An Apple I hooked up to lab power supplies and a monitor

Powering Up An Original Apple I After Three Decades In A Museum

The Apple I is the stuff of legend. Designed and marketed in 1976 by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, it was the very first product released by what would become today’s multi-trillion-dollar manufacturer of iPhones and iMacs. With about 60 original ones known to exist today, prices at auction are commonly in the $300,000 range, while confirmed working ones are even more valuable.

The Heinz Nixdorf Museumsforum (HNF), a computer museum in the German city of Paderborn, is fortunate enough to have an original Apple I in its collection. Although it has been there since 1996, it was always on static display and had never been powered on. In fact, it was unknown whether it would even work, and with it being the most valuable exhibit in the entire museum, simply firing it up would be a seriously risky project.

But computers are meant to be used, so museum director [Jochen Viehoff] decided to take the plunge and attempt to get the classic Apple to run again. In the four-part video series embedded below, [Jochen] explains the history of Apple’s first product and the steps he took to bring it back to life. This began with taking it out of its bullet-proof display case and bringing it upstairs to the museum’s workshop.

In order to make a complete system, HNF staff also dug up a period-correct keyboard as well as a slightly newer Apple monitor that could display the 60 Hz composite video output. Hooking up an original power supply would have been way too risky, because a single mistake or malfunction could send their top exhibit up in flames. Instead, they used a set of lab power supplies with a programmable current limit; this way, even a dead short on the PCB would not result in any serious damage.

Not that there were any shorts: after a bit of fiddling with the keyboard and adjusting the video output level, the 45-year-old computer came to life and began to respond to commands. With just 256 bytes of ROM, its default feature set is rather limited, but the computer duly executed a simple “Hello, World” program writen in 6502 machine code. It thereby joined the elite club of confirmed working Apple I’s, of which there are thought to be about twenty.

If you haven’t got $300,000 to spare but would still like to try your hand at programming the Apple I, you’ll be happy to hear that you can get a modern copy at a far more affordable price. And if all that classic hardware is too fiddly for you, you might want to try implementing the Apple I on an FPGA.

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Apple 1 Emulator Is A Perfect Fit For Supercon Badge

Supercon badge hackers had to be ready to present their show-and-tell by 6 pm Sunday evening. This ruthless unmoving deadline meant every badge hack on stage represents an accomplishment in time management, and some luck, in addition to their own technical merits. But that deadline also meant a few fantastic projects lost their race against the clock. We were rooting for [Jac Goudsmit] to build an Apple I emulator as his badge expansion, but he wasn’t quite done when our badge hack ceremony began. After Supercon he went home, finished the project, and documented everything in a detailed writeup.

Our 2018 Supercon badge is built on a retro-computing theme, and the default firmware came with a BASIC interpreter as well as a Z80 emulator running CP/M. So an Apple 1 emulator should feel right home with its contemporaries. Mechanically speaking, all the parts were a tight fit on the badge expansion board given out to every attendee at Supercon. So tightly that [Jac] had to file down the two main chips in order to fit them side by side. The breadboard-like pattern of connected holes on the expansion board, intended to help ease in beginners for their badge hack soldering, proved to be an inconvenience in tightly packed arrangements such as this.

With all the work [Jac] had invested, it was heartbreaking to know he was only five minutes of soldering and 30 minutes of coding away when time ran out. Time pressure was part of the challenge faced by every Supercon badge hacker, and while we’re sad [Jac] missed the deadline for stage time we’re happy to see him finish and write it all up. We hope every badge hacker would write up their stories of frantic weekend projects. Those who do so on hackaday.io are encouraged to tag their project with “Supercon” and get them added to our list of badge hacks for everyone to admire.

Hackaday Links: June 4, 2017

Quick question: what was the first personal computer? We love pointless arguments over technological history, so let’s just go down the list. It wasn’t an IBM, and the guy who invented the personal computer said he didn’t invent the personal computer. The Apple I is right out, and there were some weird Italian things that don’t quite count. Here’s an auction for, “The first personal computer”, a MICRAL N, released in 1974. There’s an 8080 running at 500kHz with 16kB of RAM and ‘mixed memory’. This is an important bit of history that belongs in a museum, and the auction will start at €20,000. The starting price might be a bit high; recently an original Apple I sold at auction for €90,000. This is a pittance for what these things usually go for. Is the market for vintage retrocomputers dropping out from underneath us? Only time will tell.

In Upstate NY? There’s a Hacker con going on June 16-17. You can get 20% off your ticket to ANYCon by using the code ‘HACKADAY’.

Colorblind? Hackaday readers suffer from colorblindness at a higher rate than the general population. [João] created this really neat tool to differentiate colors on a screen. Windows only, but still handy.

Everyone’s excited about the $150 3D printer that will be released by Monoprice sometime this summer. Here’s a $99 3D printer. Yes, it’s a Kickstarter so the standard warnings apply, but this bot does have a few things going for it. It uses actual NEMA 17 motors, and the people behind this printer actually have experience in manufacturing hardware. The downsides? It’s entirely leadscrew driven, so it’s going to be very, very slow.

What do you call the dumbest person with an EE degree? An engineer. It’s at this point where you should realize the value of a tertiary education is not defined by the most capable graduates; it’s defined by the least capable graduates.

Here’s your Sunday evening viewing: [Bunnie] gave a talk on RISC-V and the expectations of Open Hardware.

Hey, OpenBuilds has a new Mini Mill. It’s a basic CNC router designed for small ~1HP Bosch or Dewalt laminate trimmers. Small, but capable.

Kerbal Space Program, the only video game that should be required study materials at the Air Force Academy, Embry-Riddle and for everyone working at NASA, has been acquired by Take-Two Interactive. By all accounts, this is good news. According to reports, the original dev team left for Valve a few months ago, reportedly because of terrible conditions at Squad, the (former) developer of KSP.

The Stratolaunch carrier aircraft has rolled out of the hangar. It’s two 747s duct speed taped together.

Hackaday Links: March 19, 2017

This is from the Daily Fail, but a working Apple I is going up on the auction block. It’s expected to bring in $317,693 USD. In other news, we’re going to be at the Vintage Computer Festival East at the end of the month. There is usually an Apple I there.

The most popular crowdfunding campaign of the month is Lego tape. It’s an adhesive-backed tape with studs on the top, allowing you to clip Lego pieces into place. How easy would this be to create at home? It’s really just a silicon mold and some 3M stickytape. Anyone up for a home casting challenge?

You guys know the Hackaday Overlords have a Design Lab, right? What’s a Design Lab? It’s a place filled with tools where we allow residents to come in for free, build stuff, give them training, and let them keep all their IP. It’s like a hardware accelerator, but focused on Open Source hardware. It is our gift to the community and we ask nothing in return. But that’s not important right now. We’re doing shots.

2017 will be the first year Maker Faire will have three flagship faires. New York is a given, as is the Bay Area. and A few weeks ago, Chicago grabbed the third flagship faire. If you’ve already bought tickets and scheduled your trip, terrible news: the Chicago Maker Faire has been postponed until late fall.

Flip clocks are cool. What’s a flip clock? The clock in Groundhog Day, or a bunch of flaps, gears, and a synchronous motor that displays the time. You know what’s not cool about flip clocks? They’re usually stuffed in horrible 70s plastic enclosures painted Harvest Gold or Avacado. [bentanme] found a flip clock and stuffed it in a glass jar. It’s kept in place by a few 3D printed parts that ingeniously keep the clock from moving around while still allowing you to see the gears. Neat.

Hackaday Links: October 18, 2015

We have our featured speakers lined up for the Hackaday Supercon, one of which is [Fran Blanche]. We’ve seen a lot of her work, from playing with pocket watches to not having the funding to build an Apollo Guidance Computer DSKY. In her spare time, she builds guitar pedals, and there’s a biopic of her in She Shreds magazine.

Halloween is coming, and that means dressing children up as pirates, fairies, characters from the latest Marvel and Disney movies, and electrolytic capacitors.

There’s a new movie on [Steve Jobs]. It’s called the Jobs S. It’s a major upgrade of the previous release, featuring a faster processor and more retinas. One more thing. Someone is trying to cash in on [Woz]’s work. This time it’s an auction for a complete Apple I that’s expected to go for $770,000 USD.

Hackaday community member [John McLear] is giving away the factory seconds of his original NFC ring (think jewelry). These still work but failed QA for small reasons and will be fun to hack around on. You pay shipping which starts at £60 for 50 rings. We’ve grabbed enough of them to include in the goody bags for the Hackaday Superconference. If you have an event coming up, getting everyone hacking on NFC is an interesting activity. If you don’t want 50+, [John] is also in the middle of a Kickstarter for an improved version.

Your 3D printed parts will rarely come out perfectly. There will always be some strings or scars from removing them from the bed. There’s a solution to these problems: use a hot air gun.

Everyone has a plumbus in their home, but how do they do it? First, they take the dinglebop, and smooth it out with a bunch of schleem. The schleem is then repurposed for later batches.

Weird Clocks And A Two Chip Apple I

The Apple I, [Woz]’s original, had about sixty chips on a single board. Most of these chips were logic glue or hilariously ancient DRAMs. The real work was done by the 6502, the 6821 PIA, and the Signetics video chip. It’s a simple computer, really, and following the now popular tradition of two-chip computers, [Dave] built a replica of the Apple I using a 6502 and an ATMega.

The ATMega in this project takes care of everything – the 4k of RAM, the few bytes of ROM, the IO, and even the clock. With the 6502 you can have a little bit of fun with the clock; because the 6502 reads data off the bus a few nanoseconds off the falling edge of the clock and writes on the rising edge, [Dave] played around with the duty cycle of the clock to give the ATMega a bit more time to do its thing. With a 50% duty cycle, the 16Mhz ‘Mega has about eight cycles to decode an address and read or write some data. By making the low part of a clock cycle longer, he has about 45 cycles on the ‘Mega to do all the work. All of this was inspired by a fantastic tutorial on the 6502 clock.

Right now [Dave] has some hex values displaying on a small LCD, while the real I/O is handled by a serial connection to a computer. It’s retro enough, and a future update will include a faux cassette interface, possibly using an SD card for storage.