1976 Polaroids of an Apple-1 Resurface 120
harrymcc writes "In 1976, Paul Terrell, owner of the Byte Shop in Mountain View, California, placed an order for 50 Apple-1 computers, becoming Apple's first dealer. Over at TIME.com, I've published three Polaroid snapshots of the Apple-1 which Terrell shot at the time. They're fascinating history, and it's possible they're the oldest surviving photos of Apple products."
And the sad thing about it... (Score:3, Interesting)
Look at the old keyboard in the pic. It's a bit sad to realize that it was probably far better than Apple's current stuff, or the huge majority of modern keyboards. How have we fallen! Seriously: if you pay some big bucks for a high-end PC, it's unjustifiable not to get a mechanical keyboard as well.
Re:And this is news? (Score:3, Interesting)
Very early Microsoft mouse [photobucket.com], with solid steel textured ball [photobucket.com] and steel bearings [photobucket.com] instead of Teflon slider pads.
So maybe I can claim some space myself with these photos? I should probably de-BPA that housing (with the Oxiclean trick) and then enshrine it in a plexi case with a vacuum, huh?
Dinaao (Score:5, Interesting)
Dinaao Is Not An Apple One.
I spoke with Steve Wozniak at the 30th anniversary of Apple held at the Computer History Museum - I asked him why the Apple One was so retarded. He really wasn't happy about that question. I then explained that I had built a Replica 1 and then written Dinaao to teach myself how the guts of the Apple One really worked, and had found that the input was limited to 60 characters a second, and the output as well even though the MOS 6502 CPU was running at one million clocks per second. :NEXT I
Woz then explained that the Apple One was originally designed to be a TV teletype allowing deaf people to type to each other over a phone line. The current TV teletypes ran at 30 characters per second - his was twice as fast. It was a short time later that he was dragged to a local computer club meeting where someone was talking about these new microprocessors that just became available when he realized that rather than typing to a person, you could be typing to a program running on a microprocessor, and watch it respond on your television, all of which normal people could afford. That was how the Apple One was born.
After getting this running, his friend Steve Jobs worked with him to start Apple, and he started using the Apple One to help design the Apple Two with color graphics so that you could play Brick-Out.
If you want to play with a pretty nice Apple One analog - please download Dinaao off Sourceforge.net - works on Linux / MacOSX (get xcode which includes gcc) or any other posix OS. Unpack, run make, run dinaao, type "E000R", and you've got Woz Basic up and running. Works in a console. You can even cut and paste basic programs from web sites like this one. Hit F9 to exit (might need to move function keys in MacOSX out of the way).
10 FOR I=1 TO 20:FOR J=1 TO I
20 PRINTJ;:NEXT J:PRINT
30 END
Enjoy!
Re:Nice and orderly (Score:4, Interesting)
The old BYTE magazines from the 1970's and 1980's were wonderful reading. The Circuit Cellar guide to building your own home security system with a 20Amp klaxxon air raid siren in the basement. Reviews of the workstations (Next Cube), motherboards and graphics cards [uni-marburg.de] of the time. What goes into a single ASIC now, would go into a dozen little chips and a full-size daughter board. State of the art visual effect was a silhouette halo like in Xanadu.
Had the chance to program 8-bit home computers like the Apple ][, Atari, BBC, and Atari ST. There were so many magazines out there, all giving program listings and information on building things like light pens, mini device drivers and games written in assembler. These days, you would get sued just for using a function call the wrong way.