Handwritten Apple 1 Serial Number Mystery Finally Solved By Forensic Analysis (9to5mac.com) 36
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac: Apple geeks may be aware of the mystery of the handwritten Apple 1 serial number present on some of the surviving machines. Namely, no one knew how they got there. Steve Wozniak said that he didn't write them. Steve Jobs said the same. Daniel Kottke, who assembled and tested some of the boards, said it wasn't him. Likewise for Byte Shop owner Paul Terrell, who bought a batch of 50 of them... Achim Baque, who maintains the Apple-1 Registry (a listing of all Apple 1 computers), finally decided to try to solve the mystery. This, it turned out, would not be a trivial task.
Despite Steve Jobs' denial, the handwriting on the boards did seem to match his. However, since Steve rarely signed autographs, making his signature and handwriting especially valuable, the potential impact on the value of the machines with serial numbers meant that as much certainty as possible was needed. Baque asked one of the world's leading handwriting authentication services to compare the serial numbers on two of the Apple 1 boards with known samples of Steve's writing. California-based PSA said that they could do it, but photos wouldn't be sufficient -- they would need to carry out a physical examination of both the boards and the handwriting samples. The company's analysis would include the slant, flow, pen pressure, letter size, and other characteristics.
Daniel Kottke, who was a close friend of Steve, provided a number of letters and postcards written by Steve. Helpfully, these documents include a number of handwritten numbers. Baque then personally transported two of the boards, and the handwriting samples, to California for examination by PSA. The company took three months to perform the analysis, also studying many photos, before authenticating the handwriting on the boards as that of Steve Jobs. Finally, the mystery is solved! Steve clearly just didn't recall doing it. The full story has been reported at the Apple-1 Registry.
Despite Steve Jobs' denial, the handwriting on the boards did seem to match his. However, since Steve rarely signed autographs, making his signature and handwriting especially valuable, the potential impact on the value of the machines with serial numbers meant that as much certainty as possible was needed. Baque asked one of the world's leading handwriting authentication services to compare the serial numbers on two of the Apple 1 boards with known samples of Steve's writing. California-based PSA said that they could do it, but photos wouldn't be sufficient -- they would need to carry out a physical examination of both the boards and the handwriting samples. The company's analysis would include the slant, flow, pen pressure, letter size, and other characteristics.
Daniel Kottke, who was a close friend of Steve, provided a number of letters and postcards written by Steve. Helpfully, these documents include a number of handwritten numbers. Baque then personally transported two of the boards, and the handwriting samples, to California for examination by PSA. The company took three months to perform the analysis, also studying many photos, before authenticating the handwriting on the boards as that of Steve Jobs. Finally, the mystery is solved! Steve clearly just didn't recall doing it. The full story has been reported at the Apple-1 Registry.
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Hehe.
My take is Jobs simply had zero interest in even wanting to remember. It didn't value to him. And once he'd said no, that would've been the last word from him.
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"Steve rarely signed autographs"
Perhaps the two are related. The reason he didn't sign autographs is the same reason he didn't want to make his handwritten serial numbers valuable collectors' items.
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Yeah, he considered every turd precious, until he was over it and on to the next thing.
Get these damn scribble pads out of my office! *throw*
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Not a big fan of Apple, but as some counter evidence to your claim I have a Mac laptop that is now 10 years old, still works and they kept releasing new OSes for it until just a year or two ago. 8 years is pretty good for operating system support in my book. I also have friends that have had older iPhones that continue to function through multiple releases of iOS. So I'm having trouble agreeing with your point.
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My 2008 desktop is currently running Win 11. Even better, I have a 2005 laptop running Debian Buster. I don't see your point at all. Meanwhile, New M1 devices apart from RAM have SSD soldered in...
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Not a big fan of Apple, but as some counter evidence to your claim I have a Mac laptop that is now 10 years old
Sounds pretty irrelevant to what Jobs said, or his attitude towards older software.
Also sounds like you're a Superfan.
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Well, it wasn't until after Jobs was dead that they stopped offering Macintosh System 7 for download at apple.com.
And I haven't used any Apple device since the IIc.
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Physically, that case has taken an AMAZING beating. I've fallen back on it twice after two newer windows PCs- a dell and an HP- simply stopped working after all the abuse. At this point it's my perman
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Actually that's a "Unibody" case. The "Alumimum" was the previous generation, and had both PPC and Intel. And it was a pain in the ass. The surface pitted with the skin oil of my palms, the insides came loose, and the latch went out of whack way too easily. Unibody has been a complete workhorse, not counting some of the crappy keyboards that went into the later "retina" versions.
Since the video connector is some kind of semi-standard LVDS, it would be cool if someone could make boards that fit into them, b
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There would be a lot more 2010-2012 era MacBook Pro laptops if it weren't for the GPUs failing due to lead-free solder. I'm using a 2011 17" right now (I bought it years ago at a pawn shop and only switched after the *second* GPU failure of my original) and probably the only reason it still works is that I intentionally disable the GPU with a utility. (I have to set it every time it reboots, too.) And I've replaced just about every part that wasn't soldered down over the past 10+ years, too, especially the
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Anyone watching modern Apple's tactics (post Apple I/II) could tell you they do as little as possible to make older hardware more valuable. They want you to ditch your perfectly good Mac and buy this year's model... each and every year.
Not so. Apple deems a product to be 'vintage' at the point where older hardware will not support operating system version upgrades. Right now, the magic date is late 2013. But Macs of this age and older still have years of usable life, will still run alll the software they have now, and still get security and bugfix updates to their now-frozen operating system level. What 2013 PC is not already trash by now?
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What 2013 PC is not already trash by now?
I installed Windows 10 on a 2005 PC the other day.
I also swapped the original Athlon CPU for an Athlon II that I found on eBay fro $25 and upgraded to 4Gb RAM (from 2Gb) and an SSD. It all plugged, played and worked.
The Athlon II is dual core and has a single thread PassMark of 1099, which is still good.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/c... [cpubenchmark.net]
A PC that was new in 2013 would be a WIndows 7 PC. Windows 7 would have been upgraded to Windows 10 for free by MIcrosoft by now (via Windows 8, but let's ignore that).
Re: Not a lack of recall (Score:1)
I maxed out the ram and put a ssd in my 2013 mac mini... Runs windows 10 just fine and makes a great workshop pc
Are you serious? (Score:2)
> What 2013 PC is not already trash by now?
My daily driver is a 2013 model. I have a newer laptop that's been laying on my desk for a couple years but there's been no reason to use it.
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What 2013 PC is not already trash by now?
The machine I'm typing on right now, for one. It's a Thinkpad W510 laptop, which has passed it's 11th birthday and is heading rapidly for it's 12th. It's 100% up to date with software and security, what with running Ubuntu (as it did since the day it arrived). I have checked, repeatedly because of irritating mac fanbois, and I can 100% assure you that all the contemporary macs are now completely out of support, they will not take a new OS, and the latest they do tak
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What 2013 PC is not already trash by now?
(not a PC, but a Mac)
My 2013 Macbook Pro, Core i7 with 8GB of RAM and 512G SSD is pretty much interchangeable with my work-issued Macbook Pro 2020 Core i7. In some ways, the 2013 model is better. It has HDMI out, SD card slot, and real function keys.
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>What 2013 PC is not already trash by now?
Intel CPUs haven't changed much on the low end since 2012, certainly not since 2014 where CPU performance basically stalled out at, for five years. The only new PC I bought since 2012 was a "gaming laptop" with a 1060 in it to play the latest games, back in 2017, it all still works especially with 8-16gb in it
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What 2013 PC is not already trash by now?
My daily driver is a Dell Inspiron 3521 from 2013--I'm writing this comment on it. I did have to replace the battery, but that was easy.
It runs current releases of Linux and FreeBSD just great.
Geek NFTs (Score:1)
He was Trippin! (Score:2)
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He might have had "migraine aura". [wikipedia.org] I had that from around 2009-2019 or so. Every now and then an arc of my field of view would be interrupted with flashing yellow/black zigags, no other symptoms. It's apparently a sort of epilepsy in the ocular cortex, and it overrides any attempt to interpret whatever is being blocked, so for about 15-30 minutes I couldn't read anything behind the arc.
My only guess as to what started it was a flashy "blizzard" effect in a video game that I was playing at the time, but I d
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Psychedelics open doors. Sometimes people have underlying psychoses that can be exposed.
At MKUltra doses people can have long-term disruptions.
But, no, normal people aren't experiencing 'flashbacks'.
What's the Process? (Score:2)
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Totally feasible, to be honest. (Score:2)
If you imagine what Jobs and Wozniak were about to go through when Apple started to really take off, it's not even slightly beyond the realms of possibility that they may have forgotten what was probably just a quick "shall we add some serial numbers?" idea, "Cool, let's do it".
Move on, other things to do - and then the world started knocking on their doors, big time.
It's hardly the biggest event of that era, is it? - and completely excusable that they may have forgotten even doing it.
But hell, some