What good is the "Apple 1" ?

[Keatah]

What good is the "Apple 1"..? Other than to draw oohs and ahhhs at high-priced half-a-million dollar auctions, what good is this machine?

 

I feel the essence of early Apple is grounded firmly and squarely with the II, II+, and //e. It is here where the big breakthroughs came. It is the II series that shaped so much of the early years of hobby and home computing.

 

It is the II series that saw the development of a Floppy Drive and interface, thousands of peripherals and cards, modems, printers, I/O, clocks, Z-80 CP/M, 64K memory and 128K bank switching, DOS, sound, extensive games and business/science/finance/educational programs. Worthwhile color graphics and sound. And so much more. Including mass marketing and stellar documentation.

 

 

[BydoEmpire]

It's a piece of personal computer history, I think its value as a computer (not meaning $$$) generally stops there. You could probably ask the same question about a lot of 70s computers. What good as an Altair? It depends on what the owner gets out of it.

[thetick1]

What good is the "Apple 1"..? Other than to draw oohs and ahhhs at high-priced half-a-million dollar auctions, what good is this machine?

 

 

It is a stepping stone in history. Much like Wright brothers first airplane or the model T for the automobile automation industry.

By today's standard of technology it's just landfill garbage.

Edited January 2, 2018 by thetick1

[spacecadet]

It's pointless as a computer. I mean does it do $815,000 worth of computing stuff? Of course not... it probably does $10 worth of computing stuff and the other $814,990 somebody paid the last time one of these came up is just for historical value.

 

As a computer, it is - and was always intended to be - just a hobbyist device. You can make it go beep and bloop and spit out some text. Or maybe as the Steve Jobs character in "Steve Jobs" says, you could "build ham radios... or something." (Actually he was talking about the Apple II in that scene, but it still made me laugh.)

 

Of course nowadays I have a feeling anyone who buys one is not even going to turn it on.

 

The thing about the Apple I and its high prices these days is that it was an entirely Steve Wozniak creation, and I just wonder how many of these rich guys paying out the nose for Apple I's nowadays are really Steve Wozniak fans.

[tschak909]

sigh, time marches on, and people forget...

 

The Apple 1 was very much an exercise in the marrying of a low cost display terminal (using shift registers for memory), with a very minimal 6502 implementation, with enough memory to actually be able to write simple programs.

 

This was very important.

 

Keep in mind, at the time, that most computer systems consisted at the very least of the computer, and some form of terminal, be it teletype or glass, and those systems were very expensive once you got enough of something to build a system (e.g. an Altair 8800, with a 4K RAM board would easily cost you $900, and you still did not have a terminal for it, or the associated I/O card to provide the serial port, where e.g. an ADM-3A was ANOTHER $900, and you still needed to buy the serial card for $300, well, guess what? You were now roughly $2100 in.), you would have spent one hell of a chunk of money just doing so.

 

This is why systems like the Apple 1, the TRS-80, and the Commodore PET were so revolutionary, they slashed the cost of implementing an interactive computing environment by a factor of 10. The Apple 1 didn't have much in the way of expandability, but with the cassette interface, it was good enough to write simple programs and to provide one of several very concrete examples of what a low cost computing system would be, and what could be done with it.

 

-Thom

[spacecadet]

I don't think people "forgot" that, it's just not something you'd buy a computer for *today*.

[Keatah]

The thing about the Apple I and its high prices these days is that it was an entirely Steve Wozniak creation, and I just wonder how many of these rich guys paying out the nose for Apple I's nowadays are really Steve Wozniak fans.

 

I've not heard much about the provenance of Woz making the price high. It is "Apple" that seems to do it. I think that if Apple was not as successful as it is, then the value of the Apple 1 would be far less.

Edited January 3, 2018 by Keatah

[Keatah]

I don't think people "forgot" that, it's just not something you'd buy a computer for *today*.

 

Well, no, for sure. You know.. Just that if I'm going spend money (big or small) on classic computers, I want them to be functional and usable for something. Not that I'll be playing it every day. I want it to be a conversation piece that can actually be interacted with from time to time.

 

Like for example Tranquility Base (lunar lander) on the Apple II. It's a quaint little charm of a B/W "vector" game with the right amount of flickering to say 1970's. Or flying off-world A2-FS1. I could have my nostalgia goggles on, however. Loved all that when I was a kid.

 

Or it's like on the MicroModem II. Regardless of what background noise is going on in the room. Everything seems to get a little quieter when the relay clicks and the red Off-Hook LED turns on. Then the magic of computer-to-computer communications takes place.

 

It's things like that. Being able to experience the essence of something as opposed to having it sit in a glass case.

Edited January 3, 2018 by Keatah

[AMenard]

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say.

 

Collectors spends thousands of dollars on a single used postage stamp. Those are even less useful than an Apple I computer. Yet, they also are rare and historically important.

 

Atari computers and game console are also quite limited compared to a PS4 of modern PCs, yet here we are on a forum with an active community still using them

[JamesD]

Most 8 bit machines at the time the Apple I was introduced were trainers with hex keypads or completely roll your own systems.
I think the only other single board (mostly) machine with build in video and a keyboard was an OSI machine.
Most machines required a terminal, TTY, etc... to have a regular keyboard and output.
And then there's the built in BASIC which the trainers didn't have, they had a port of Tiny BASIC at best.
As far as capabilities go, it's not that special, but it was a leading machine in many ways at the time.
I really don't see a reason to own one because there isn't much software for them.
There is some compatibility with Integer BASIC, but the machine really isn't compatible with the Apple II series which was where Apple really had their success.

[tschak909]

You did mention off hand the Ohio Scientific Machines. Those were _very_ expandable machines, as they were all built from exactly the same core, just with more options each successive model, (OSI even had models with as large as 74 megabyte disks for database applications)...they just weren't all that pretty in the enclosure department.

 

-Thom

[BassGuitari]

I think the Apple-1--or rather a repro or replica of an Apple-1--would be fun to mess around with in sort of the same way something like a Sinclair ZX80/81 kit would be. It would be a gas to put the hardware together and then get such a primitive thing to actually do anything. (Likewise for Altair, Imsai, Sol-20, etc.)

If you enjoy, are mildly amused by, or can at least tolerate stuff like the text-based BASIC number, math, puzzle, and strategy games of the era, the Apple-1 probably does at least as good a job at those as anything else. Beyond that, I don't see much practical utility there. You probably aren't going to be running spreadsheets or anything like that.

While there are differences, I regard the Apple-1 as essentially a prototype Apple II. I imagine that if you cripple an Apple II enough (remove some RAM, lose the Autostart and BASIC ROMs, ditch the Disk Controller, etc), you have the essence of the Apple-1 experience, with less hassle--your case, power supply, and keyboard are already there! Even if you don't want to "Apple-1ify" your Apple II, you can still "let's not and say we did" and just CALL-151 into the system monitor and still get a taste of what the Apple-1 was about. (Full disclosure: I say this having never actually used an Apple-1 and having only fleeting experience with a Replica-1.)

Edited January 6, 2018 by BassGuitari

[tschak909]

the main differences:

 

The Apple 1 is not a direct driven keyboard/display, at all. The Apple 1 is a really dumb terminal (not even an option to scroll, but rather display wraps around a la Don Lancaster TV Typewriter), mated to a 6502 with 4K of RAM, and a dash of I/O.

 

That means,

no graphics modes

no repositionable text, output is treated as teletype.

no real way to save or load basic programs, except in the monitor (you literally just dump the program area)

 

the monitor is also much simpler than the monitor that was written by Wozniak and Baum later for the Apple II, rudimentary dump and hex deposit, load and save from tape, no mnemonic dump, no mini-assembler, no sweet-16, etc.

 

The reason I make reference to Don Lancaster's TV Typewriter, is because Woz was inspired by it, and used more than a few of the same circuits from it, including the Signetics 2519 line buffer, and Signetics 2513 character ROM (which Apple would retain as a default character set for most of the II's life, extending it over the years)

 

-Thom

Edited January 6, 2018 by tschak909

[tschak909]

2513's data sheet is here: https://amigan.yatho.com/2513.pdf

You'll also see here why the cursor is the @ character.

 

-Thom

[Jcp7777]

Can anyone tell me what this is. It’s in my father’s basement. 

[DistantStar001]

On 12/24/2023 at 6:03 PM, Jcp7777 said:

Can anyone tell me what this is. It’s in my father’s basement. 

Looks to be an Apple II or II+ that was bought in kit form, with a custom case and PSU, along with a third party keyboard.

[Sir Guntz]

On 1/2/2018 at 5:52 PM, Keatah said:

 

I've not heard much about the provenance of Woz making the price high. It is "Apple" that seems to do it. I think that if Apple was not as successful as it is, then the value of the Apple 1 would be far less.

All one has to do is look at the KIM-1 for proof of that, a computer that is functionally and historically equivalent to the Apple 1 but for MOS Technology/Commodore International, yet the value is a tiny fraction of the Apple 1.

[Geister]

Is that a scrapple?

 

What are Apple I's good for?  Too late to recover the chips and reimburse Atari for what Steve Jobs stole.

[+OLD CS1]

1 hour ago, Geister said:

Too late to recover the chips and reimburse Atari for what Steve Jobs stole.

Which was?

[Grimm1966]

I bought one of those Apple I PCBs that were popular several years ago, but I haven't done anything with it yet.  I thought that it would be a fun project to both build and play around with, but the chips are just too expensive (if you can get them anymore).  

Edited December 28, 2023 by Grimm1966

[Geister]

On 12/27/2023 at 4:42 PM, OLD CS1 said:

Which was?

The chips, dude,  Steve Jobs raided the parts bins at Atari while he worked there to build the prototype apples.  This is  not breaking news.

[+OLD CS1]

1 hour ago, Geister said:

The chips, dude,  Steve Jobs raided the parts bins at Atari while he worked there to build the prototype apples.  This is  not breaking news.

While I am neither an apologist nor water-carrier for Steve Jobs...

[Geister]

Cute, but pointless.

[+OLD CS1]

1 hour ago, Geister said:

Cute, but pointless.

Kind of like this response without quoting or referencing me.  Makes me think maybe you did not want me to know you replied.

 

But, not pointless.

 

Everyone wants to nit-pick history.  Did Steve Jobs really steal components to build his prototypes?  If so, were they good parts, or bad or reused parts he pulled from a junk bin?  Were they perhaps troublesome parts his engineering genius friend Woz was able to work with, like those bum disk drives he picked up?  Was he ever prosecuted?  Did Al Alcorn have a hand in any of that?

 

What about Bill Gates?  Did he use Paul Allen's school computer account to compile his original release of BASIC?  Was that stealing?  Does it matter?  What about Gates' egregious handling of IBM and Sega, which eventually gave rise to 32-bit Windows and the XBox?

 

What about the team that left Motorola and all but cloned the 6800 to produce the 6500 family of microprocessors?  What about Jay Miner and his team who left Atari to create the Amiga?  What other transgressions did innovators of my time perpetrate to produce what laid the bedrock for the products we use today?

 

I am not looking for a relativistic approach to wrong, just a better understanding of what was actually wrong.  In a relativistic sense, if true, stealing some chips from Atari to produce his Apple prototypes pales in comparison to him keeping the Pong bonus a secret from Woz.  Still wrong, but given Al Alcorn's claim to have helped Jobs and Wozniak with parts during the  development of the eventual Apple 1, the theft claim does appear dubious and I am open to more concrete evidence of the accusation.

[Geister]

Oh, I'm sorry.  Did I not @ or # you?

 

I'm not looking to convince you of anything, just stating what I had heard back in the day.  Steve jobs may have gotten the parts from Al Alcorn, but I've never heard that story before.  I did hear the one about his body odor problems.  Not that I ever smelled him or cared to.

 

Everything I've heard or observed about Steve Jobs paints him as a sleazy character, including the thing you mentioned about him screwing the Woz.