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More Macs on the auction block
gleam
sent us this wired article which talks about
more macs on the block
an Apple II with serial number 2, and an early apple I. They
also comment about the earlier auctioned Apple which Woz
confirmed is not really the first Apple.
Try to remember that they're not Macs, they're Apple I's and II's. The Mac came in 84 and was based on Motorola 68000 while the Apple II's were based on 6502. I can't remember off the top of my head what the I was using as a processor.
(Happy owner of an IIGS and a whole crapload of programming manuals, including the real gem "Programming the 6502" from Sybex, printed '78.. also got bunches of SCSI cards, turbo card, Z80 card and whatnot..)
Bell and Howell resold Apples in a black case. They were fairly common back in the day. It probably just a standard Apple ][+, not an Apple I or anything fancy.
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Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
I think people are missing the point of what's on sale here... It's not an old piece of hardware, it's the first of many peaces of hardware that affected what each of us do today. I don't care who you are, what you do. Apple affected EVERYBODY's life on the planet. They were the first to develop a computer for the peons that was actually feasable. I don't care if Xerox developed the gui first, it was the first apples that gave apple the chance to take Xerox's stuff and develop it into the mac. If it wasn't for that, gates wouldn't have stole the mac os. X would not exist, you'd probobly be staring at a dumb term hooked to a time share through your ulra fast 2400 bps link playing adventure XIIV.
The computers that started our lifes today are on sale, not old hardware. I thank apple for having the guts to do what nobody else would, change history.
As i sit here looking at X11R6 inspired by the mac os running WM which is inspired by next which was developed by steve jobs who was inspired by his mac and was inspired for that by the Xerox system and got to see the Xerox system all because him and Woz decided to build a computer in their garage. I can think of my mother the school teacher sitting at her house happily clicking away in claris works making the computer do what she wants, and not even know it. Even though she's not a computer person, she was touched by what apple did.
It all started with those first few computers.
In the Wired article, Woz says he may have the original Apple I breadboard! Now there's a unique piece of history -- that should go to the Smithsonian. I doubt that any single comparable prototype exists for an Altair because they were motherboard systems. Even if you could find an original Altair CPU breadboard, you'd need the rest of the system, and I doubt that all of it still exists, or even that it ever existed as a single prototype. Most likely some boards were designed and produced before others, so there would be no single prototype system. (The one pictured on Radio Electronics was a mockup, I believe.)