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Were Apple-1's wave soldered?

falter

falter

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Was watching 8bitguy's latest video on the Apple-1 project he did, and in it he mentioned how long it took to solder around 1000 joints for the sockets, and that that gave him a new respect for the people who built the Apple-1 in the garage.

I've always been under the impression the original boards were wave soldered - that's what I've seen from most authoritative sources. There's a mini argument about it in the comments on the video. But personally I cannot see the logic of hand soldering all those sockets on almost 200 boards.. doesn't seem very efficient. Even Woz said they didn't do that, but some are arguing that Chuck Peddle and others claim the opposite, and that everything was done 100% in the garage.
 
Pretty much every documentation I saw about the Apple 1 said all were hand-soldered. Makes sense to me. Back then, you could not just find some company doing wave-soldering for 200 pcbs for you. And Apple had no money at that time to pay for such a service anyway.
 
The standard lore is the first fifty units assembled for “The Byte Shop” were hand soldered while later ones were wave soldered, but there are mixed indications about when they actually switched; it may have actually been during the Byte Shop order. Different sources cite various anecdotes but they basically seem to boil down to discovering after an initial batch or two of PCBs it was surprisingly cheap to get them soldered. The actual number of fully hand soldered boards may be quite low.
 
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I thought the video memory as shift registers was pretty interesting.
 
alank2 said:
I thought the video memory as shift registers was pretty interesting.
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It was a really retrograde design for 1976; Don Lancaster's 1973's TV Typewriter used similar parts. Pretty much the whole world had switched to RAMs by 1975. Which, on the flip side, meant that the associated shift registers had suddenly become really cheap on the surplus market.

Re: the comment about "Back then, you could not just find some company doing wave-soldering for 200 pcbs for you", this was the mid-1970's in Silicon Valley: you could totally find someone able to wave solder a pile of boards for you on the cheap. The difference from today would mostly be instead of it happening inside of a gigantic highly-automated facility in China it'd be happening inside of an unassuming warehouse in north Sunnyvale. There are car autobody shops today living in the exact same buildings where they used to build hard disks forty years ago.
 
Thanks guys.. I was a bit confused because while I've never been close to a real Apple 1 I've seen lots of pictures of the backsides and it sure looks wave soldered to my (admittedly limited experience) eyes.

It's hard to know what's real or not. I'm sure the passage of 4 decades plus hasn't sharpened details any. In the 8bitguy comments a guy said that Woz was wrong about nothing going on in the garage because he wasn't there most of the time, and claimed Chuck Peddle stated that he witnessed tons of hand soldering and assembly going on. But I also see on the Apple 1 registry a blanket statement that all boards were wave soldered.

I recall reading somewhere that something like 10-50 unstuffed boards were kept at Apple in a drawer for some time, and I think I recall they had sockets. Would be odd to spend hours soldering those up if there were no firm orders..
 
falter said:
It's hard to know what's real or not. I'm sure the passage of 4 decades plus hasn't sharpened details any. In the 8bitguy comments a guy said that Woz was wrong about nothing going on in the garage because he wasn't there most of the time, and claimed Chuck Peddle stated that he witnessed tons of hand soldering and assembly going on. But I also see on the Apple 1 registry a blanket statement that all boards were wave soldered.
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I'd love to know more about this claim that Chuck Peddle had any inside knowledge of what was happening at Apple. So far as I'm aware he never worked there and I can't offhand think of any source I've read that he had anything to do with them. I mean, the guy worked for MOS and then Commodore; I guess it's conceivable that he at some point in his capacity of a MOS engineer made a visit to Apple's facilities, they were after all a "Customer"...

... Okay, here:

https://theamphour.com/241-an-interv...ng-coryphaeus/

Start around the 33 minute mark. (found by randomly scrubbing around) Apparently he and Woz have somewhat different recollections about a meeting where Chuck showed up in a consulting role to help them work out issues with the pre-production Apple I; Woz apparently claims that Peddle showed up all straightlaced in a suit and a hat and blawblawblaw and tried to sell him stuff while Chuck says it was an informal technical troubleshooting visit to the garage, during which he actually helped them out.

At this point I have to drag this unpopular opinion I have about Woz: people love him, and I get why, but so far as I'm concerned he's an unreliable narrator when it comes to the history of personal computers. And as part of that he has a bad habit of trashing other people's contributions (which is a tendency he's had going back to interviews he gave in the 1980's, it isn't a new thing). This leaves me inclined to believe Chuck's recollection of this particular incident, and it's in large part because I can't imagine Woz wanting to admit that he ever needed any help.

(The tone of his autobiography is consistently self-aggrandizing to the point of absurdity; to accept his narrative you basically have to accept that the companies that were making microprocessors had essentially started cargo-cult-style manufacturing mysterious artifacts that fell from outer space without knowing what they were or that they could be used to build a computer before he came along and had this AMAZING IDEA.)

That said, I don't think this says anything about how the production Apple Is were churned out; this incident clearly predates mass production, and in this interview at least Peddle says the next time he ran into the Steve-s was... significantly later. (He kind of wanders off in another direction for a big chunk.)
 
All Apple-1 (including the first going to the Byte Shop) were wave soldered. No doubt about it.
It is easily to see on the back of every Apple-1. The usual ripple effect of wave soldering is visible. You find more information here: About the Apple-1.
So many writers just copy or make stuff up. I have unfortunately experienced this myself. You give an interview, the journalist writes everything down, and the final article says things that make your hair stand on end.
 
Eudimorphodon said:
I'd love to know more about this claim that Chuck Peddle had any inside knowledge of what was happening at Apple. So far as I'm aware he never worked there and I can't offhand think of any source I've read that he had anything to do with them.
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I think it was mentioned in 'The spectacular rise and fall of Commodore' - Peddle appears to have indeed worked for Apple but only for a short time (couple of months in 1978). Trying to google this now I came up with very little results but it is mentioned in here and here.
 
I think some of the confusion on this subject may stem from accounts of boards being worked on (repaired) in the garage after assembly or when returned. I'm pretty sure I've seen a photo of someone in the garage repairing a board. I'm 100% sure they were all wave soldered at the beginning though. I can't see how it would have been productive or worth the effort to hand solder 150-200 boards.
 
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