This Apple 1 was acquired in early August 1976 from a Byte shop on Blossom Hill Road in South San Jose, California as a fully assembled PC board. The Byte shop also sold me the power transformers and a used Decwriter Keyboard. The completed system shown includes a custom Keyboard and case with an expansion board and peripheral boards that were designed and built starting in the summer and fall of 2009 through 2020. This Apple 1 is fully functioning with 32K of DRAM and can use an iPod or iPhone for program storage. This site is a venue for early Apple history, and the modifications, programs, and construction details of this Apple 1 System.
In 1976 I had been working at Fairchild R and D labs for 12 years and was head of the Memory Research Department under Dr. Jim Early. (As a side note, Gil Amelio was also a Department Head there at the time.) We were developing technology for bipolar Dynamic Rams and had developed a 4K chip that was similar to the MOS DRAMs of the time and I was interested in finding a vehicle to try these prototype chips in a real computer environment.
I was curious about personal computing and had been visiting Byte shops to see what was available and I noticed that the Apple 1 used dynamic MOS DRAMs and I could easily adapt my bipolar DRAMS to work in the same environment so this really provided what I needed for a test vehicle.
At that time we had 4 teenage boys at home so I put a number of games on the Apple 1, mostly adapted from “101 Basic Computer Games” published by Digital Equipment Corporation, March 1975. One of the games I adapted and embellished using the larger available memory on my Apple 1 was Startrek (called SPACWR in the book). In the fall of 1976 I took my Apple 1 to Steve Jobs’ house on Crist Drive to demonstrate the Startrek game. In the spring of 1978 he asked me to port the game to the Apple II which I did on a prototype Apple II at their first office. Later In August of 1977 I joined Apple as the 16th employee.
At that time we had 4 teenage boys at home so I put a number of games on the Apple 1, mostly adapted from “101 Basic Computer Games” published by Digital Equipment Corporation, March 1975. One of the games I adapted and embellished using the larger available memory on my Apple 1 was Startrek (called SPACWR in the book). In the fall of 1976 I took my Apple 1 to Steve Jobs’ house on Crist Drive to demonstrate the Startrek game. In the spring of 1978 he asked me to port the game to the Apple II which I did on a prototype Apple II at their first office. Later In August of 1977 I joined Apple as the 16th employee.