Got Any Apple 1's Stashed?

[AB3L]

If you had enough insight back then you would have a nice Christmas shopping fund this year.

I believe I was told that Apple offered a buy back of the 1 model to upgrade to a 2 model back then. There must be a few left out there somewhere.


http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/gaming.gadgets/11/23/apple.computer.auction/index.html?npt=NP1


Happy Thanksgiving

[k4kyv]

Did they use 300B, 2A3 or 845 triode tubes? Or even 12AX7s? Did the keyboard come with wooden keys? At least the cables should be well broken in.

[WBear2GCR]

Oh boy... and I just threw one of those out...


         ...yeah right. 

                                    _-_-bear

[KA8WTK]

Too bad my Commadore 64 or Timex-Sinclair doesn't bring that kind of money!

[w1vtp]

I heard that only a couple hundred of those were made -- in Jobs folks garage.  That oughta boost the price up

[W2PFY]

I do have an old Apple, it has a rather small CRT box and the mouse is the size of a child's shoe box. I have about a dozen manuals that came with it. It probably isn't worth ten cents but it's neat to look at. I'm going to set it up and take some pics sometime and post it on this thread.

[W1RKW]

Too bad my Commadore 64 or Timex-Sinclair doesn't bring that kind of money!

For you diehard Commadore fans.

http://www.commodoreusa.net/Home.html

[Pete, WA2CWA]

Too bad my Commadore 64 or Timex-Sinclair doesn't bring that kind of money!

For you diehard Commadore fans.

http://www.commodoreusa.net/Home.html

We brought this to light back in August 2010:
http://amfone.net/Amforum/index.php?topic=25117.0

[W2PFY]

That was the very first Macintosh (mac)

There's one on ebay that looks like what you have posted. It's now up to 36 bucks.

I think that is what I have.

[k4kyv]

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/gaming.gadgets/11/23/apple.computer.auction/index.html?npt=NP1

Too bad antique radios don't fetch that kind of money.

[Ralph W3GL]

    Yeah, Don, AB3L published that link back on the 25th ! ...

[K6JEK]

I think this was the very first Mac

[W9RAN]

Well, if you always wanted an Apple I and didn't just win the lottery - the Replica I clone might be just the ticket:   http://www.brielcomputers.com/wordpress/?cat=4

These guys have some other fairly cool retro-computing stuff.

73, Bob W9RAN

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

Not even close. The Alto was about an order of magnitude more expensive and had a far less featured GUI. Will this silly myth ever die?

I think this was the very first Mac

[AJ1G]

Just found a pair of Timex Sinclair ZX81s complete with RF modulators and a manual for them in a box of odds and ends..wonder what they are worth on EBay...

[K6JEK]

Not even close. The Alto was about an order of magnitude more expensive and had a far less featured GUI. Will this silly myth ever die?

I think this was the very first Mac

Yes, it wasn't a Mac.  It was an expensive workstation not an inexpensive PC and not very many were built but it did pioneer quite a few things.  Everything has an anticedent but I don't know of anything that put it all together like the Alto before the Alto.  And, of course, it preceded the Mac (and the Lisa for that matter) by a long time.

Ever miss something?  In the early '70's the start-up I was in went belly up.  We scattered.  A super bright young programmer who worked for me ended up at PARC.  I was pretty much blown away by the stories he told me about the Alto.  But I was impressed by the what they were doing with networking, Ethernet.  I never even asked about the GUI and never even tried to go over there to see the thing.

Pretty good article about the Alto:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Alto

Here's a short article about PARC including a tiny bit about Xerox suing Apple over the GUI.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_PARC

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

PARC came up with some great stuff. Too bad XEROX made little or no money of much of it. They were too stuck on copiers!

Just a few points on the differences in the Mac and the Alto.

Apple engineers visited PARC a total of two times.

Jeff Raskin (one of the main designer of the Mac GUI) master’s thesis was on GUIs for computers, pushing WYSIWYG, fonts, different display resolutions, etc. This was 1967, well before PARC even existed.  The name of his thesis was the A Hardware-Independent Computer Drawing System Using List-Structured Modeling: The Quick-Draw Graphics System. Not coincidentally, the Mac graphics component was called QuickDraw.

The GUI had (and Alto did not):

Drag and drop file manipulation

File resource forks

pull-down menus and the now (in pretty much all GUIs) menu bar (actually came from the Lisa)

one-button mouse

self-painting windows (you had to click in an Alto window for it to update the display) (also from the Lisa)

clipboard (from the Lisa)


It seems the Mac copied more from the Lisa than it did from the Alto.


Yes, none of this stuff just popped out of nowhere and usually built on previous work by others. Doug Englebart demonstrated a GUI in 1968. But the idea that the first Mac was just a copy of the Alto is far too simplistic and just plain historically inaccurate.

[W3SLK]

The Mac I had only a 13" B&W (okay technically black and light blue) screen. What made them the big hit at NASA was that they were icon driven and implemented a mouse as part of their normal operating system. Alot of the structual engineers could identify with this because they used a mouse as part of their CAD programs and terminal interfaces/work stations. Remember the computer was evolving from the mini's (VAX's) to desk top tools.

[K6JEK]

The Mac I had only a 13" B&W (okay technically black and light blue) screen. What made them the big hit at NASA was that they were icon driven and implemented a mouse as part of their normal operating system. Alot of the structual engineers could identify with this because they used a mouse as part of their CAD programs and terminal interfaces/work stations. Remember the computer was evolving from the mini's (VAX's) to desk top tools.

Indeed.  Of course long before Apple or PARC or Jeff Raskins Ph'd Thesis there was Sketchpad

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sketchpad

By the time the Mac came out, those of us in the computer biz were pretty well aware of WIMP intefaces (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointing device) because of the Alto, the Star, and even the Lisa.  What impressed me and my buds about the Mac wasn't its graphical interface (yet another, maybe better) which is what most people think of but that they got the damned thing to work -- so little hardware, so much functionality, that and its sheer elegance.

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

Yea, MacPaint was something like 8k lines of code.

MacDraw used only addition and subtraction vice taking square roots to calculate graphical circles and ovals. The 68000 uP didn't support floating point ops, so this was a nice work around. It was also slower doing multiplication and division, so the add/sub was faster too.

[W3SLK]

Now then you have to distinguish, a Mac, Mac+, Mac II, and I think I'm missing one in the series.