Do you know what the first Apple looked like?
Daniel Turner has posted a nice photo of the Apple I, designed by company co-founder Steve “Woz” Wozniak, at MIT’s Technology Review.
If you’re not familiar with the computer landscape of 1976, you might be shocked to see that it’s actually just a circuit board. Buyers of the “affordable” $666.66 product (about $2,400 in today’s dollars) had to hook up their own keyboards, displays, and power supplies.
Only about 200 of the Apple I motherboards were made before the Apple II was introduced in 1977 and (as Apple still notes in all their press releases) “ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s.”
Aren’t you glad you’re living after the revolution?
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After reading Woz’s recounting of those heady first days of the PC revolution — the man /invented/ the PC, for chrissakes — I’d actually love to have been around the Homebrew club and Apple, where there were ‘eureka’ moments like never before. We may cherish our fast, compact laptops and big, high-def displays, but everything we have today is just an incremental improvement on the Apple I. These were folks, too, who understood their machines down to the individual chip level. I think many computer users today would enjoy that kind of knowledge and might be surprised to find it’s relatively easy to follow: there are kits and even old boards floating around for experimentation and learning.
“Aren’t you glad you’re living after the revolution?”
NO! I lived through it, and I never had more fun with computers. Everything was customizable (obvious), you had to invent solutions, there were no viruses, and hanging with other computer owners was great.
Now they’re appliances. Then they were a gas, and owning one made you The Uber Nerd. There were dozens of magazines, many full of hardware hacks and software hacks and brand-new inventions.
There needs to be a movie.
I agree with TJ I would have loved to have been back there during the meagre beginnings of modern computing. I truly felt left out by missing out on all this stuff by only a few years. Regardless that was probably much harder times for computer geeks but damn how much fun would have been to be there pioneering the modern personal computing field. At least I was able to get into the mix during the Apple ][ era.