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For Sale: The First Apple I
Foxman writes "It's got
no case and no hard drive. Still, a computer handmade by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs
could fetch the most money ever paid for a personal computer.
The very first Apple computer is going on the auction
block. "
And it should be placed in a museum. No, really, this should probably be donated to the Smithsonian.
the Smithsonian already has one.
My recollection, "permanent memory" for PCs
went as (1) paper tape, (2) cassette tapes,
(3) floppy drives, then (4) hard drives around 1980. Bill Gates loaded PC BASIC 1.0 on the Altair in '76 (?) via floppy tape he had cross-compiled on a PDP at Harvard. It ran the first loading.
In the big iron arena, the hard drives were just
shrinking from 14" to 8" and washing machine size.
32 MB was a large drive in '77 and cost about $15,000 for a PDP.
Don't you Brits know that there is a worldwide shortage of the letter 'u'. So much so that hundreds of millions of people do not use the english language at all. The rest (who care) have gone to great pains to purge the unnecessary occurance of this endangered letter from their lexicon. Do your part ro reduce waste!
12 u's were sacrificed for this comment in the hopes that others can be saved.
You've got the first 386 chip ever made!? I'll give you $12k for it!
I had one I got here in Taiwan back in 1986. Box said Apple, manual said Apple...
Screw copyrights!!
and throw it out the window, just to spite Steve Jobs.
Apple must be getting really short of cash if they have to auction off the first machine they ever built...
Pirates of Silicon Valley. Sunday, 8pm EST.
:-)
Got the Palm III all set up to remind me.
Not anonymous, just lazy.
Bill Kocik
It's called "Trimph of the Nerds" AFAIK
The "Newton" was recently discontinued due to slow sales.
But at any given time, only 5-10% of the technology companies make money and survive.
Five years from now, which InterNet portals
will be alive? A couple years ago even
Netscape seemed to be winner.
Its a combination of very intelligent guessing
and luck.
Yeah, this movie might be worth watching just to play "count the inaccuracies".
My School (Northrop University) had an Apple one. To the best of my knowledge, it was sold as just a motherboard - no case or keyboard was included. I'm not sure if it included a power supply. The documentation looked like it was run off on a copying machine. I beleive we managed to fire it up (after having some problems getting a keyboard to work) but never managed to find anything useful to do with it. Maybe somebody could use it as a digital clock...
There is a museum of sorts in the lobby of building 4. One of the displays is an Apple I, under glass.
(And Apple has ~ $1.2 billion cash + liquid assets, so no, we're not short on cash)
I did come across a web site several years back that contained not only the complete schematic of the Apple 1 (reproduced from the owner's manual) but a TIFF image of the motherboard suitable for photographic etching. Therefore, it should not be too terribly difficult (nor expensive) to build an Apple I today.
In fact, anyone with a fair stock of old TTL chips could build an Apple I, subject it to the equivalent of two decades of aging, and pass it off fairly easily as an authentic Apple I to the unsuspecting person.
Were the sales documentation not present, I'm certain that this item would not fetch nearly as much. However, there was a common rumor circulating in the '80s that an Apple I had sold at auction for $10,000, so accounting for the time lapse, inflation, increased collectability value, and documentation that it was at lease one of the first few Apple Is produced, leads me to believe that it may go for much more than $40,000.
-p.
u r smart n u reed artacle gud
Nah..somethings haven't changed. The Mac is still for sissies who don't understand computers.
Here's a link to an add for the apple 1 :
http://www.xs4all.nl/~bootsma/Apple1_Ad.jpg
Check out the price! >:)
Bootsma.
HAAHAHAH
Dumbass
Just pulled down Interface Age Vol. 2, Issue 1, Dec 1976 from the shelf.
On page 11 is a full page ad for the apple (I) selling for $666.66*
* includes 4K bytes RAM
----------------------------------------
Apple Introduces the First Low Cost Microcomputer System with a Video Terminal and 8K Bytes of RAM on a Single PC Card.
* You don't need an Expensive Teletype.
* No More Switches, No More Lights.
* 8K Bytes RAM in 16 Chips!
* A Little Cassette Board that works!
Software: A tape of APPLE BASIC is included free with the Cassette Interface.
APPLE Computer Company * 770 Welch Rd., Palo Alto, CA 94304 * (415)32604284
-----------------
Note the tricky sales pitch from that time - Headlines with 8K RAM but prices with 4K. ~;-)
A Nony Mouse
Hey, Mr. Elitist. Apple ][ Mac.
Call -161 will also work. Lots of incorrect calls will get you into the monitor. Call -151 is the proper entry point.
Am I the only one that gets that?
68K sucks?
#1) This machine they are talking about (Apple I) is not 68K. 68K wasn't even a figment of anyone's imagination when the Apple I was built.
#2) 68K rocks. 68K is not just Mac. It was used in Amiga's, older Sparc's, NeXT, and quite a few other architectures.
#3) I doubt Apple are the one's auctioning the computer off.
#4) You are lame.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/isbn=0385312105
Not totally focused on Apple, but includes a good account just about everything (and everyone) that ultimately mattered. Unlike many newer "history of cool computer stuff" books, both the anecdotes and facts in Levy's "Hackers" have successfully withstood years of critical review.
^@ for those of us who were _really_ into economy.
My first computer was an Apple II with 48 k memory and *2* floppy drives (Each only held 130k or so, can't remember the exact number). Got it for Christmas when I was 12 yo.
:(
Then went to a TRS-80 Model III -> Commodore 64 -> Atari ST (Great machine, BTW) -> a long progression of IBM PC compatables.
Always wanted a Commodore PET, maybe I'll pick one up on eBay someday.
I miss those days
"Amazon's URL can't be copied and pasted, so if it doesn't work, use the Amazon search :-)"
It can be, if you paste the ISBN # directly into the "obidos" URL as I did above.
Remember the handling diagrams they printed on the backs of their disk jackets? I found a scan of them:
B eagleBros.gif
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~ongtw/pics/appleii/
Ha!
If you're looking for a Linux porting project that almost nobody will have the hardware for, I've got an Intel Bubble Memory evaluation kit. It has 8 megabits of bubble memory (512K bytes) on an ISA card. Utilities included with it include DOS drivers to make it a small 'solid state disk'. I've often thought that it would be the coolest, and most obscure piece of hardware to write a Linux device driver for. Think Linus would include it in the next kernel? heh
rendent@earthlink.net
The Apple I cost $666.66 direct from the Apple Computer company itself. Of course, you had to provide your own case, power transformer, cassette tape drive, keyboard, and tv set...
Yup, Woz is the man.
/. readers wanna worship any Apple employee, The Woz is the man.
And if
You had to be a small business and the computer had to be used daily. Not bad getting $15,000 of equipment though.
Now I can finally buy a computer that might actually make a Windows system run WORSE! ;)
Bullsh*t. I'd bet you $40,000 that you don't have one. Nor does your company.
My favorite Apple II trick was to take print a 13-character message like so:
10 PRINT "This is cool!";
20 GOTO 10
On a 40-column display it would scroll diagonally which looks kinda cool. You had to use a 13 (or 39) char message to make it scroll like that tho.
The memory bus ran at 2Mhz. The CPU ran at 1Mhz. Every other cycle was used for video access to the RAM. This seems to confuse people because it's the opposite of the way modern computers work.
That type of incident wasn't all that unusual. I knew a guy in LA who was using an Apple IIe to run a BBS, and for some reason the BBS software started crashing frequently, so he took the case off and found a big surprise - a mouse nest!
I was at the SLAC Homebrew Computer Club meeting
when the two Steves showed it off back in '77.
Their innovation was off-the-shelf I/O, i.e.
keyboard and monitor. Lots of us were still
playing with dipstick-L.E.D. lights I/O. We'd
enter the assembled machine code sequences by
hand and watch the register results on L.E.D.
Lots of us at the time thought the Steves'
off the shelf computer was for sissies who really didn't understand computers. Boy were wrong!
But we all had fun and few even got rich.
Just to provide some needed technical details about the Apple I (since everybody here seems to not know what a PC back then constituted):
The Apple I consisted of a single PC board. It had built onto it a parallel 8-bit input port for attaching an ASCII keyboard (user supplied). There was a scratchpad area on the board near the keyboard interface to add an inverter chip if your keyboard used the wrong logic state for the port.
There was no AC power transformer included, because that would have added significant weight to the shipped unit. There was a connector to attach a composite-video monitor (television resolution) to the board, to act as a display. Mass storage was provided as an interface to connect a Cassette tape recorder.
Up until a few years ago I had a nearly complete set of Kilobaud Computing magazine. (sold them to a collector for probably-way-too-little- about $80) Issue One included a full page ad for the new Apple I computer, and the issue also included a legnthy review article about the machine. The things that were innovative about the Apple I were that it came out of the box ready to attach a keyboard and video display monitor. (and also ready to attach a power transformer you had to get elsewhere) Earlier personal computers generally included a row of toggle switches or a hex keypad (like on my two Syn-1 machines).
My Big-Board computer (also sold as the Xerox 820) was similar to an Apple I, although of a far later design. It has on-board video and a parallel keyboard interface. But it's also got a floppy diskette interface (50 pin connector for 8" floppy drives) and serial ports. And it has !64K! which is far more than the Apple 1 came with.
There are still good deals to be had at flea markets and swapmeets for the older gear. I got my BigBoard for $10 a few years back. I got a Syn-1 (Synertek clone of a Kim-1) complete with the original box and manual, for $10 a few years back as well. Someday I want to wire both Syn-1's I own together and make some sort of multi-player game for them.
rendent@earthlink.net (not interested in getting a Nick)
You all know that Bill Gates is the one who's gonna buy all three of these machines. Not for nostalgia or any such reverie, but because he needs to steal more technology from Apple :)
The next version of Windows will be "Windows Interactive" which requires the user to place the software on the harddrive manually.
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
Good thing it doesn't have the Microsoft tax or it'd be that much more expensive.
Let's come back down to earth though.. It makes me wonder who (besides you know who) would waste 40 grand on the first Apple computer.
And it doesn't even have a see-thru blueberry colored case, or come with a whimsical one-button mouse. In fact, the only thing it has in common with the iMac is the lack of a floppy drive.
(-:
----
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
This technique definately reminds me of my old VAX days in Germany; we had a couple of 11/785's (nice steel cabinets) clustered together. When one would start flaking out we would shut it down and kick the shit out of the sides with our boots. Did wonders about 90% of the time.
rodent...
Tactical nuclear weapons are a viable alternative!
I soldered it together myself...built it part by part as I could afford it...completely socketed, no direct soldering of chips. I remember doing 3d wireframe graphics using GraForth, and writing a turtle graphics package for it that imiated the LOGO command set.
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
haha, yeah right. I bet you couldn't even fit Linux into an Apple //c's 128kB of RAM, let alone the Apple I's tiny amount.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Posted by ConradUn0:
:)
At school we found an old Apple I made speciallly for a company called Bell and Howell. This discovery took place about 3 months ago in a place we call the graveyard, and ever since then we have been lovingly taking care of it and learning it inside and out... ahhh.. what a great machine. Recently ran a prime number generator, took something like 2 hours to find the first 1 thousand, and that was running a highly optimized algorithm. Sure the machine is porbably worth tons, but we have no intentions of selling it
Posted by zippy@cs.brandeis.edu:
m l ...
Beagle Bros' Diapora:
http://www.response-o-matic.com/
familiar style, eh?
http://www.westcodesoft.com/WestCode-Company.ht
scroll to the bottom to see
http://www.westcodesoft.com/Artwork/beagle.gif
--Pat
As I recall, noone ever designed a clone of the Apple II. [though there was one machine (Sorceror?) that had a 6502, z80, and 8088 (6?)) that could run apple, trs-80, and ms-dos software. It died when it could no longer run pc-dos software when programs starting using keyboard scan codes instead of ascii input].
Franklin and the others simply flat-out stole the apple design. Copied the ROM's, and usually the motherboard layout. Then, having saved on R&D costs, they undercut apple. In short, these weren't competitors, but thieves.
Also, this did *not* cause the Apple II to die. Apple finally pulled the plug because people wouldn't stop ordering them (and still, they made an emulation card for the LC). Each sale of a II put apple that much further behind the ms-dos machines. Yes, the II had a loyal following, but it was an anchor holding apple back from progress. They certainly could have sold more in the short term, at the expense of the long term prosepects for the mac.
As someone else pointed out, the II did not run at 2 but 1 mhz. The III ran at 2, and would drop to 1 for compatibility mode.
I'm not sure that all of the II's came with cases. The old purple manual was softbound, so I presume it came with the II. It was written with the assumption that the user would be supplying case and keyboard, and had instructions to connect these (and power supply, iirc). I believe that at least some of the boards shipped, and remained on the product list long after they could be ordered. I saw one once at Alltronics, in a blue wooden case--though I now wonder if it was an original and not a II.
He is probably the wealthiest grade school teacher in the area, then :)
:)
Sure, he's spent lots of his fortune. But the reported "loss" on the US concert included *buying* the land it was held on. Don't worry about him, he may be down to his last couple dozen million, but he'll be fine
Graphical [mumble] Machine
There was a mac prototype that used a 6809. They got quickdraw running at least somewhat, and had a bouncing ball on the screen. However, the bright idea of "a single bank of memory" meant that it would have 64kx8, or 64k of memory, and would lose a third to the video display. Thus the 68000 was brought in, for 64kx16 total memory [ I *wish* I was making this up!]
Could this have been the GLM?
Would the date codes on the ROM or CPU suffice?
Actually, I think that was the Apple III, a notoriously cheap-ass machine.
That's why you never see any of them.
adr
I had a totally no-name pirate knock-off of the Apple II that I got in Singapore before Singapore had copyright laws. But it wasn't a cheap piece of crap, by any means -- it worked entirely too well and had these nifty-ass macro keys besides... you'd hit the macro key, and then another key on the keyboard, and the machine would spell out "RUN" or "PRINT" or "CALL-161" or whatever the macro key was bound to.
Crazy days. I loved that damn machine.
adr
Ok, who is going to be the one who buys it and puts linux on it? :)
And yes, I rememeber the quote about the Apple I. I believe one of the women that worked at the company had recently purchased one for $10,000.. That was around 1986? I don't believe that the price increase is that far off, yet. I figure within another 20 years the price of one (given the current value of money) will reach at least $200,000. Apple does pretty much get credit for starting the computing revolution (read: home and small business), so this icon sure deserves the price tag.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
Now there's something you don't find with computers anymore! When I had my Apple ][+, I had the joys of opening up the schematics and seeing the flow of hardware logic that the software controlled. It was beautiful and right down to each gate. Writing low level assembly was a breeze since I knew exactly what the computer was going to do when I exchanged bits on the ports. It was easy to write code without bugs, because all the information was there.
The schematics allowed some very inventive software to be written and helped cause an explosive growth of community. It was a hackers dream to toy with the internals and code.
I would gladly pay double for computer boards with schematics down to the programmable ports. Documentation makes hardware much more useful for me.
Quite the opposite! If I remember the first Apples were sold as a board. The Apple II had quite a durable case that allowed the computer to survive fire and any abuse. It was a solid computer from the enclosure to its core guts. It was simple and well designed. They still seem to fetch a high price tag. I hope to catch an Apple II surplus, because they do work well for what they do. The Apple II that I had only ran at 2MHz on its 6502 processor, but for simple things, one or two million instructions per second is fast. Screen updates were faster than a blink of an eye. I wrote some GUI environments that were mighty quick too. The only problem was that you could not write bloated code in less than 48K of memory. Which was a good thing.
I had the Apple ][+ (I never saw a plain ][) with a stock 2MHz crystal driving a Rockwell 6502 processor. I would later find out that processor was used in video games, such as Asteroids (my all time favorite!)
Some time ago, I relived my memories by finding an Apple ][e emulator for DOS and a stash of warez. I would be most happy if I stumbled upon an emulator for Linux!
The only problem I had with the emulator was that the games ran WAY TOO FAST! It was a joy to relive the experience of programming this simple, yet effective computer. I always wanted to see technology advance where the platform could get small enough where an Apple computer could fit in my pocket. Well, now I just got a Palm Pilot and hope they are easy to program just like the ][+...
Not a bad project, really. A cluster of Apples these days would make an excellent lab experiment. They are simple enough to trace what happens when they talk to eachother and compute a larger problem. It may be slow, but it would be a learning experience!
A mouse peeing on the power supply back in those days was a valid excuse for a computer failure. In my experience, it took some act of nature, like a squirrel jumping into the substation transformer to cause a computer to die.
Nowadays, people accept a computer not working for no reason at all. Its a damn shame. What used to be external causes or hardware failure can now be blamed on what was once solid, reliable logic. Now we have bloat running the majority of consumer's computers. So much for innovation and the billions people pay for the newer crap!
A few months ago, I read in the Wall Street Journal about a software developer's forum about making a profit was held in Silicon Valley. The main point was driven into the crowd that don't wait for perfection, but to release it and worry about bugfixes later. I was appauled that this seems to be common business practice. No pride.
It may sound crazy, but if you knew anything about graphics, you were a hit. In 1984, I was at La Jolla Jr. High in southern California. Apple ][+ computers filled a classroom. They were a great learning tools and those who knew how to do anything graphical, eye catching candy, were the first to be asked for help. Our teacher enjoyed the opportunity and encouraged us to learn. Computer classes were electives attended by both sexes and I have quite a notes and colorful kisses in my yearbook from helping those of the opposite sex.
No software?
A good starting point for Apple III software.
A good archive for Apple II software.
Eat your heart out this link.
Zaxxon? Castle Wolfenstien? I remember those! Email a copy to me, I will host them for you!
Old gems like those should never be allowed to die.
About making music on the Apple just by toggling a flip-flop for the speaker: it was incredible! I forgot exactly how to write those little programs, but it was about 22 lines of assembly (I knew all the hex codes and did it by hand!) involving a shift, xor, and a compare in a couple of loops. If I still had that Apple, I would be doing work writing sound effects. Unfortunately, I have not seen any pages on the art of making noise.
Using computers as matchmakers was the rave back in the 80's. The cool uses one could dream of... *sigh*
I'm not sure how you did it, but the only way I can think of distributing the load on simple computers, is to batch out parts of the job to others, and fetch the results and finish the job.
I wish I still had Beagle Bros' Big Tip Book laying around at work so I could quote this. I remember them stating, somewhere in the mid-80's, a very brief history of Apple (pre-Mac) machines. When they started off with the Apple I, they said not to expect seeing one, as they were extremely rare and worth $10,000. 15 years of inflation and vintage-ness only crank the 'value' of it to $40,000? I'd actually expect it to be auctioned off much higher.
Does any old Apple ][ guy/girl have this book laying around to quote that section?
Man, Beagle Bros. rocked!
Taken straight from this wonderful book from Bert Kersey and Bill Sanders, circa Bantam Books, April 1986: //c to Goodwill... Grr!
APPLE I?
Of course there was an Apple I. Back in the old days when computers cost megabucks and only corporations and the government could afford them, the Apple I was one of the first "affordable" computers for the home. It was around 10K (that is, $10,000). Of course, it only came with about 4K of RAM, and you had to supply your own keyboard and there were no disk drives; only cassettes. Now that was fun!
----------------------
Now if my dad hadn't donated my
Try Sun Remarketing, http://www.sunrem.com
/// system utilities disk. $15.00
;-)
They're pricey, but right now I saw a Apple
More sigh...they used to sell Lisas cheap, too.
And this is _really_ making me want to go find that landfill in Utah that has all the unsold Lisas buried in it. _Real_ computer archaeology!
And check out www.geocities.com/~compcloset.
Today's English Lesson: Oxymorons
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
]
**>>BELCH
I once worked at one of the first computer stores in the Bay Area, what was originally the Byte Shop of Walnut Creek, but by the time I worked there had become Microsun computers. (Sort of an ironic name nowadays..) Anyway, I worked there in 1979, and the owner of the shop told me about the time that Jobs and Wozniak asked him for investment money for starting Apple. My boss was involved in the Homebrew Computing Club, and thats how he met the guys back then. He and his father went down to the famous garage to look at the machine, to see what their money (something like $10,000 to $30,000, I forget exact the amount) was going to buy. Jobs and Wozniak had the first Apple I prototype, but they could not get it to work at all - it crashed every time they tried to do anything at all with it. They spent the whole vening trying things, without any success. As a result, my boss and his father decided not to invest any money in it, because they thought it was never going to work. In 1979, my boss told me this story, kicking himself because even then he knew that he would have been a multi-millionaire. I can't imagine how much money he would have ended up with, but he certainly would have done quite well.
I really miss the enhanced part, tho, and Merlin, and ProDOS 1.8, and. . . *sigh* I really want a IIgs, tho... as well as copies of _Beneath Apple DOS_, _Beneath Apple ProDOS_, _What's Where In the Apple_, and _ProDOS Technical Manual_.
The Apple was the reason I got into computing bigtime.
Crawling back under the couch. . .
--
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
A stock Apple ][ ran at 1.023MHz... yours must've been accelerated. :o)
The only problem was that you could not write bloated code in less than 48K of memory.
I just got done writing a rather cool hexdump util that's quite featureful for the 128 or so bytes of 3page[1] memory it takes.
[1] "3 page" refers to the chunk of RAM at $300-$3CF
--
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
--
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
something like:
spkr = $C030 ;speaker toggle ;use as a 2nd speaker instead of cassette out
wait = $FCA8 ; mon wait routine
cass = $C020
(here, reading the spkr toggle and creative use of wait will whap speaker once... writing to spkr whaps it twice. Lots of groovy ways to make sound with ONE bit! _Robotron 2084_ was a prime example of exploiting this to its fullest. Oh yes, you can fake "stereo" sound by using the cass toggle connected to another speaker.)
--
--
Me spell chucker work grate. Need grandma chicken.
I collect old computers, and while I don't have any Apple IIs, I do have an Apple III. Unfortunately, I have *no software* for it. If anyone knows where I can obtain any software for it (even just the OS) I'd appreciate it. I also have a MIPS workstation in the same boat (MIPS branded, down to the MIPS mouse).
I have a (full?) set of Apple II manuals still in shrink wrap if anyone is interested. Also a full shelf of documentation on the AT&T 6300 down to schematics and BIOS source dump if anyone needs the info...
--Rubinstien
10 PRINT " A" //\|/\\"
20 PRINT " H"
30 PRINT " / \"
40 PRINT " | |"
50 PRINT " / \"
60 PRINT " | |"
70 PRINT " | |"
80 PRINT " | |"
90 PRINT " | |"
100 PRINT " | |"
110 PRINT " | |"
120 PRINT "
130 PRINT ""
140 PRINT " * * "
150 PRINT ""
160 PRINT " * * *"
170 PRINT ""
180 PRINT " * * * "
190 PRINT ""
200 PRINT " * * * *"
210 PRINT ""
220 PRINT " F R"
230 PRINT " I U"
240 PRINT " L L"
250 PRINT " T E"
260 PRINT " E S"
270 PRINT " R !"
280 PRINT ""
290 PRINT ""
300 PRINT ""
310 GOTO 10
"better ways of doing things eventually just replace the inferior things" - Linus Torvalds 09-08-07
Although the $40,000 would probably double Apple's last-year revenues.
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
On with my story. I come home to find my Mother stuck my Vic, and both 64's in a box ready to go out to the trash. It took some arguing, convincing, and eventually hiding to get those puppies back in my posession. Now, my mother uses one of the 128's in the kitchen for recipes.
Occasionally, I'll pull out the old Game Collection and play some games on the 128 in c64 mode. There's NOTHING like playing on the original machine. (No, Not even an emulator.)
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
lets all throw some cash in, and get this, so we can port linux to it . . . .
Have you tried nesting emulators? Like they did on bedope awhile back... I can't find the screenshot anymore, but it showed BeOS running a MacOS emulator, on which they were running a dos emulator, which was running windows 3.1, and on top of that they had a MacII emulator running digdug!
That should slow things down nicely I think...
I have heard of confirmed sales in the $10K area, and there was apparently an auction some time ago where one sold for something like $30K (I seem to remember Woz being involved?)
This one will probably sell for $40K or more -- there are some very well financed collectors running around these days.
The one at Fry's in Sunnyvale, btw, belongs to the Computer History Association of California.
Shameless plug: Check out my collection as well -- I don't have an Apple I, but It's on my wanted list.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
Apple isn't selling it. Someone else is.
Rumor has it that it's a guy named Computer Jones, but I don't know for sure. CJ is, shall we say, a little not-quite-mainstream.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
An Apple III or Amiga 500. They both had ICJ problems (Intermediate Chip Jump).
--"In dreams begin responsibilities" - Delmore Schwartz
Think of the Beowulf clust.e....r.......
SIGBADHUMOR received: Program terminated.
This sig is false.
why are they selling it? :)
if i had one of those i'd still be using it
to get the monitor.
My friends, we are nothing but wings on the chicken of society.
Hmm.. would have thought it'd have gotten a bit mouldy now.. it probably looks better than an IMac anyway :>
Delphis
close one ;> .. Must have hit that submit button a tiny bit quicker than I did...
AppleII's were amusing, yea.. I seem to remember those little goobers with their tiny round screens and beige (or was it just dirty?) plastic.. aww..
Delphis
Actually, I think what when wrong with the "manufacturing process" is that Steve Jobs insisted that the machine wouldn't have a fan.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
The land fill is in Logan, Utah where Sun Remarketing is located. My Uncle helped start Sun Remarketing.
I used to have a Mac XL which was a Lisa converted to be a Mac. It was a pretty neat machine.
The Lisa's had removable I/O, CPU, memory cards that all fit in a removable thing and you could do it all with out a screw driver.
So do I. That computer was a riot. I used to be able to impress people by operating at the '*' prompt and using only memory addresses to access commands. I probably could still do it if I had one right here too :-) I once wired the button of the paddle port to my door such that the computer would beep if my door was opened. It would also print "INTRUDER ALERT" over and over. It was a true Hacker's machine. I was an 11 year old kid with nothing more than a public library card but there was still enough information around for me to find out what went on under the cover. There was a guru in my school who taught me well in the ways of hacking. She used to give me books and software free of charge for my home machine so that I could learn. My favorite programs were animations where I would have something flying through space and it would be blown up by a laser beam or something. It was always fun to try an code a better looking explosion.
My sister used the machine for word processing until about 1992 or so when she got a Dell 486.
*sniffle*
They just dont make em like they used to...
-Rich
That was the COOLEST book.
I especially liked the part where they were like "This is a secret so dont tell anyone" and then had the cartoon beard covering the bits of information. I'd love to get in touch with the people who wrote those things.
I wish i knew what happened to mine. I used to
check it out from the library continuously for about a year or so. At some point I lost the library's copy and ended up having to pay for it to be replaced. It never was. And I never found the copy I had been charged for.
-Rich
It is very unfortunate that this huge piece of computer history is being sold. It should be in a museum, perhaps in the Smithsonian. I hope that the buyer is willing to donate it to a museum.
Ah, such is capitialism...
-AP
I was watching wargames on TNT the day before yesterday I think and I saw an advertisement for some movie about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. It'll prolly be all fluff and fake stuff but mebbe they'll have something interesting in it.
-- There's only one replacement for displacement.....
This will be how they continue to remain profitable for an eighth quarter... they'll start selling their Apple I and ]['s that are sitting in the dungeon. Because everyone knows that these iMacs will stop selling once Gateway, Packard Bell, et al start selling "cute" PC's that cost half as much and run "twice as fast" (to use Jobs' benchmarks).
:)
-Chris
... I wonder what it's RC5 rate is?
The Apple III was a damn fine machine. They had a manufacturing problem for a while which caused the chips to not be fully seated after transportation (I think they sockets were too tight and they weren't fully seated). I sold a bunch of them with my software for several years, and we never had a failure. I don't like dropping machines so we opened up each one and manually pushed down on each chip. Yes, they machine ran a little warm, but they never overheated. The main problem with the machine was an image problem; once people thought there it was a bad machine they didn't sell at all. But that machine could have 256K of memory, and when running Apple Pascal was a dream to work with. We sold Corvus (any remember them) hard disks, and they worked like a champ. Our largest customer had 8 Apple IIIs on a Corvus network all hooked up to a Corvus 80 meg drive (really big in those days). The networking was a bit primitive, but this customer was running a payroll/billing system for several hundred employees.
-- Error: Cannot find file REALITY.SYS - Universe halted, please reboot!
...but something went wrong with the manufacturing process that all the chips didn't properly seat.
In the second "Batman" movie, all the computers in Penguin's campaign headquarters are Apple IIIs.
Dave
The article mentions that they offered the machine to Steve Jobs, but they didn't mention Steve Wozniak. I guess his current position of grade school teacher doesn't give him the prestige (or salary) to be offered a $40,000 antique machine. Or perhaps they just know that he'd refuse to buy back something he built with his own hands, and could still build today, given the proper tools and components.
Steve Jobs is a good businessman, but the Woz is a great hacker.
They should give the machine back to the Woz and let him auction it off for charity, or keep it, or trash it, or whatever he wants to do with it. The Apple computer was his brainchild. Apple Computers, Inc. was Steve Jobs' creation.
--Kevin T.
BTW, I dispute the claim somebody made in the news article that Apples are the most sought after vintage computers. Altairs, even pieces of them, are going for ridiculous amounts on eBay.
Wow. I still have working (I think) IIgs at home, with 1.25 Meg of Ram, and the Apple High Speed Scsi card. (Yes, it even has a 20 Meg hard drive).
Unfortunately, my software for it is somewhat limited. My collection of games was sold with the Enchanced IIe that we sold 8-10 years ago. Ooops.
Microsoft has been collecting digital rights to artwork for the purpose of propping up their own encyclopedia software while denying competitor's products the benefit of using such artwork. I find it disgusting, and yes, Microsoft has a history of rewriting history with a pro-MS slant.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
here you go
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
This thread is making me weepy!
::stroking my beloved PPro200::
My first box was an Apple ][c... and come to think of it, since it was at "the top of the line" of the time (128k memory... stand back!), it was my parents fault for starting this damn habbit I have of buying the expensive "better" stuff...
I loved the "Portability" aspect of the the Apple ][c... It had that cute little green-screen monitor, and that speedy 1200 baud modem (which could fill an entire 760k disk with pr0n in just over night ).
I kick myself evey time I think of the fact that we sold that comp when we upgraded to the 386... I would love to spend a few hours optimising the Distributed.net client in BASIC:
10 Print "Moo"
20 goto 10
A
I figured he'd use it to upgrade the POS on his desktop.
My first experience with a computer was with an Apple ][e, programming simple things like making our name tile across the screen...... those were the simple days. The coolest game around was Oregon Trail. (I always broke an axel while crossing those darn rivers...)
I wish I had one of those things, just to play around with. Oh well. =)
Insert mind here.
I read the article at WIRED News, and they said that along with the Apple I, a Lisa and GLM were being auctioned off. I've never heard of this "Apple GLM" before, they say it was a prototype. I'd love to know what this machine was (or was supposed to be.) Anyone have any clue? No one else seems to...
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
People ask, where's the humanity in a machine? It's a cold box. They never think of the people sitting in front of the box. Now if only I could find a ROM of Number Munchers, I'd be in heaven!
Your friend's homemade PC wouldn't qualify...you had to be able to provide the original invoice, warranty certificate, or something to prove the date of purchase. The documentation requirement narrows down the eligibility quite a bit.
Ahhh, that brings back memories.
The GLM was a research prototype of a modular, slotted mac. There was a movement inside of Apple to create a slightly more open mac, a little bit cheaper, and to merge the best of the ][ line with the mac. The GLM was a small box which became the ][GS, a machine aimed at the K-12 market. The ][GS was an amazing machine, carefully crafted by the hardware hackers of 87-88. Unfortunately it didn't fit in with the philosophy of the time, and the development of GS tools and support was underfunded until the project died.
The best bits of the GLM became a project known as Reno, the mac with slots (the MacII).
And I've still got my Kim-1 and Syn-1 boards, but I haven't powered them up in years
the AntiCypher
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
i miss my Apple ][...oh yeah, first!
the competition was searching for the oldest PC still used in a business.
This post reminded me of my old apple 2e, and I went digging and foundmy old copies of ZAXXON and CASTLE WOLFENSTIEN. Since the school district I go to/work in never throws anything away, I found and old ][ ][e and tried them and the STILL WORK!@ I will gladly get rid of them for dirt cheap ( just shipping charges, hell, I might even just post 'em somewhere since I doubt Datasoft is around anymore )
The Secret Government Ego Project
If I remember correctly, one of the early Apple boxes--might be the Apple I, maybe a little bit later--wanted you, as one of the inital installation steps, to actually:
"Lift the box to a height of 18-24 inches and then proceed to drop it to the ground. This will ensure proper setting of some internal components.
Ah, the good old days.
-
Back when I ran nintendo, apple emulators, and older PC games on my DOS-based P75, I found a program called Mo-Slo that would let you slow the processor down to a percentage of its processing speed (in increments of 1). It worked fine on the P75, as I could get close to 1Mhz or 8Mhz or whatever the game required.
:)
I'm curious if a program like this exists now that is a little more improved (as 1% of my PII-300 is still 3Mhz, a little too fast for a 1Mhz Apple progam)
This article reminds me of a competition Dell was sponsoring a few weeks/months ago: Whoever could prove they had in their possession the oldest personal computer would win a $3000 Dell system, and have their computer placed in a museum. Anyone know what became of that? Is it still open, 'cause my friend has a homemade PC in a wooden case lying in the basement... /:)
Wah!
Commander Taco, I'd love to hear about the end result of this competition.
Wah!
...its here.
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan