Mentioned many times on Hacker News, but very relevant here: https://eater.net/. A great way to understand what's going on by building a computer from the ground up.
I bought Ben's kits and built the 8 bit breadboard computer. It was the most educational experience I've ever had learning computer architecture. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a lot of work though and breadboards are fraught with issues.
The difference between this and the apple-1 though is that Ben's computer is effectively a third gen computer on breadboard, whereas the apple-1 is pure fourth gen. I guess the fair comparison is ben's 6502 kit.
This is a really cool concept. Computers are getting so advanced now that many of us spend our hours fighting about performance differences of Intel vs AMD vs Apple Silicon, without even fully understanding how a computer works. The glory days of hacking together a computer are seemingly gone, but this product appears to attempt to bring that back and I embrace it.
I signed up to get notified. I think the $99 pricepoint is extremely reasonable. Even if this ends up being a project you complete over a single weekend. There's a lot to learn here.
The Pattern on the Stone is also excellent, especially for audiences less familiar with computers. It has always struck me as a paramount example of "education" in that it shares relative illumination in a very digestible format. I wish I'd read it years earlier.
Yes. I'm reminded of old cars from the 70's or earlier. You look under the hood and it's all understandable, accessible. Distributor, battery, spark plug wires, radiator, radiator hoses — not much else aside from the engine.
Modern car?
It's nice to look under the hood of an old computer and enjoy understanding how it all works.
Full-time driver? Well, airbags, crumple zone, ABS brakes were all added for a reason....
Nice to have a hobby car in the garage though to tinker with, take out on Sundays.
This is why working on motorcycles such a breath of fresh air. The bike I own has the most advance compute ton it as the trip meter. It’s carbureted and thoroughly mechanical. But even better is the fact that on a motorcycle you can get at everything relatively easily. I went from barely knowing where the coolant goes in to rebuilding an engine in about 3 years and that’s a really empowering feeling.
Complexity is starting to go that way with bikes too, and I suspect euro 4 & euro 5. Plenty of drive-by-wire bikes now, with IMUs and other tricky bits, and some of the few really simple ones remaining (new) wont' make the new emissions standards (e.g. moto-guzzi is getting more complex).
But you are right, if you stay away from the performance engines there is a lot you can do, and it's easy to get at.
It wasn't that long ago that you could, if you knew where to look, easily find lots of PC parts for absolutely free... and I recommended that as the go-to for general computing experimentation, as it was a well-documented platform with plenty of software available, but now it seems "retrocomputing" is popular again and people will pay a surprisingly large amount for these older systems.
Other Apple 1 kits I've seen have cheated on various bits such as the video/character generator and keyboard interface by using an embedded microcontroller, which seems to defeat the purpose of an Apple 1 recreation.
It's not too hard to generate a simple black and white video signal, and it's an interesting bit that I would definitely want to try.
The Apple 1 is unfortunately a disappointing game machine because of its serial-style terminal interface, so you can't really create an interactive display, even with block character graphics.
Obviously an Apple ][ recreation would be an excellent game machine, but it's quite a bit more complicated, particularly things like video, PAL chips, and especially storage (which you'd probably want.)
Given the size of the "Keyboard", "Video", and "Hi-Res Video" chips, I'd wager a guess that they're ATmega microcontrollers with sticky labels on them.
The kit looks like it's taken some other shortcuts as well. The original system used an array of DRAMs, for example, not the single SRAM in this kit (which didn't exist when the Apple I was made).
The original Apple II was almost entirely discrete logic -- no PALs. It'd actually be a great target for reproduction.
For the Apple II there are already some reproductions of the Rev 0 PCB but there are already plenty of originals (non-rev0) out there in the wild, they're not really rare enough (particularly given their use in the US schools system).
I have six a ][ EuroPlus, three //es, a //c and an ITT2020 and once upon a time had a lot more. The biggest issue is the RIFA caps going in the PSU.
As Apple I diy kits these are a little bit too modern for my tastes. I prefer my retro remakes to stick much more closely to the original design. The only real "fake" that I have is the PiDP 11/70 front panel which has a Raspberry PI running an emulation as it's CPU.
There are a long list of modern remakes around in the retro computing community, but most stuff earlier than 1981 uses discrete components so if the CPU is still available should be cloneable.
> The kit looks like it's taken some other shortcuts as well. The original system used an array of DRAMs, for example, not the single SRAM in this kit (which didn't exist when the Apple I was made).
Are the parts still widely available enough that you could realistically build an accurate replica?
If not, I wonder if parts are available that someone could still design a kit computer (without cheating) that could be assembled from discrete through-hole components with reasonable amount of skill.
Yes, you are right – controllers are made on ATmega328PU chips so drivers could be easily modified and uploaded to the chips via FTDI cable. E.g. you could change color of the screen
I'm really curious about when that changed as a norm, I assume it was gradual, but there must have been some 'turning points' (said with my apologies to mathematics).
I used to be keen on '80s Pioneer stereo amplifiers, the SA-8xx range if I recall correctly, (I'm younger than them) and they all came with schematics. Nothing contemporary to me did (that I had) though.
I think the circuit diagram was no longer included with the //e but definitely was with the ][+ so for Apple., at least, that provides a boundary line.
No, we use ATMegas for Keyboard and Video. About gaming and serial terminal – we had an idea to make it possible to have some pixel graphics run by our Apple-1 - e.g. to use ASCII codes above 127 as commands to video driver to set pixels or lines. Similar to how VGA registers work. So it still will be a kind of serial terminal, but it could draw graphics (TFT screen basically uses also serial connection via SPI).
The actual kit seems to be on breadboards so maybe that's just a development thing? I'm confused though, they mention breadboards but also custom PCBs? Not sure what this kit actually is.
That is really weird, is there any reason to use them other than repeated removal/reinsertion? (Hence found on chip programmers, component testers, etc.)
ZIFs are on our test board for our breadboards kit schematics – they are used (as you have mentioned) to insert/remove chips for testing. And fast check of ROM firmware for it's updates.
So we've built a test PCB board to test fast our chips and schematics.
