It was with a sense of anticipation that I opened the book, "Apple I Replica Creation: Back to the Garage", by Tom Owad. Being a recent 'switcher' from Windows to Mac, the idea of building a first generation Apple to go with my cutting edge machines had the engineer in me pretty jazzed. 
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just a question: is that paid advertising or not?
No, it is not a paid advertising. It's just that when a reader actually buys it through that link osnews gets about 1 or 2% of the book's price.
Many people online have such amazon accounts and so when somebody buys it through their link they are able to get a bit of money back to sustain server costs.
"Apple I Replica Creation: Back to the Garage"
I mis-read that as "Back to the Garbage".
When I lived out in South Africa, a friend of mine was a geologist and he insisted on using an Apple//e up until 2002. He just couldn't bring himself to use anything else. Appaently Verbatim still produced 5.1/4 inch disks until just recently, bizarrely.
Anyway, he got a powerbook.
The 6502 was my favorite processor. It was simple to program, and oh so much fun. The only opcode i still remember in hex is LDA #xx(A9 xx) . Device drivers were also a breeze to program(since you had to build the hardware 
)
Ahh, the good old days 
Seems to be a great and fun book! I will buy this one for sure as soon as possible.
I actually used one... back when I was 7 in the 70s. Apple had Bell & Howell do the manufacturing. Played Oregon Trail and Colossus cave on that box.
<sniff>
"Device drivers were also a breeze to program(since you had to build the hardware ) Ahh, the good old days "
LOL 
One of the best jokes I've read in ages
If his old computer does what he needs, why change it?
Love the old days! Nowadays, hardware is just too freaking complex. There's nothing you can do with it, with reasonable tools and eyesight. And now, when they kill off the serial and parallel ports from PCs ('cause they "have to be USB, can not stand vintage"), even doing simple peripherals will be much harder.
Anyway, I love my Apple IIe, just wish I had a color monitor for it.
Well I wouldn't want to go so far back as a 6502 anything, but if someone ever does a 68K retro Mac (I have 4 oldies & roms) that would be a neat HW project. Or even the much underrated but slowish 9900, not the TI pc, but the whole world of industrial/embedded stuff it was seriously used for.
Right now HW design has gotten to be right on the edge of barely being doable by even an advanced hobhyist/EE with todays latest FPGAs having speeds far beyond table top equipment, BGAs having invisible connects, highly stacked boards for signal integrity, too serious.
I do miss wirewrapping boards just a little and knowing it would just work, today its gotten so abstract.
Still a small readymade FPGA board (Xess, Digilent etc) with onboard video, PS2, serial, headers, DRAM/SRAM can easily be used to build any retro HW from <10yrs ago. FPGA4fun has lots of these wonderfull little projects too.
I bought the book yesterday, and my Replica I arrives next month. I agree with the reviewer -- the author did an excellent job, particularly in the digital logic and assembly language chapters.
