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

Bruce Tomlin said:
And that's a lot of money for an A1 that is unlikely it can ever be made operational because of all the missing chip positions. The best you could do is try to reproduce the missing parts of the circuit board, then Frankenstein it with dozens of bodge wires. Not that I even really care about A1, because memory-mapped video became a thing just as I started getting into electronics as a kid. I have no love for terminals that use shift register memory, just amazement that it worked at all.
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Of course, the function of a vintage computer is moot isn't it.

In fact, my A1 is 'fun' just for the building and expanding. I have managed to put BASIC into ROM along with the A1 assembler and remapped the RAM to give 8k contiguous memory. I fancy making an adapter to run a TMS 9129 chip to give colour and sprites.

Totally pointless :)
 
Gary C said:
The whole '6800' thing seems to be such an unused and breadboarding legacy thing, you wonder why its designation wasn't removed from the silkscreen when they put the 6502 jumpers in.
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I suspect the opposite, it was not “legacy” at all, although the path there is convoluted.

Woz’ attested timeline about this thing is he’d been toying with the design for a while based on datasheets for the 6800, but he never actually built anything before that trip to Wescon ‘75 and came home with the cheap MOS chips. (It seems like he may not be entirely positive if they were 6501s or 02’s; in the grand scheme of things it hardly matters, but them being ‘01s makes sense for two reasons: A: they were cheaper and that seems to have been a major driver in his designs, and B: when the design was committed to a PCB it included space for the external clock driver.) So…

Woz says he never wrote any 6800 software and he didn’t care to, so why in the world does the manual for the shipped Apple 1 mention running one in the board and the PCB have jumpers for it? I would guess that when they started shopping this around at retailers and computer clubs somebody suggested having the option might be a selling point. (this was probably during the period when the plan was to sell kits, not pre-stuff every board) Since they’d already done the layout for the 6501 option it was basically free to add the jumper points so… they did.

Since the Apple 1 never was actually sold as an unpopulated board and bombed on the market anyway it does look pointless in retrospect, but I can see there being this brief moment around the time the PCB was being finalized where it seemed like a good idea.
 
Gary C said:
In fact, my A1 is 'fun' just for the building and expanding. I have managed to put BASIC into ROM along with the A1 assembler and remapped the RAM to give 8k contiguous memory. I fancy making an adapter to run a TMS 9129 chip to give colour and sprites.
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Right, and there's not much building and expanding that can be done with the particular unit in question. But I know what you mean. I've got a whole bunch of chips that I'd love to be putting together in cool ways, but right now I have to make myself focus on only a few things so I can actually get one or two of them done. As Steve Jobs supposedly said, "Real artists ship", and I got tired of not finishing things. It even seems to be working for me.
 
So I have a question I have been mulling over. I thought it stupid to ask it, but in the light of this particular scenario I feel its actually appropriate. Which machine is more useful/useable the Apple-1 or the Kim-1 (I never noticed the obvious naming convention till tying this very thread)?
 
There were a fair number of third-party add-ons for the KIM-1, so the question is a bit difficult to answer. I'm not aware that the Apple 1 had an expansion bus nor many products made for it.
 
I has a bus, exposed on a 44 pin edge connector with an internal socket for the cassette interface. It has three decoded 4k block select lines whose addresses are selected by the jumper block in the centre of the board and its simple to interface something to it. I have mapped a couple of 4K EPROMS with one at address E000 which works perfect for a ROM version of BASIC.

I imagine the A1 sold in such few numbers (price and capability) it never got any development and the KIM-1 being a third of the price took the experimenters market
 
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The KIM-1, hands down, is the better computer. The only leg the Apple-1 has to stand on in this fight is it comes with video display hardware out of the box, but even then the fact that the KIM-1 cost 1/3rd as much meant it was very possible to put together a system consisting of the KIM, a terminal/TV typewriter kit like a CT-1024, and additional RAM for about the same price or less. (And within less than a year there was a video add on board for it that sold for $35) The KIM had a better machine language monitor, cassette I/O was built in, pre-decoded GPIO, its built-in keypad made it suitable for embedded work without a terminal… the two machines aren’t really comparable at all, honestly.

Neither machine is a “personal computer” in the same way as a Commodore PET or TRS-80, both are clearly “hacker machines”, but the Apple 1’s terrible terminal (and reliance on such) and high cost makes it the clear loser compared to the KIM. Which is why Commodore sold *many, many* more KIMs.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Wasn't it MOS Technology that sold the bulk of the KIM-1 boards? Or was it CSG? I don't have the numbers.
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The acquisition was in late 1976 and they sold the KIM through… 1979 or so? So I would guess a majority were sold under Commodore ownership, but I certainly don’t have the sales figures at hand. In any case, even if we wanted to nitpick them into two piles I would bet there were a lot more KIM-1s sold post-acquisition than Apple-1s ever. ;)

If we really want to dog pile on this comparison we could also lump in the KIM-1’s cousins and semi-clones, like the JOLT/TIM, SYM-1, AIM-65, etc, all of which sold far more than 200 units. And in terms of useful life of the platform, obscure beasts like the SuperKIM were still on sale in the 1980s and doing more interesting things than I would guess anyone ever did with an Apple-1.
 
I have Lancaster's TVT 6-5/8 add on for the KIM. Unfortunately my KIM doesn't work.. never did figure out what it's problem was.

The KIM was always sold assembled right?
 
falter said:
The KIM was always sold assembled right?
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Yep. Introductory price of $245. (And, FWIW, about three months before the Apple-1 went on sale.)

593px-KIM-1_Computer_Ad_May_1976.jpg


Unfortunately the KIM's reliance on the 6530 RIOT chip makes it one of the oldest computers that's a pain to try to repair today specifically because it uses unobtainium "custom" (mask-programmed) ASICs. You can sub them for a ROM-less 6532 using an adapter board but the 6532 is itself discontinued and getting a bit rare.
 
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Bruce Tomlin said:
There's one in every Atari 2600 ever sold. I think there's still a lot more of those lying around than KIM-1 boards.
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True enough, but 2600’s aren’t as cheap as they used to be and it kind of sucks to have to kill one. It’d be really nice if someone could convince Western Design Center would churn them out again along with their versions of the PIA and VIA.

FWIW, they do sell an MCU, the W65C134S, which from reading the datasheet is almost a single-chip KIM. (It has a 6502, 192 bytes of RAM, I/O and timer features like the RIOT’s, and a monitor ROM built into it. Also has built-in chip selects for adding external memory with no decoding.) I wonder how hard it would be to port KIM software to it…
 
Eudimorphodon said:
True enough, but 2600’s aren’t as cheap as they used to be and it kind of sucks to have to kill one. It’d be really nice if someone could convince Western Design Center would churn them out again along with their versions of the PIA and VIA.

FWIW, they do sell an MCU, the W65C134S, which from reading the datasheet is almost a single-chip KIM. (It has a 6502, 192 bytes of RAM, I/O and timer features like the RIOT’s, and a monitor ROM built into it. Also has built-in chip selects for adding external memory with no decoding.) I wonder how hard it would be to port KIM software to it…
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Some years ago I purchased assets of a Commodore/Apple repair guy and got a bucket of ICs.. 6532s, PET ROMs, ram, support ICs and even a 6530-003. I'm not one hundred percent sure the RRIOT chips are at fault on mine.. but I have swapped memory and a host of others without success.
 
My $0.02?

Having watched Apple as a company, learned about its history, and Steve Jobs' involvement therein, there's one thing that's resoundingly clear about the whole story.

Steve Jobs was a sociopath. A sociopath who was particularly adept at conning people into believing his "innovations" weren't the products of outright theft and clever deception.

IMHO, Jobs' lasting contribution to the IT industry? The definitive corporate blueprint on how to best screw, steal, and profit off others work, and get away with it. How to cut corners, how to not keep your word, how to convince your followers that your mistakes and misadventures were somehow merely the unavoidable product of his "misunderstood genius".

Woz, by contrast, is practically a saint. Brilliant guy, with an enormously strong personal and business ethics.

The best hack of Woz' life wasn't the design of the Apple II, or the Disk II controller... Woz' greatest hack was learning how to manage Jobs' sociopathy and lack of moral/ethical compass to accomplish his own goals...sort of like how a steam locomotive uses a cow-catcher to clear the rails of obstacles. As the old Sparks' song goes, it's always nice when something big is acting as your go-between..
 
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falter said:
Wow. That's a lot of cash for that. I honestly don't know who to believe on authenticity. I'd be inclined to believe Woz et. al, but I know from first hand experience that memory isn't that reliable, and especially not over decades. My Dad and I were having a chat the other day about different cars he owned - I remembered his old 79 Grand Prix. I said yeah, big yellow thing. Dad says no, it was pink. I'm 100% sure it was yellow, he's positive it was pink. Someone has to be wrong. Either one of us or both. It's quite possible the actual Apple guys are misremembering. It could be that everyone is wrong. I'd be tempted to dismiss Corey on this one except for those darned resistor bands being aligned similarly. I can't see how that happens twice by random chance. Either that's the board in the Polaroids or someone's running some kind of con and moved them to match.
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There's no way to authenticate this board. The best we can do is trust the statement of one of the two people who would have direct knowledge. Whatever Steve Wozniak's ability to recall things from decades ago if he authenticates it then it will be treated as such (barring any way to disprove it, which doesn't seem to be the case here). An absolute statement from him that it is authenticate is all that's needed to authenticate the board. Key word: absolute. If he can't absolutely authenticate it then it can't be considered authentic and not worth $6.77 let alone $677K.
 
I don't think there is much doubt that this is a genuine apple product from the start of the company and it's interesting like many other things.

The price is stupid though.
 
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