Apple 1 History And Build Guide

hi my name's aaron and welcome to the channel the topic for today's episode is a big one in fact i've been putting it off for a few months just working and working on it to make sure i had it just right because it's so crucial for the start of the personal computing industry and marketplace as a whole the topic today is the apple one i really wanted to dive into the history of the apple one and actually build a clone of the apple one so that's what we're gonna do it's coming up right now on the retro hack shack [Music] i recently went down a rabbit hole not the five-minute diversion kind but a seriously deep hole that led me to want to make a multi-part series about it on my channel i started seeing stories about this original apple one that was listed on ebay of all places for 1.5 million dollars it got me thinking why was this thing so expensive is it a decent computer for the time period and most relevant for this rabbit hole is it possible to build a replica of the apple one there's no doubt that apple is a massively successful company with almost 300 billion in revenue in 2020 and about 147 000 employees they're currently the most profitable company in the world this story is not going to be about macbooks ipads or iphones along with the technology they bring to the market what makes apple equally impressive is its place in computer history starting in a los altos garage in silicon valley and becoming one of the most influential companies in the early days of personal computing apple products have a special nostalgic place in so many of our lives but this story is not even going to be about macintosh or the apple ii this is an origin story it's about the very first product that apple put on the market and perhaps more importantly it's about what was going on in the industry that led to that product the apple one contrary to what some people might think the apple one was not the first desktop computer not even close but it may just have been the first personal computer what i mean is a computer with a keyboard for input and an easily accessible monitor for output that didn't cost an arm and a leg like most things the apple one was created thanks to the developments that preceded it market opportunity and a need to scratch an itch by its designer steve wozniak steve wozniak famously the co-founder of apple and creator of the apple one and apple ii was used to scratching his own itches or to put it another way building personal solutions to problems since middle school when he was only six years old he built his first crystal radio set and then in the sixth grade he got his first transistor radio which he says may have been the most important gift of his life shortly after that he got his ham license and he estimates that he was the youngest ham operator in the country at the time this being silicon valley he and his friends would do gardening work around the neighborhood and sometimes they would get paid in electronics components like resistors or capacitors which he could use for all kinds of projects fascinated by electronics magazines and manuals he discovered a copy of the small computer handbook which described in detail the inner workings of a mini computer the pdp-8 this led to him spending time in high school designing mini computers on paper the parts at that time were way too expensive to actually build one of these systems at home not to mention even though they were called mini these computers were still very large and not yet personal at all so working on his own he would design and redesign these paper-based systems making them more efficient as new integrated circuits became available in 1974 while visiting famous phone freak john draper also known as captain crunch woz watched him connect over a modem to the arpanet which was the predecessor of the public internet he was using a teletype machine in california to play chess with someone all the way in boston woz had a new itch he had already built a clone of the game pong by atari and was able to use that experience to build a cheap terminal that used an inexpensive keyboard from sears and a standard tv steve jobs and woz actually sold some of these to be used for time sharing before apple was even formed as a company while all this was going on some of the first commercially successful desktop computers were just coming onto the scene most notably the altair system from mits which was featured on the cover of the january 1975 issue of popular electronics the altair was a kit computer that was affordable enough for hobbyists to buy but required the user to enter programs one byte of memory at a time using switches on the front panel and you thought typing in basic programs from books or magazines was hard even though this may seem arcade compared to today's standards the fact that you could buy a computer at a low cost for home use was a revolution for computer hobbyists at that time and got many people interested in designing better systems and even starting companies that could someday make money in this new market on march 5th 1975 the home brew computer club started in gordon french's garage in menlo park and by chance steve wozniak was there at that meeting attendees were asked to share some information about themselves and woz listed one of his skills as being short on time it was through homebrew that was learned about new microcontrollers that could make it possible to design new computers that were more affordable since they would use fewer integrated circuits woz described his excitement about this realization in his autobiography i was oh my god i could build my own computer a computer i could own and design and do any neat things i wanted to do with it for the rest of my life that night the night of the first meeting this whole vision of a kind of personal computer just popped into my head all at once just like that because woz had already designed the terminal mentioned earlier he was able to quickly combine that with the brand new 6502 microprocessor from moss technologies which would go on to be the cpu used in so many early 8-bit computers of the era was added some dram for memory which at the time was new compared to static ram and two rom chips which stored a program he called a monitor now known as wasman which monitored the keyboard inputs and got the system running with all of these pieces in place the apple one was born woz passed out schematics for the apple one at the homebrew computer club and spent four months writing a basic program to make it easier to use steve jobs suggested that they make some pcbs that they could mark up in price and sell to save people the trouble of wiring the computer up by hand and this was the start of apple computer there's a whole history of course to go into here but that's not the focus of this episode the bike shop was a local computer store that sold altairs and other computer equipment to hobbyists in the bay area steve jobs made a deal with the owner paul terrell to deliver an assembled working apple one computer for 500 each and then set the retail price at 666 dollars and 66 cents contrary to a belief in the past that this was somehow demonic in nature it's actually just because was like repeating numbers when the pcbs and parts finally arrived woz and a group of friends got together in steve jobs parents garage and did the assembly and testing then steve jobs would drive them in batches to the bike shop in total they made around 200 apple 1 computers and all but 25 were sold within 9 or 10 months but that was it woz was already starting to design the apple ii which would be the real game changer and so there was no reason to make any more apple ones at that point and it's for these reasons because so few were produced and because it marked the start of what would eventually become an iconic company apple one computers are valued at millions of dollars today if you're interested in learning more about steve wozniak or the history of the apple one i suggest getting was autobiography called i was where i found most of this information in addition to wikipedia and a forward was wrote for tom oswald's book apple one replica creation which can be found on applefreer.com [Music] so that's a brief overview of the history of the apple one and why it's so important in personal computing history if you like me are interested enough in it to actually want to build one for yourself you've come to the right place so i'm going to share with you 11 tips why 11 i don't know that's just how many tips there were 11 tips that you can use if you're going to go down this path of trying to build the apple one if you're interested in any of the information that i'm sharing there will be links in the description below so please check there first otherwise leave a comment and i'll try to provide links to any of the information mentioned in the video [Music] the first thing to realize is this is not a project for the faint of heart building an apple one replica requires at least a small amount of knowledge of power supplies logic circuits timing and troubleshooting skills not to mention the necessary tools and the ability to source all the components i would have never attempted this back when i was just starting out repairing vintage computers a good rule of thumb is if you've repaired let's say a commodore 64 by troubleshooting the ics and replacing the capacitors and power components then you should be ready to handle building an apple one replica also it's not necessarily cheap depending on where you get your parts from you can expect to pay between 500 and a thousand dollars to put one of these together depending on the tools and parts you may already own and how authentic you want to make it it's not 1.5 million dollars like the one on ebay but at least for me this is still a lot of money before you buy anything make sure you do some research doing some research ahead of time will save you loads of frustration later and you'll be sure to learn a few things along the way here are some great places to look for more information applefritter.com as the name suggests is a site dedicated to discussions of apple products and they have a dedicated apple one forum it's where i found most of the information i needed to get started on this project we've all been told at one time or another to rtfm and this project is no exception the next place to do some research are the build guides for the apple one replica that you can find floating around on various sites mike willigal's build guide is pretty comprehensive and goes step by step including a nice parts list and some warnings about what not to do there was also an official manual release for the apple one and it explains a lot about how the computer works and how to use it so if you're thinking about building an apple one i highly recommend actually reading the original manual first it even has the original apple logo design on the front and of course came with schematics which can be invaluable for testing although if you search on the apple one sites you'll discover that the original schematics do have a few mistakes in them speaking of schematics as luck would have it as i was editing this episode steve wozniak posted a video where he encourages companies to adopt a right to repair policy he certainly lived up to this when he included all the technical details and schematics in this original manual back then it was the norm and not the exception was talks about this in detail in his video and it's very relevant to this project and anyone who likes to break things apart so i highly recommend you watch it one thing i want to point out is that there are different types of replicas available for the apple one there are circuit exact clones for those who want their project to look exactly like the original apple one and then there are replicas which take advantage of modern components to reduce the number of ics but still produce a working unit i'm going to be building a more authentic version so the pcb and components i'm using are almost exactly the same as the original ones if you're thinking about going down the authentic route as well be aware that there are several versions of replica motherboards that you'll find out there the most popular ones i've seen are the mimeo version created by mike willigal and the newton version created by mike newton these are both high quality boards and worth the price there are cheaper boards available on ebay but you may want to do more testing with those no-name boards to make sure they don't have any defects as you can imagine with a project like this you'll need to find components that haven't been made for decades and some of them are in very short supply this is why there are people who have collected some of these components and offer them as a complete kit this saves a lot of time and effort on your part plus at least one seller uncle bernie will test the components before he ships them to you to make sure they're working which is super helpful since these parts are so old but be aware that some people will only sell you the proms if you buy their version of the pcb so keep that in mind before you buy your motherboard some rare components of course could be replaced with slightly more modern versions or alternatives to the ones used in the original builds but you'll need to have some know-how and electronics to make that decision if you're not sure about replacing a particular part please be sure to ask on apple fritter first the experts there will be able to guide you whether a replacement part is appropriate or not so here's my apple one replica motherboard that i found on ebay and i was originally thinking of just hanging out on the wall for display but as i got further down the rabbit hole and since i already had the motherboard anyway i decided to source the components myself some of the most difficult ics to find for a reasonable price are the character generator the proms and the shift registers were made by a company called signetix keep in mind as you're searching for parts that it's going to be much better to find new old stock parts if possible rather than using used parts pulled from old systems since you never know how long they'll last or whether they'll even work at all i found many of the more common logic ships at my local surplus electronics store i featured this store in my video about where i find vintage computers they have almost anything you can imagine and the best part is that i didn't have to pay for shipping from a bunch of different ebay sellers for the really hard to find signetics ics i mentioned before i bought those at a site recommended in the apple fritter forums called unicorn electronics despite the late 90s aesthetic of their website i was able to order the more difficult to find chips there and their prices were reasonable compared to the price some of the ebay scalpers were asking also whenever it was financially feasible i bought at least one extra chip in case i ended up with a bad one that way i could easily at least swap one of them out the logic chips used in the apple 1 were the standard ttl chips of the day so the part names that you're going to see in the parts list will be 7404 for example instead of 74 lso4 that you may be used to with newer systems even though different series of logic ships can be compatible in some circumstances this doesn't always hold up for example ls and hc series logic chips use less power but won't work in the apple one since there are slight differences in the voltage thresholds so what registers is a high in the older logic chips might not be detected in the newer cmos chips stick with the old-fashioned non-ls and non-hc ttl chips to make sure that your apple 1 will work beyond just the motherboard and old integrated circuits you're also going to need a monitor that supports composite video and a certain type of keyboard the monitor and keyboard weren't provided by apple with the original units but there were some suggestions made in some of the early apple documents that still exist for example this note from steve jobs suggests that you could use a sony tv115 television the keyboard itself should be an ascii keyboard one popular type was made by dianetics and they're very difficult to find or you could do what i'm going to do and repurpose an original apple ii or apple ii plus keyboard with some slight modifications check the build video where i go through those details unless you're building this just for show you'll need to find a way to get programs onto the system the best way to do that is the same as it was all those years ago which is to purchase or build an apple cassette interface board this will make it possible to load and explore some of the software that's archived for the system if you don't build the aci there won't be a whole lot you can do with your newly built apple 1 replica except perhaps stare at a blinking cursor the last tip i have is to take your time and methodically test as you go don't just solder everything up and turn it on as you might do with a modern electronics kit the last thing you want to do is spend hundreds of dollars on rare signetix ics only to blow them to bits the first time you flip the switch this means doing things like checking the traces before you solder the sockets looking for shorts at critical parts of the build and measuring the voltages as you go along so you can save yourself a lot of headache and detect issues when they're easier to troubleshoot [Music] well this seems like a good place to stop hopefully that gives you an idea of the importance that this computer had in history and also gives you some tips that you can use if you want to go down the route of building your own clone like i am now coming up on the next episode or two depending on how things go we'll go ahead and build an apple one test it out and run some software i'll show you how to do all that build a case for it hook up the monitor all of those things will be coming up very soon on the channel if you want to learn more you can follow me on my instagram or twitter accounts please subscribe to the channel to get all of those details delivered straight to your home page on youtube and also consider becoming a patreon i could use some additional support for the channel to help build it out and help it grow so with that thanks for watching see you next time if you want to support me on patreon you can go to patreon.com retrohackshack and sign up you

Channel: Retro Hack Shack

Views: 18,158

Rating: 4.9560876 out of 5

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Id: lYEYTjqx4pY

Length: 20min 20sec (1220 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 17 2021