Re: Resurrecting the Apple I

[Eric Smith <eric-no-spam-for-me@brouhaha.com>]

"Liam Busey" <buseyl@yahoo.com> writes:
> It's pretty mystifying to me that Apple I computers  command so much money.
> I guess value is in the eye of the beholder. In my opinnion it was the
> original Apple 2 that was the real innovation. Sure the Apple I was a clever
> piece of hardware but still it was basically just a SBC with integrated TV
> typewriter.
[...]
> Does anyone share this opinion?

Yes.  The Apple I design was nowhere near as clever as the Apple ][.  The
Apple I was, as you say, a very simple computer and a MOS shift-regsiter
based TVT that happened to share a PCB.

The Apple ][ design, on the other hand, shows an absolutely remarkable
amount of cleverness.  It took me a *long* time to fully understand the
design of the system timing generation (the lower left corner of the
large schematic) and why some things were done in a particular way.  For
instance, why every 65th clock cycle is slightly longer than the others.
But once I finally understood, I was in awe of Woz's design skill.