Apple I

apple

The Apple Computer 1, originally released as the Apple Computer and known later as the Apple I or Apple-1, is an 8-bit desktop computer released by the Apple Computer Company (now Apple Inc.) in 1976. It was designed by Steve Wozniak. The idea of selling the computer came from Wozniak's friend and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. The Apple I was Apple's first product, and to finance its creation, Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator for $500 and Jobs sold a second hand VW Microbus, for a few hundred dollars (Wozniak later said that Jobs planned instead to use his bicycle to get around). Wozniak demonstrated the first prototype in July 1976 at the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto, California.

Production was discontinued on September 30, 1977, after the June 10, 1977 introduction of its successor, the Apple II, which Byte magazine referred to as part of the "1977 Trinity" of personal computing (along with the PET 2001 from Commodore Business Machines and the TRS-80 Model I from Tandy Corporation).

Wikipedia APPLE 1

PSA DNA certified autograph !!!

This is one of the dreams, for us retrocomputer enthusiasts, sooner or later I'll assemble it!

Let's start with setting up a monitor for the Apple I

this is the pcb we use for assembly

Some considerations on the computer. Looking at the long side PCB, you will see numbers at the bottom, ranging from 1 to 18, the same goes for the left side, you will see letters ranging from A to D.The combination of the letters on the left and the numbers on the bottom form a nearly perfect grid on the PCB, this is widely used in documentation among hobbyists to identify chips or circuit parts.

In principle it can be divided into three parts, at the top right there is the power supply with the three large Blue capacitors, at the bottom all the components including the references A1 to A18 and B1 to B18, the computer with the micro, ram, prom, etc... Above all the components included by references C1 to C18 and D1 to D18, the video or terminal part. This section works independently, because in effect it is like a copy of a terminal or teletype. These terminals, or teleprinters, take ASCII characters and print them on the screen, or print them on paper.

Then the computer part (bottom part) takes the ASCII characters one at a time and sends them to the video (top part), to be displayed. The heart of the video comes down to the character ROM at position D2, which contains the BIT patterns for 64 characters. These are the only characters that APPLE 1 can display. The screen is 40 columns wide x 24 rows, for a total of 960 characters.

In this phase you can see the complete pcb of the components relating only to the video terminal part. The problems encountered were, a faulty LM323 (it went into protection when I inserted more than 5 chips), a faulty SN74174 (it blocked the reset), the faulty video output transistor (Chinese).

Here you can see how I fed the pcb the reset, of the video part, all random characters, then I gave a +5 volt on pin 13 of the keyboard.

Now it's time to insert all the remaining components, and connect a compatible keyboard. At this stage I only encountered a bad ram and a 7400 with a bent pin.

To do a little test, enter these lines of hexadecimal code:

0: A9 0 AA 20 EF FF E8 8A 4C 2 0 return

Type 0.A return in this way the memory locations with the hexadecimal values will be displayed

Type R return ( R means run the program)

Let's play with P-Lab Claudio's WiFi modem and Francesco's BBS

For configuration, follow the instructions on the P-Lab website

Insert the modem after configuring it for your WiFi network. Type the command C100R after resetting the computer. Check the connection to the previously configured wifi network. Type ATE1R command to get echo of typing.

Typing the command ATDT BBS.RETROCAMPUS.BBS:6502 will start the connection to Francesco's BBS.