard standard. You have to pay to get one. At least it comes with the case.
By buying a new pc with interchanagable modular parts that can be upgraded however i wish from any mfg with the best price/preformance without those mfgs telling me what i can and can't do with the hardware and software that i bought. For half the price of an apple. Which incidentally now also uses that same exact hardware. But only if it has been blessed by his holyness The Jobs.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors/processors/the-truth-about-benders-brain I didn't realize that Apple would be responsible for Bender's MOS 6502 brain. Apparently David X Cohen programmed assembly for the Apple ][ in high school.
Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
The 6502 processor was fast, clean and easy to program. My first assembly programs were on it. The assembly language was simpler and almost as fast as Z-80, and the apple BIOS permitted much more elegant control of the screen. It was so nice, it persisted into the Vic 20s, a much newer machine with a tidier construction and layout.
The 6502 was eventually surpassed by the 6809, which lead into the notorious 8088 and then x86 range.
None of them beat the 6502 for intuitive assembly code. It was almost as clean as the PDP-11.
Please ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
I had schematics for the ][ and the entire annotated source code for that and Apple DOS 3.2/3.3. And these weren't pirate, Apple happily published them. Woz was a freaking genius with how much he did with so little hardware.
You wanted to add lower case? Just run this wire here. Optionally bypass the write protect for floppies? Just put a three pole switch here. You want to extend the BASIC? Sure, here's these hooks (and Beagle Brothers made insane use of that).
The Apple I was the prototype for that and I salute it. I never had one, though of course now I wish I did!
Also funny how it's utterly unlike the Apple of today. I remember when the first Mac came out, completely unexpandable, and The Steve declared that it would never have more than 128K of RAM because that was more than enough for anyone. Which was ridiculous, because my Apple ][ had 16x that much already.
Yes I'm old.
Being a geek is about values. Only one of the Two Steves is a geek. Steve Wozniak is a geek; Steve Jobs is not. Wozniak would be reveling in gadgets and tech whether it made him a pile of money or not; Jobs would head for the exit the moment it was clear to him the grass was greener elsewhere. Jobs would be perfectly happy doing anything, in the complete absence of anything geeky, if it made him filthy rich and popular.
Wozniak is a geek. Jobs is just a... salesman.
... including the claim that its 16 bit address bus allowed expansion to 65K of memory. /me didn't realise the use of decimal rather than binary capacity multipliers in marketing claims was so old.
somebody IP ban this guy please, or at least mod him down...this crap does not fly here at /.
Gotta love those click farms with one single photo and two paragraphs of text per page. Nice way to spread one article out over 13 pages.
...wtf is up with this dude's chin? http://technologizer.com/2011/04/08/apple-i/13/
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
Fight back against these antisocial New Media types - never click Next Page when it is clear they could have put the entire thing on one page.
I have an affinity for things I can tweak but I have to admit this represents a minority opinion and that sealed boxes make sense for typical users (cost reductions, simplified supply chain, etc).
Of course there are other good reasons for "closing the box"... The original Mac, the first iMac and several models in between had built-in CRTs and the associated high-voltage circuitry, so you really, really didn't want users poking their fingers inside.
Most subsequent consumer Macs have been "small form factor" (and usually much smaller form-factor than competing SFF computers). If you make something as tiny as the Mac Mini or a slim as a modern iMac, you're gonna end up with "no user servicable parts inside". The advantage for Apple is that ultra-slim systems can sell for a premium *useful if you're trying to develop your own platform), rather than trying to compete in the low-margin mini-tower and boxy laptop market.
As you point out, Apple tower systems are still clip-open (swapping drives or adding memory to a Mac Pro is a breeze).
The other thing is, the motive and opportunity for tinkering has reduced. In the 80s any self-respecting geek would have lost the lid of their computer and have all manner of internal expansion - even on systems that didn't support it there would be boards piggybacked on chips and flying wires soldered to pins on the motherboard. Not so easy on a modern multi-layer motherboard with surface-mount components. I haven't felt the need to go near a computer with a soldering iron in years... There's also less need - the main reason I ever went delving in a Mac (apart from memory and HD upgrades) was to fit ethernet cards - these days, you'll find at least one ethernet port (probably plus WiFi) built in to any half-decent board, and anything else can be fitted via USB. The only PC with an internal add-on card I have now is my MythTV box - and I'm planning to replace that with a smaller box + USB tuner (having found that there are few linux-supported PCIe tuners and that the most suitable dual tuner PCI card is actually a USB tuner stuck on a card with a PCI-USB bridge...)
Apple have also pushed external expansion - first SCSI, then Firewire, then the iMac pulled USB out of the doldrums, now they're pushing ThunderBolt...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
it may not have been completed.
http://www.commodore.ca/history/people/chuck_peddle/chuck_peddle.htm
Apparently when he turned up to help them out, he ended up doing a lot of analysing of what they were doing and helping them understand how the 6502 worked and what they were doing wrong.
I was very encouraged to find this site. I wanted to thank you for this special read. I definitely savored every little bit of it. Hire Dedicated Seo
My earliest memory of meeting Steve Jobs was, IIRC, at the Atlantic City Microcomputer Festival in August 1977. He gave me a pitch about the Apple 1 and explained why people wanted color computers, even low resolution, instead of the state of the art monochrome displays. He told me, confidentially, that Apple already had 650 orders for the unannounced Apple II computer. I walked away thinking he was a misguided huckster. 650 advanced orders? Yeah, right, will never happen. I finally decided to buy an Alpha Micro, a 16 bit PDP-11 clone and use it to develop and market software. Now that was a useful computer. It was a true multiuser computer capable of support a whopping 5 users. Alpha Micro Basic language was much more advanced than Apple's. The main regret I have is in not taking more photos of those early days. The majority of the vendors exhibiting at the show were are now long gone, with the notable exception of Apple.
Ah, yes, let's remember the Apple I but forget the ol' Commodore 64.
And if it HASN'T been too well maintained over the years (not thoroughly cleaned inside) maybe you can get some old skin flakes from when Steve Jobs personally hand soldered some of the connections.
Then, using the DNA from the flakes, makes some clones. From the clones, harvest some organs (a pancreas and liver should do just fine*). Offer them to Mr. Jobs for a cool $1 Billion (or the chance to be first in line for the iPad 3 ;)
Actually there might be easier ways of getting the requisite cells. In fact, if you've already got this level of cloning ability, you could probably just ask him. (Another alternative would be to grow some organs from stem cells, that technology is coming along.)
*while you're at it try to excise/replace the "bad" gene which made his pancreas cancerous in the first place
Remember when a article would take up one page and was split out among 13 pages with 6 billion ads surrounding the tiny bit of content on each page? Those were the days.
"Jobs most likely sees himself as a visionary or an artist, perhaps even a philosopher..."
From what I've seen of how he talks, how he treats customers, and how fans follow him, I would say "prophet" would be more apt.
(And like most prophets, he's invented his own religion.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Wrong. From wikipedia:
"However, to make a working computer, users still had to add a case, power supply transformers, power switch, ASCII keyboard, and composite video display."
It didn't have a power switch to flip. And Wozniak couldn't even get the thing to work properly without help from MOS/Commodore's Chuck Peddle.
As always, Apple's contribution to early computing is severely overblown by revisionists.
For a good history of early personal computers (particularly those where the 6502 is involved), check out the book "Commodore: A Company on the Edge"- the first half is basically about the father of personal computers, Chuck Peddle.
I didn't realize that Apple was still selling Apple I's after they introduced the Apple II. I thought they has sold out the entire first (and ONLY) run of Apple 1 boards before the II was introduced. What the story didn't mention was the fact that Apple ALSO sold the Apple II as just a bare board sans case, just like the Apple I. They didn't offer this option very long, but I do remember it being available. Perhaps they thought that Apple I owners who had built the I into a custom case would want to upgrade? I think the two boards were about the same size, but the II had to be mounted with the short dimension front to back (if you wanted the expansion slots in back).
Stan Veit operated a NYC computer shop (in the back of a toy store) and carried the Apple I. I remember seeing it AND the Apple II when they first came out. I worked at a rival computer store, but we didn't carry Apple or Altair. The place I worked at had SWTP, Processor Technology, and Imsai computers.
... including the claim that its 16 bit address bus allowed expansion to 65K of memory. /me didn't realise the use of decimal rather than binary capacity multipliers in marketing claims was so old.
There's a common perception that disk makers and bandwidth providers are cheating customers by advertising base-10 gigabytes and megabits. They're not. They're reporting numbers the way storage and data transmission people have done since the beginning of time.
It's the memory and CPU manufacturers that gradually switched from base-10 to base-2 because it made calculations and addressing easier.
...it didn't have those cool bitmap graphics as function keys that the Timex Sinclair had! An Apple ][+ was the first computer I ever killed. Accidentally plugged in a parallel card while the thing was on. Actually, all it killed was the BASIC ROM. You could still boot Pascal games.
Steve Jobs knows how to solder???
Wow, my opinion of him just quadrupled.