Hello its blogging time again, it's April fools day, a day dedicated to pulling practical jokes on family and friends. But 50 years ago, two friends in Silicon Valley created a device that was no laughing matter. It was one of the first computers availible to consumers and it would lead to them creating a billion dollar tech empire. These two friends were Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs, and that computer was the Apple I.
Now Apple is a company that means no introduction, and wether you love them or hate them (and lets face it most people do for vailid reasons, including me!) you cant deny their place in computer history. The Apple II was the first fully assembled personal computer with color graphics and sound, It's Visicalc Spreadsheet program became the first killer app and legitamitzed computers as an essetial tool in everyday life, The Lisa and The Macintosh were some of the first commercially availible personal computers with GUI operating systems and mice, and they pretty much made the smartphone an everyday item thanks to the iPhone.
But 50 years ago, back in 1976, it was just a small opperation out of Job's home selling Apple I's to hobbists. While the computer only sold in small numbers, it did leave an indeliable mark on the company and lead them on the path to become the tech giant they are now. So in this post, I'll have a look at the story behind this litte machine, how it works, and what its like to use its software today.
Now the interesting thing about the Apple I is that it came from the most unlikely of places: Prank Calling. The story begins in 1957, in the town of Richmond Virgina. There, 7 year old Joe Engressia made an incredible discovery.
Being blind by birth, Engressia loved the telephone and used it to escape reaility. One day he accidentally discovered that whistling at certain frequencies could activate phone switches on the other end of the phone line. He discovered that whistling the fourth E above middle C (a frequency of 2637.02 Hz) would stop a dialed phone recording.
What happened was that the 2600 Hz tone caused the telephone's trunkline system to hang up while keeping the line active, allowing him to make a long distance call without being charged.
By the time he was a student at the University of South Florida in the late 1960s, he was given the nickname "Whistler" due to his ability to place free long-distance phone calls by whistling the proper tones with his mouth. After a Canadian operator reported him for selling such calls for $1 at the university, he was suspended and fined $25, with authorities caught him and arrested him however this led to an idea
His discovery caught the attention of a former military electronics engineer named John Draper, who discovered that a a toy whistle packaged in boxes of Cap'n Crunch cereal emitted the same 2600-hertz tone. and he did it often earning him the nickname Cap'n Crunch.
He decided to automate what Engressia was doing by creating a device electronics hobbyists dubbed as a blue box. This inspired a sub culture called phone phreakers so called because of their freaky nature and frequency which was key in manipulating the telephone system.
So you might wonder "What does this have to do with anything?" Well, the Phone Phreaking Phonomenon left a big impact on Steve Wozniak. One thing about Woz was, He loved pulling pranks. In high school and college he would often make devices for pranking his friends. Building a metronome to put in his friends locker in high school and building a TV jammer out of a Magic Marker and using it in the tv room in his dorm.
While attending UC Berkly, He earned about Phone Phreaking through an article in Esquire. This would lead him and Steve Jobs to build their own digital Blue Box and sell it to students, as well as meet Draper himself.
Woz and Draper ended up becoming good friends and one day in 1974, he showed Woz a teletype connected to a modem to the ARPANET (The precursor to the modern internet) to play chess with someone from Boston. this gave him the insparation to make his own cheap terminal based on the Signetics 2513 that used an inexpensive keyboard from Sears and a standard TV.
Then on March 5, 1975, The two Steves had joined The Homebrew Computer Club in Menlo Park, California. The meeting gave Woz the inspiration to build his own personal computer, something that he could show off to members of the club as well as do his own programming projects on similar to the computers he was using at HP.
So he took that terminal that he had built earlier, and gave it a few modifications such as the addition of the MOS 6502 and a built in machine language monitor. Initally he showed it to his bosses at Hewlet Packard, but they declined to sell it. After demonstrating it at the Homebrew Computer Club, Jobs was immediately interested in its commercial potential. Wozniak intended to share schematics of the machine for free; however, Jobs advised him to start a business together and sell bare printed circuit boards (PCBs) for the computer, without any components soldered on. While Wozniak was skeptical at first, he was convinced by Jobs and after getting the needed money, and on April Fool's Day 1976 Jobs and Wozniak found the Apple computer company in Steve Jobs home in Los Altos, California selling the Apple 1 for $666.66. The name came from 3 sources the first was Newton's apple in fact Apples first logo was Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree and the Apple gave him inspiration then realize that was a little too arcane for most people so they made it more just Apple the fruit. the other two sources was Steve Job's fruitarian diet, (which mostly consisted of apples,) and the time he spent on an apple orchard.
Now the Apple I only sold around 150 to 200, it still gave Woz and Jobs to create a successor. That succesor eventually became the Apple II a year later, and became a hit.
So thats the history out of the way, lets actually use it. Now unlike later personal computers The Apple I doesnt have a case or keyboard, users would have to get that themselves, and often would build their own from whatever they had. This resulted in many different cases for the Apple I in everything from suitcases to woden cases.
Booting the computer your dropped into a monitor program called WozMon where you can enter machine code. Heres an example from the manual that repeated every charactr repeatedly.
Its also possiblr to run basic with something called an ACI, Or Apple Cassete Interface. This was a seprate board that plugged into the edge connector on the side and would allow you to load and save programs on cassette.
With this it was possible to load a cassette with BASIC on it and program it that way.the way how you would do that would be by typing C100R and then type E000.EFFFR to read the data from cassette into the memory range and after the screen returns to a backslah you type in E000R and you'll be dropped into BASIC.
So how does this computer work? Well inside is a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor running at 1.022727 MHz, and its design was based largely on Wozniak's previous work centered around a Motorola 6800 (snd it also has the option to use a 6800 as well if desired), 4 or 8K of RAM, and 256 bytes of ROM. Yes you read that right, 256 Bytes of ROM! That is insanely small that's about as much memory thats in Impressive!
The video is handeled in an odd way as the video portion almost works independedly through shift regesters. It makes sense considereng its essentially a modied terminal, but still it makes the the display very limited. Theres was no graphics, just black and white text that could be displayed at a rate of 60 characters a second. Theres no lowercase charaters, any graphics characters, any reverse marks, or even the ability to put characters anywhere you want on the screen it can only display characters scrolling line by line. While thats pretty lacking for displays, in 1976, it was pretty attractive. A teletype or terminal could cost thousands of dollars at the time and the Apple I essetually had one built in. All the user had to do was plug in a keyboard and a CCTV monitor or television. Alongside the Sol-20, The Apple I was really one the first computers to do something like this.
There is also no sound, but it is possible to play tones through the ACI, similar to the TRS-80,. but not much software took advantage of it.
Speaking of software, its also releativly spare. As you can imaging for such an early personal computer, there isnt much in terms of commercial software. but there are a few ports of games like Hunt The Wumpus Hamurabi, and Star Trek that were availible for the Apple I
So thats my look at the Apple I, A simple but revolutionary computer that began as a simple terminal turned computer that made two friends go from geeks to billionare. While the machine is very simple by todays standards, its legacy lives on by kickstarting the Personal Computer Revolution. That wraps up todays entry, Happy April Fools Day, and as always, Thanks for reading! See you next time!
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