• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

They may have found (most of) the Apple 1 Prototype Board

robert_sissco

Experienced Member
Joined
Oct 12, 2021
Messages
400
Location
Midwest U.S.A.
Thought this would fit here. They may have found the prototype board that Apple put together to demo the systems they were tying to sell, and was likely shown to the Byte Shop to get them to order systems to sell. It has supposedly been matched to Polaroid photographs taken by Paul Terrell in 1976 and verified by Corey Cohen.

It looks as if the power supply part of the board was removed or broken off, and a lot of the chips are missing, but kinda neat that something thought lost to time was found.

Currently at $407,000.

 
I love how it always says STEVE JOBS.. He had nothing to do with building and designing the Apple 1 it was all WOZ. The guy is alive and gets zero credit for anything.

Im on the fence about whether this is real or not. IF it is Id love to know how it got to the shape its in. I cant understand at all the money already bid on it. Its not the start of Apple computer. Woz is, he built the machines. Wouldnt his phone phreaking boxes or his Cream soda computer really be the start of Apple Computer?

Jobs... Cant wait for the day his name fades.

Jobs jobs Jobs Blah.. "did you know STEVE JOBS was really the guy behind Sinclair Research?" Thats right, Steve Jobs is single handedly responsible for UK computing.



In other news Bill Gates is guying up huge amounts of farmland.... Now thats forward thinking.....
 
Well Woz was good at making stuff (back in the day) Steve Jobs was good at self-promotion.
 
That seems to be what I read. He made a wirewrapped system before having a PCB etched. Which would make you think there are more out there.

I wonder if there are more boards that havent been scrapped.. Apple has lots and lots of prototypes floating around.

the first thing i thought when i saw that board was... yeah it can be fixed.... with a tremendous amount of work and breadboarding..
 
Last edited:
It would be uncommon to send an order to a PCB house for a single board, even back then.
Nowadays, when I order a PCB, the default quantity is 5--fewer doesn't gain a discount.
What I recall from the HBCC presentation was that Jobs was the pitchman.
 
It would be uncommon to send an order to a PCB house for a single board, even back then.

Falter recently did a Youtube video about this auction, and I likewise commented that it'd be pretty weird (bordering on stupid) for them to order just one copy of a PCB with plated-through holes. It's almost certain that more than one copy of this board existed, and it's also very likely that more than one was built up.

The claim attached to that auction is it's the *specific* exact unit that was demonstrated to Paul Terrell at the Byte Shop, which I guess I'm ambivalent about. There is a really badly colored and scratched up Polaroid that shows items like resistors *seemingly* close to the same positions, and both boards have some "optional with a 6502" clock generation circuitry built out, but this board has half the chips missing and at least one of the ones left appears to have a different logo on it, so a lot of possible landmarks to make it more certain are gone. That same Polaroid don't show that cut-off corner (which presumably was done to fit it into some kind of case) so... again, eh? It *could* be the same board that subsequently went through some more adventures before getting turned into e-waste, but to me it seems like the evidence is sketchy enough that I wouldn't bet my reputation on saying for sure either way. I don't think it's a "fake", but again, that *exact* unit? I dunno.

As to its condition, to me the explanation is simple enough. It's a well known part of Apple lore that the company got sick of trying to support Apple I owners (Woz was basically the only one who could answer any questions about it and he himself had lost interest even before he "finished" writing BASIC because, you know, Apple II) and strongly encouraged them to trade them in so they could be destroyed. My personal theory is that this thing had spent a year or two kicking around a workshop being stripped for spare parts before being snapped in half along with a batch of trade-ins, and then after being broken someone noticed it was a prototype and plucked as a souvenir. I have serious doubts about it being Steve Jobs himself, but since he's not around to say one way or the other I suppose the story gets to be whatever drives the auction price up the most.

But, yeah, whatever. I hope whoever buys it enjoys his half-million bucks' worth of literal garbage.
 
It would be uncommon to send an order to a PCB house for a single board, even back then.

My understanding of that era is that there existed tiny shops-- as in, literally one guy in a garage type setups-- that would do overnight turns on PCBs. You'd bring in your red and blue drawings for the etches, and they'd do the chemical photolithography on a board or two for you. These shops wouldn't be interested in or capable of doing quantity or necessarily even more than one unit. The idea was to get a quick and dirty turn on your layout to check out before making further changes or committing to a production run from a volume manufacturer.

This is context from research I've done on Sphere out of Salt Lake City in the same era, so I can't comment on Apple specifically, but assuming similar operations surely existed in the SF peninsula at the time it seems plausible that Woz could have had, say, one or maybe two boards of a particular design but no more.
 
Last edited:
This may have been a prototype, but the true original prototype would probably have been a wire-wrapped affair, no?
Supposedly, yes however wasn't that and a bunch of other handwritten early Apple stuff lost when Woz's storage unit burned down?

IF it can be confirmed as genuine (really, the only person left who could answer that is Woz himself) I can understand the price and leaving it as-is to be framed and put on a wall. I was all salty about the super rich being the main buyers of Apple I's last month but this is completely different if verified to be both an early-run prototype. I don't think there's anything older that still exists.

Well Woz was good at making stuff (back in the day) Steve Jobs was good at self-promotion.
That's because Woz has a soul in comparison.
 
Last edited:
My understanding of that era is that there existed tiny shops-- as in, literally one guy in a garage type setups-- that would do overnight turns on PCBs. You'd bring in your red and blue drawings for the etches, and they'd do the chemical photolithography on a board or two for you. These shops wouldn't be interested in or capable of doing quantity or necessarily even more than one unit. The idea was to get a quick and dirty turn on your layout to check out before making further changes or committing to a production run from a volume manufacturer.

This is context from research I've done on Sphere out of Salt Lake City in the same era, so I can't comment on Apple specifically, but assuming similar operations surely existed in the SF peninsula at the time it seems plausible that Woz could have had, say, one or maybe two boards of a particular design but no more.
Well, Woz and he-who-will-not-be-named were in the heart of Silicon Valley--and even then, there was a considerable business in PCB fabrication--this doesn't appear to be more than a double-sided PCB in any case--the cheapest of the cheap PCBs with no mask or silk-screen. Around the same time, we were doing multilayer boards and you ordered several ($$$) in hopes of getting at least one where the registration wasn't bollixed up.
 
IF it can be confirmed as genuine (really, the only person left who could answer that is Woz himself) I can understand the price and leaving it as-is to be framed and put on a wall. I was all salty about the super rich being the main buyers of Apple I's last month but this is completely different if verified to be both an early-run prototype. I don't think there's anything older that still exists.

Bury it in the ground for about 2,600 years and maybe it'll be "worth" what they're asking. (Basing that on a quick perusal of what authentic ancient Greek and Egyptian artifacts go for... although I guess it depends a lot on whether you think this is more akin to a pedestrian painted urn or an authenticated royal tomb artifact; I'm going to pretend it's more like the latter, based on the supposition that the Cult of Jobs will continue to build sufficiently for his name to be etched on a pyramid or two before we're all done with it.) But, hey, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.
 
based on the supposition that the Cult of Jobs will continue to build sufficiently for his name to be etched on a pyramid or two before we're all done with it.) But, hey, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I guess.
I bet you $5000 Apple pays a team to keep Steve's uglier skeletons in the closet for the sake of preserving the reputation of their historical co-founder and the identity of Apple itself.
 
Around the same time, we were doing multilayer boards and you ordered several ($$$) in hopes of getting at least one where the registration wasn't bollixed up.

With plated-through holes you're drilling the holes and plating them before you do the etching, correct? I'm curious how, back in the 70's, they handled this. CNC wasn't quite a thing yet, at least for small shops, right? I would guess if you were making a batch of boards they must have made some kind of drilling template at least, would a one-off/small order just been done by hand? If it was then *maybe* I could see a scenario where you wouldn't get a bulk discount until you ordered (X-many) because there would be diminishing returns on the drilling part of the process until you hit a certain threshold, but I honestly have no idea. (It's not an easy thing to research.)
 
I bet you $5000 Apple pays a team to keep Steve's uglier skeletons in the closet for the sake of preserving the reputation of their historical co-founder and the identity of Apple itself.

Heh. I don't think I want to take that bet, but, on the other hand it's not like there's not already a huge amount of ugly just hanging out there to see already that his fans don't seem to care about. (Or worse yet, take for granted as the cost of being a "genius".)
 
A friend of mine got very small runs of double-sided boards produced, but they were never through-hole plated. The vias had to be soldered in manually using harwin pins if I remember correctly.

I used to do 'smart' things at work with our bespoke operating system and computer languages. I got more out of the more senior engineers at the time who knew their stuff being impressed by what I had done and were asking questions about how I had achieved such-and-such rather than the managers who hadn't (in general) got a clue. There were the exceptions of competent engineers rising through the ranks to become competent managers. I had time for these managers, and no time for the idiots! And yes, we had managers who would get young engineers to do all the work and then publish the documents under their own name and take all the credit! I never subscribed to that at all...

Dave
 
Last edited:
With plated-through holes you're drilling the holes and plating them before you do the etching, correct? I'm curious how, back in the 70's, they handled this. CNC wasn't quite a thing yet, at least for small shops, right? I would guess if you were making a batch of boards they must have made some kind of drilling template at least, would a one-off/small order just been done by hand? If it was then *maybe* I could see a scenario where you wouldn't get a bulk discount until you ordered (X-many) because there would be diminishing returns on the drilling part of the process until you hit a certain threshold, but I honestly have no idea. (It's not an easy thing to research.)

Well, we had a small team of Chinese PCB artwork people (for some reason, they seemed to have the knack for detail). Work done on mylar (4x?) with registration marks and hand-checked on a light table. Four-layer (3 boards) with power and ground on the inner layers. I thought that the vias were done with an electroless process, but that's all I can remember. Bad multilayer boards were very common--common enough that product went out with bodge wires. This was about 1977-78. I still have a few of those boards.
 
A friend of mine got very small runs of double-sided boards produced, but they were never through-hole plated. The vias had to be soldered in manually using harwin pins if I remember correctly.

Yeah, that was the really fly-by-night "home darkroom" recipe. IC sockets were a challenge on those because you needed to solder both sides on every component.
 
A friend of mine got very small runs of double-sided boards produced, but they were never through-hole plated. The vias had to be soldered in manually using harwin pins if I remember correctly.

I used to do 'smart' things at work with our bespoke operating system and computer languages. I got more out of the more senior engineers at the time who knew their stuff being impressed by what I had done and were asking questions about how I had achieved such-and-such rather than the managers who hadn't (in general) got a clue. There were the exceptions of competent engineers rising through the ranks to become competent managers. I had time for these managers, and no time for the idiots! And yes, we had managers who would get young engineers to do all the work and then publish the documents under their own name and take all the credit! I never subscribed to that at all...

Dave
its been a very very long time since i have worked with managers who climbed the ranks or actually did the job i was doing while working under them. its been MBA instant bosses and micromanagers for about 20 years now.
 
Back
Top