On Sun, 26 May 2013, Michael J. Mahon wrote:
You picked upon that. It mentioned some of the auctions, then mentins a bust "it didn't work".Michael Black <et472@ncf.ca> wrote:On Sun, 26 May 2013, nyder wrote:http://apple.slashdot.org/story/13/05/26/0323250/apple-1-sells-for-671400-breaks-previous-auction-record Nice price.There was a most of a page article in the local paper yesterday about Apple Is in general, in the business section. About how they can draw so much, if they work, a bit of history about the Apple I. I guess it was a syndicated article, but I can't remember where it came from. MichaelAnd it would be trivial to get any physically intact Apple I working--likely adding a couple hundred thousand dollars to its value. We are apparently in an age where anyone who can fix broken electronics is a magician! ;-)
I didn't think people were spending hundreds of thoursand of dollars to get an Apple I to use, I thought it was about bragging rights. They are likelt to sit in a glass case on display, so whether it works or not won't matter.
But didnt the Apple I use long shift registers in the video display? I can't remember if I've seen detail of that, but I gather Don Lancaster's first TV Typewriter used long shift registers, it was right on the cusp of when RAM was available. If it did use those, fiding replacements might be an issue, likely the one part that isn't so easy to find replacements.
I remember in the early seventies, people were building equipment for slow scan tv (which originally used about 8 seconds to fill the screen, a long persistence CRT was used to "hold" the picture on the screen while the update was going on, otherwise you'd never see the whole picture). They'd build digital things that collected the image in memory, and then display it on a tv set. And at the time, it used "a lot" of memory, and initially it was hard to get long shift registers. There was a very small window where they became available as surplus, and I gather in only small quantities, and when RAM became viable (ie cheap and "dense enough"). By the time the ALtair 8800 came along, RAM was the only way to go.
Michael