Collaborate Disseminate
Like today’s Intel-AMD duopoly, the market for home computer CPUs in the 1970s and ’80s was dominated by two players: Zilog with their Z80, and MOS Technology with their 6502 …read more Continue reading Hackaday Prize 2022: The Baffatari 2600 Adds Atari Compatibility to Retrocomputers
The Apple-I was a far cry from Apple’s later products. A $666 single-board computer, the product had some unique design features including using a shift register for video memory to …read more Continue reading [Ken Shirriff] Takes a Bite of the Apple-I
Supercon badge hackers had to be ready to present their show-and-tell by 6 pm Sunday evening. This ruthless unmoving deadline meant every badge hack on stage represents an accomplishment in time management, and some luck, in addition to their own technical merits. But that deadline also meant a few fantastic projects lost their race against the clock. We were rooting for [Jac Goudsmit] to build an Apple I emulator as his badge expansion, but he wasn’t quite done when our badge hack ceremony began. After Supercon he went home, finished the project, and documented everything in a detailed writeup.
Our …read more
Continue reading Apple 1 Emulator Is A Perfect Fit For Supercon Badge
If you think Apple products are overpriced now, wait until they’re 50 years old.
This original Apple I recently sold at auction for $375,000, making it one of the most expensive 6502-based computers in history. Given that only something like 60 or 70 of the machines were ever made, most built by hand by [Jobs] and [Wozniak], it’s understandable how collectors fought for the right to run the price up from the minimum starting bid of $50,000. And this one was particularly collectible. According to the prospectus, this machine had few owners, the most recent of whom stated that he …read more
Continue reading Pristine Apple I Sells at Auction for a Jaw-Dropping Price
Today, Apple is known for iPhones, iPads, and a commitment to graphical user interfaces. But that wasn’t how it all started. The original Apple was a single board computer built around a 6502. In 1976, you could snag one for $666.66, but you needed to supply your own TV, power supply, and keyboard. [Alangarf] didn’t have an Apple 1, but he did have a 6502 CPU core for FPGAs from [Andrew Holme] that he fleshed out to an Apple I clone with a VGA output and PS/2 keyboard port. The project works with either an iCE40 board or a Terasic …read more
The Apple 1 was one of the three big hobbyist computers that burst onto the scene in 1977. Unlike the PET 2001 and the TRS-80, only a couple hundred Apple 1s were ever produced, and with only a handful in existence today, you’ll have to fork out some serious money to get a Wozniak original for yourself.
The Apple 1 experience is easily emulated, of course, but this ESP8266 emulates the Apple 1 on hard mode. Dubbed the Espple by its creator [Hrvoje Cavrak], it emulates the 6502-based original in all its 1-MHz glory, while providing 20-kB of RAM, a …read more
