Woz That a Real Apple-1?

The Apple-1 computer dates back to the very early days of the personal computing revolution, before the average person had jumped aboard. Sold as a bare motherboard, with no keyboard or display to be found, this computer was clearly not meant for the average person. You would have had to have been handy with a soldering iron and capable of deciphering the circuit diagrams and MOS 6502 assembly code in the Apple-1 Operation Manual to have gotten very far with this machine when it was released in 1976. Steve Jobs had apparently not yet dreamed up the catchphrase “it just works,” which was said about many Apple products in the decades to come.

With a 1 MHz processor, no more than 8 KB of RAM, and low-resolution video output, this computer does not have much to offer the modern world. But because of the role that the Apple-1 played in launching the storied company bearing its namesake, collectors all around the world would love to get their hands on one. That is easier said than done, however, because very few Apple-1 computers were produced during their fourteen months of production, and even fewer still exist today. When they come up for auction, buyers routinely pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the machines.

That is enough to crush most people’s dream of ever owning an Apple-1, but as Artem Kalinchuk of Retro Tech Revival pointed out in a recent video, that does not necessarily mean you cannot have one. If you would be content to play around with a reproduction of the system, they are actually pretty simple to construct, and devoid of anything like the sticker shock of the real deal.

Kalinchuk walked through the build process, and fortunately for us, the experience was recorded so that we can play along at home. The first step is to pick up a reproduction motherboard that is an exact copy of the original circuit that was designed all those decades ago by Steve Wozniak. Both the passive components and the ICs can largely be purchased new, which means they are not only highly available, but also cheap. A handful of chips are no longer in production, but even these are easy enough to come by either by buying an original from an auction site, or by picking up a modern reproduction chip that performs an identical function.

After populating the motherboard, the Apple-1 Operation Manual was used to build an external power supply. This power supply was built on top of a piece of wood, which seems just about perfect for an Apple-1. Since the computer did not come with a case, and 3D printers had not even been dreamed of yet, many early users built their own cases from wood. As a final step, a replica Datanetics ASCII keyboard was purchased and connected to the machine.

Naturally, once the replica machine was powered up for the first time, it did not work. But after spending some quality time with the Operation Manual and consulting with some other enthusiasts, Kalinchuk managed to work out the bugs and saw the familiar “@” prompt on the television that was being used as a display. At this point, some intermittent issues are still popping up, but that’s OK — let’s be honest, building and fixing these old machines is often the very best part of working with them.