I am new to your forum, don't know why I didn't come here sooner!
I was present at the home brew computer club meeting the night that Steve Jobs passed out the few copies he had of the origonal hand drawn Apple schematic. It wasn't total mayhem as depicted in the "pirates of silicon valley" movie, but the action was pretty brisk. . .
So the other day I was looking at my copy of the schematic that Jobs had given me at the club meeting and was wondering if those were produced in mass or if in fact how many of these exist other than mine.
At that time in the mid 70's I also produced a 6502 based computer called the "datahandler", I had mine out shortly before the first apple, in fact my PC board was also layed out by the same PC designed by the name of Howard Canton (a little known trivia question)
Sorry to get off track, back to the question, does anybody have an idea as to how many copies of this exist. Thanks in advance and you guy and gals have a great site here. . .
Hi,
i would of liked to be there that day with you :), anyway, welcome to forum, it's nice to meet someone that who was an original homebrewer !!
Paul.
Wow! I can't imagine that very many copies of the hand-drawn schematics exist today. I certainly have heard of none except the original material that Woz has kept. I hope it has been preserved appropriatly for the future.
Do you still have your "Datahandler"? In working order? This is another important piece of the history of the personal computer. Congratulations on being one of the pioneers!
just a scan of the hand-drawn schematics would be great having
available at Applefritter
regards
Franz
I forwarded your question to Woz. He writes:
"I'm in Tokyo, short of time.
"When I joined the club I didn't know that it was about microprocessors. I had non followed them nor knew what they were. I had not heard of the Altaire. But I had seen a friend, John Draper, connecting to the Arpanet and playing chess with a computer at MIT, using a teletype machine. Whenever I saw something like that I could not afford it but could build it for almost free. So I had developed a TV terminal all on my own (without knowing of any others) and went to the club to show off and pass out my schematics to it. I think I took my schematics for that terminal and passed them out at a very early meeting, long before Jobs started attending the Homebrew meetings.
"The Apple I was based on this TV terminal. I just replaced the modem with a microprocessor, some dynamic memory (NO other hobby computers then used this low cost memory that was an ESSENTIAL KEY to an affordable computer), and a small program to read a human keyboard and cut out the mainframe for getting initial data into RAM. This computer was designed and built with no intent to sell it. I did every bit of the engineering and conception on my own, silently and quietly.
"I designed this computer in a vacuum and created the copies of my schematics and code listing on the copy machine at HP, where I worked. I passed these schematics and listings out because I wanted to be identified silently as a super designer with a new and different computer formula (hence my name, alone, on those schematics and listings), but secondly as a person who did this to better the world, to be giving to the future with my skills. I put no copyright notices on the schematics and passed them out myself.
"It was the interest in this, at the club, that got Steve Jobs to suggest starting a company, not to sell computers, but, at this initial stage, to sell PC boards for $40 each so that people interested in my schematics could build their own with much less effort.
"Paul Terrell, owner of the Byte Shop, who saw my demos of the Apple I and my BASIC at the Homebrew Computer Club brought up the idea of selling fully built computers in his store based on my design. In the end we only supplied fully built PC boards because manually building computers was expensive when it included the casing and keyboard. These were the boards that Paul paid $500 for (and accepted the credit on the components) and which we attached a suggested retail price of $666.66.
"Oh, I recall making at least 50 sets of those schematics and listings. Maybe even 75 sets or more. After the main Homebrew meetings I would have a demo set up on a table and about 20 people would gather around and stay around while others at the club came up and looked.
"Other companies were started and run by people in the club, but this is probably the main instance of schematics being made public in that way."
dude, i would also have loved to have been an original homebrewer! its really great to have you here! welcome to AF!!!
Just think of all the talent present.......
I bet you wish you knew then what you know now.
Man thanks for the welcome, yeah those were great times... The home brew computer club was a fantastic group, back then noboby knew any more than the others and we all shared the information that we had learned that day. When I joined HBCC they were all of 35 people meeting in the "orange" room at SLAC, that further grew to several hundred, Woz and Jobs used to demo their apple out front on the left side and I demoed the datahandler on the right. . . Sometimes after the meeting we would go to the car and burn a bone and postulate the application and future of these computers we had built, you can imagine the ideas that were thought up. . .
A guy named Lee Fellenstein would run the meeting, he would get the group fired up by saying "let's hear it for hardware", "let's hear it for software", everyone was crazy screaming at that point and them he would say "let's hear it for underware", man they went wild, he could get the crowd crazy, I liked that guy. . . I don't remember that being in the pirates movie, that was heart shaking. . . It was crazy like in thunderdome. . .
I am not absolutely sure but I am pretty sure I was the one that suggested to Woz that the 8T97(8097)tri-state buffers were the hot setup as opposed to the open collector devices (7438's?)he had designed in (prevailing current design technology).
I should have posted a picture of the schematic to make it recognizable as to its design level, not sure if I need to add a HTML link or what. I'll get a digital pic and try to get it posted. . .
Man, he called that one right, the apple was 4k expandable to 16K Dram, the datahandler was 1K statics. . . . My small ram size forced me to write some very tight machine code, I think my whole keyboard/cassette tape OS was only about 385 bytes of code. . .
Any progress on the photo? If you need somebody to host this photo, just let me know, I can host it, or upload it hear to applefritter.
Vince