True or False: The first Apple computer was made of wood. April 21, 2007
Posted by reverseengineer in Legacy Hardware.trackback
True. At lease the case was.
The Apple I, circa 1976, was made and designed by Steve Wozniak in Palo Alto, California. Only 200 were made, and sold for US$600 fully assembled as a circuit board, but to get it to work you needed to purchase a case, power supply, keyboard and display. Its CPU was a MOS 6502 running at 1kHz. It came standard with 4kb memory. It was discontinued a year later when the Apple ][ came out.
Today, maybe 30 to 50 units still exist. At an auction in 1999, one sold for US$50,000.
Humble beginnings, and the start of something good.
False. The one pictured at top in the Smithsonian was just one of motherboards for which a case was made by a hobbiest. The actual computer itself is the motherboard, which in many cases nobody built a case for and was not made of wood. In computer training labs people run nothing but the old Commodore KIM-1s which are nothing but a motherboard, LED display, and hex keypad; frequently when PC techs are testing motherboards if they work, and we don’t have a case, we just plug in an ATX powersupply, keyboard, and videocard to the motherboard laying on foam or an antistatic plastic bag the motherboard shipped in