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Interesting read on ebay

Yeah.. I have no love for that Steve either... Never have and never will.

Explain to me how he wasnt the pure essence of middle management?! He never made anyting, he didnt know how to do the job of the people he bossed.

He learned to make his product a fashion item and rake in money from idiots...... maybe that aspect I will give him credit although hes still evil for it.
 
VERAULT said:
He's right. Can someone with an S-100 bus machine please chime in.. We need Diversity here people....:unsure:
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Actually I can kinda chime in here with my AltairClone, but that's an emulated S100 machine.

Even though for $600 I bought an empty 1:1 size box with everything including peripherals and expansion reduced to a chip the size of my thumbnail, an S100 machine in the flesh or emulated is massively more flexible than an Apple 1. Even if I owned a genuine Altair 8800 there are more programs I can run without even needing a cassette interface and it's far less of an ego stroke because unless you picked it up you'd never know if I paid $600 or $4000. If it runs on an Interdata, IMSAI or any other S100 machine odds are it will run the same code. For an Apple I unless it's very carefully programmed integer BASIC most of the programs are not backwards compatible with the Apple II.
 
Owning any vintage computer is objectively 'dumb' to most people. As a hobby we enjoy the machines no matter how 'crap' they really are in todays world. We enjoy different things, but generally we enjoy the divergence of computers from the past in all their forms and also the history including the good, bad and ugly.

It is though, slightly offensive to be tarred as an 'intergalactic ego stroker' :(

But I will live.
 
Unknown_K said:
I meant for its time.
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My mistake, I misread what you had written. I agree with you that the Apple II was the Rasberry Pi of its day. In fact I can say the Rasberry Pi is in some ways the spiritual successor to the Apple II (and similar systems of the time)
 
If I paint too broad a brush, I'm sorry. If there is collateral damage I'm only speaking it as I see it. If the public image is that most of the current Apple I owners and buyers are pompous, rude or paranoid I strongly ask the minority of the remaining Apple I owners to point out those people are poor representations of why people want an Apple I and what it means to them today beyond a price-valued status symbol.

I seem to be getting a fair bit of flak in this discussion now because these opinions are outstanding. I'll be stepping back.
 
Nah, go for it.

I'm building one because its fun. I know its not an original but I wanted to build something and the clones that used Pi's didn't quite meet what I wanted as I am probably more hardware than software and the A1 was actually a lot cheaper than building a full Altair with a real S100 bus.

Must admit I have learnt a lot and I didn't know that the video subsection was so stone aged before I started, but thats part of the journey. Chucks revelation that he was present when the Steves tried to flog it at the HBCC and that no one wanted it because they all had S100 systems was fascinating.

Once its completed and in its wooden box, will I ever use it beyond demonstrations ? probably not.

But I will still have enjoyed the process of making it.
 
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oldpcguy said:
I really don't know what point you guys are trying to make with your Apple II examples.
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I would say the point that people are making about the Apple II is it was blessed with flexibility and capability far beyond the Apple 1 despite the fact that an ignorant look at the raw specs might lead one to believe they aren't that different. (I mean, gee wiz, they're both single-board 6502 machines running at 1Mhz with built in video terminals, it must be some kind of conspiracy that nobody writes amazing software for the Apple 1, right?)

The fact is, and the point was already made, that the Apple 1 was, by design, a limited and frankly kind of crummy computer even by the standards of the time it was sold. It's no more capable (or friendly) than any other single-board CPU trainer with a boot/monitor ROM, which at this point in 1976 was something that had been on the market for more than three years (and at "affordable" price points for about a year, at least), and its main selling point, the built in video terminal, was implemented in a really archaic and bass-akward way that made the whole package roughly the equivalent of an MIA Jolt glued to a copy of the original 1973 version of the TV Typewriter, for all the negative the latter implies. (IE, terribly inflexible and slow video access. And, honestly, the Jolt probably had a better monitor.) By this point in history everybody had already figured out that RAM was the way to go for video displays; there were multiple options for random-access memory mapped video displays available for Altair-type machines for months before the Apple I went on sale and prototypes of the 6800-based Sphere beat it by over a year. At $666.66 it was at best a marginal value proposition considering what you actually got for your money; you'd be more like $800 into it by the time you added a keyboard and other missing pieces, which is why it sold so poorly. For just a few more bucks you could have something like a Poly-88/"Micro-Altair", which was expandable, had a good-size software base already available for it, and could even do graphics which, while pretty crude, were light-years ahead of anything the Apple I could do.

The Apple II solved all the problems of the Apple I and then some; it rightly deserves its place in history as one of the first affordable machines with full bit-mapped color graphics and the rest of the architecture was flexible enough to give it a good 15 years of market viability plus a perpetual nostalgic (and sometimes practical) afterlife. This is the machine that "deserves" some level of adulation; the problem from an investment standpoint is because it was successful it's just too darn common. (Not that it stops people from finding an angle with hyper-valuing "Rev 0s" and "low serial numbers" and other such nonsense.)

The only thing interesting about the Apple 1 is its dumb luck being first product sold by Apple Computer. Nobody would remember it at all if it wasn't for that. And, frankly, I guess if you're *honest* about that and want one anyway for your collection I guess that's fine. But, man, all the ridiculous hype/lies that get attached to it really get under my skin.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
I would say the point that people are making about the Apple II is it was blessed with flexibility and capability far beyond the Apple 1 despite the fact that an ignorant look at the raw specs might lead one to believe they aren't that different. (I mean, gee wiz, they're both single-board 6502 machines running at 1Mhz with built in video terminals, it must be some kind of conspiracy that nobody writes amazing software for the Apple 1, right?)
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A point that was never in question (at least that I saw).
 
oldpcguy said:
A point that was never in question (at least that I saw).
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If it's not in question, why do you keep trying to advance the claim that the Apple 1 and Apple II are now both "equally useless"? (That seems to be what you keep saying, I'm actually having a little trouble trying to parse it.) I mean, sure, I get that an 8-bit computer isn't going to get you on the Internet, but there are tons of applications out there still sourcing 8-bit MCUs to do the heavy lifting, and they do the job fine. I mean, obviously nobody is going to specifically design a practical commercial product today that specifically relies on an Apple II as the main moving part (that they haven't been made since 1993 just might be a factor there), but the flexibility and extensibility of the machine means that on the hobbyist level there's still tons of viable uses if you happen to have one lying around and are motivated to use it. Whether it's some sort of real-life control application or just writing a new video game an Apple II is still a great platform, as good as it ever was for any application realistically within its performance envelope.

By contrast, the Apple I is a horribly crippled machine that's really not good for much at all beyond teaching very basic computer literacy skills, and it's not even that great for that application. Just to play devil's advocate, here, let's compare a $666.66 Apple 1 (again, we're actually closer to a thousand bucks by the time you've added the keyboard and a TV set) with a $245 MOS KIM-1:

593px-KIM-1_Computer_Ad_May_1976.jpg

First we'll say where the Apple-1 wins: obviously it's nice to see more that six hex digits of your program at once and it comes with four times the RAM. But that's where the winning stops. The KIM includes a better software package in its 2K of ROM than the Apple I does in its 256 *bytes* and in addition to its built-in keypad it has built in support for bit-banging two serial channels, one of which can be connected to the serial terminal of your choice. (How about a $275 CT-1024? Throw that on your wishlist along with the KIM and you're still paying $150 less than an Apple 1 (Of course, shortly after it came out the guy who invented the TV Typewriter introduced a video display board for the KIM that cost a whopping $35, so maybe you'd end up with some buyer's regret going with that full terminal.) Out of the box interaction with either machine is pretty much limited to entering hand-assembled machine code via hex digits, and the KIM-1 also includes the audio cassette interface so you can actually save your software programs, that's a $75 option for your Apple 1. Seems to me if you want to learn machine language, which was all you could do with an Apple-1 without spending $200 over the starting price for more RAM and the cassette interface, the KIM-1 wins this hands down. And if you're effectively spending a $1000 to run BASIC, well... there were better options already out there than either of these, really. But the KIM-1 was capable of growing into the role if you really insisted.

The Apple-1 was too expensive to do embedded microcomputing things (and for those things its TV terminal is completely useless anyway), costing almost as much as a starter configuration for a "real" computer, but with its limited I/O and brain-dead terminal it was too limited to compete with them and people saw this back in 1976. Strictly speaking, sure, both the KIM-1 and the Apple-1 have expansion connectors hanging off them that would allow them to be expanded to whatever arbitrary degree your heart desires, but only one of them was really intended to serve the role of being ultra-flexible electronic play-dough and priced accordingly, while the worst deficiencies of the Apple-1 that you might want to fix with expansions are also its only selling point. (IE, its trash terminal and I/O setup.) This is why they sold thousands and thousands of KIM-1s over a product lifetime of over three years instead vs. just couple hundred Apple-1s over a year and a half. (A year that ended with the leftovers going into a dumpster.) The Apple-1 was a big fat failure because it was overpriced for what it offered and wasn't even particularly good at what it did do. Which, you know, is fine, it was a first attempt. But like a lot of first drafts it deserved being crumpled up and tossed into the circular file, which is what actually happened to it.

Anyway, the point you keep trying to avoid is that people still love and use the Apple II for what it offers, while the only reason to care about the Apple-1 is for what it is. That's a huge distinction.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
Anyway, the point you keep trying to avoid is that people still love and use the Apple II for what it offers, while the only reason to care about the Apple-1 is for what it is. That's a huge distinction.
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It is, and I agree but really, its a bit of a pointless argument in the end.
 
Eh people say early Macs are useless too, and I do most my house budget and vintage computer/parts inventory on one. All depends what you need.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
If it's not in question, why do you keep trying to advance the claim that the Apple 1 and Apple II are now both "equally useless"?
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Because in 2022 they essentially are. Outside of hobbyists or special circumstances no one is currently, or has been for some time, building solutions on either one.
 
twolazy said:
Eh people say early Macs are useless too, and I do most my house budget and vintage computer/parts inventory on one. All depends what you need.
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You are, relatively speaking, an exception and not the rule.

EDIT: I think I need to qualify my statement with "depending on which early Mac your using".
 
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Using a Mac Classic. Nothing fancy. Once a month or so I dump it to the network with the LC I have. Might do a serial network dongle using an ESP32 soon just to make life easier.
 
twolazy said:
Using a Mac Classic. Nothing fancy. Once a month or so I dump it to the network with the LC I have. Might do a serial network dongle using an ESP32 soon just to make life easier.
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The Mac Classic can do those two tasks quite easily (an Apple II could even do them depending on the size of the data).
 
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