The first computer Apple released was also its cheapest until the release of the Mac mini. It was an innovative machine. Unlike its peers, it included a keyboard interface and onboard graphics, options that cost hundreds of dollars on other platforms. It even included mass storage: the machine had a built-in cassette interface. Read the article at MLAgazine.
I wish my parents’ first computer had been an Apple instead of a Compaq DeskPro. Then, I wouldn’t have to devote any energy to convincing them to make the switch now.
Not to belittle the article, but did the author bother doing a comparison of wages back then, relative cost of goods, and so on ?
It’s easy to compare dollar for dollar, but its a flawed comparison because of inflation and other factors
Using an inflation calculator, something that cost $666 in 1976 would cost it would cost you $2286 today!
So no! the Apple I was not the cheapest computer apple evet sold
Wasn’t it actually $666.66?
and I quote from the article:
“Up until the Mac mini, the Apple I was the lowest priced computer Apple ever sold (without adjustment for inflation), at $666.66.”
Actually standard inflation adjustment is 3% per anum(based on thet average CPI over the last 30 years). So that would mean 666.66 * 1.03^29 = 1571.03
Going the other way, 499.99 * 1.03^-29 = 212.17
So all things considered, the Mac mini is easily the best bargain in Apple’s history of which I am aware. However true price inflation is hard to figure due to changes in availability of certain components and the fact that popularity will inherently reduce price in the long run due to higher production yields reducing overall costs and consequently reducing prices.
The most impotant aspect of Apple’s first computer. IMHO, is that “it was user friendly”. OK in those days, user friendly was quite different than today.
You bought a computer and received a pile of parts to be soldered together.
With this one, you just added the peripherals (sorry, no FireWire or USB options).
And yes, it was a closed-machine in the sense that you could´t change the video card (??) or the storage system.
The same actual Apple´s mantra.
if i remmeber correctly my IBM pc jr costed a couple thousand plus dollars, still had it until someone stole it from our storage building, still had the receipt and manuals and everything dang it…. cant have nuthin! also later got the tandy model i think it was that was similar… got it for free
reading about the WOZ got me thinking about captain crunch and phone phreaking and everything… whew, the good old days
anyone heard anything from captain crunch?
Lets face it Apple has the most expensive stuff now. To bad they want to limit their market for fear that they would be in market battle with microcrap. That is why I think they keep prices high, well part of the reason.
An Apple I in great shape usually costs nowadays between $10,000 – $15,000 at auction.
What a great investment buying one for $666 twenty years ago.
And what a great tribute to Apple.
Every other computer from that day will cost you money for someone to dispose of properly. And even today in the PC world, Dells, et al, have no value after 5 years. Even schools won’t take them.
Yes, this is something Wintel apologists don’t understand. Technology can be art. Technology can have a place in history. Not everything needs to be disposable.
I wish my parents’ first computer had been an Apple instead of a Compaq DeskPro. Then, I wouldn’t have to devote any energy to convincing them to make the switch now.
Bah; cool kids owned Amiga and Atari’s
I can’t believe people bought PC’s when Amigas and Ataris were so far ahead of the PC world, in respects to almost every area; from operating systems, to development tools to games and productivity software.
As they say, it isn’t always the best that wins.
I can’t believe people bought PC’s when Amigas and Ataris were so far ahead of the PC world, in respects to almost every area; from operating systems, to development tools to games and productivity software.
And what united Apples, Amigas and Ataris (well, apart from their initial)? Probably the greatest microprocessor ever: the 68000.
Abandoning the 68000 in favour of that memory-wasting over-hyped never-as-fast-as-promised RISC nonsense surely was one of the most stupid decisions in the history of computing.
And we’re all so sorry now with all those ripping fast 68000 machines dominating the market…
Except that they junked it because they were sooooo slow in comparison to Intel’s offerings. I know, I was stuck with the lame 68LC040 in my Centris. That 20Mhz processor got it’s butt kicked when comparing it to an Intel chip. At least when they switched to the PPC, they had some speedup for a short period of time.
At least Apple was willing to take a gamble in order to move forward. Unlike Intel and AMD who are still struggling with an almost 30yr old architecture and basic processor design. Too wuss to really move forward.
I credit Apple for making the switch to ppc.
Except that they junked it because they were sooooo slow in comparison to Intel’s offerings. I know, I was stuck with the lame 68LC040 in my Centris. That 20Mhz processor got it’s butt kicked when comparing it to an Intel chip. At least when they switched to the PPC, they had some speedup for a short period of time.
What year are you talking about? I got an Amiga 500 back in 1988, and believe me, it kicked the crap out of any IBM/PC offering of that era. It *ONLY* started to get better in around 1994/95.
Believe me, what killed Amiga and Atari were the crappy PHB’s who couldn’t market the product to save themselves. Had the two combined, and worked together, you’d probably have an evenly split market right now.
Bad management killed the Amiga not only through poor marketing but mainly through not spending enough on R & D.
As a result, the hardware soon fell behind Apple’s Mac II.
The video-based graphics display was fine for games and animation (for video) but terrible for office applications. The text-only PC display was clear and non-flickering, so much more suitable for word processing.
The Mac II had an 8 bit display when the Amiga had only 16 colours at the same resolution. The 8 bit display made Photoshop possible. We had a Mac II and an Amiga 3000 side by side, and the Mac hardware was better. The better OS on the Amiga was not enough to make it competitive for DTP, graphic design and image processing.
Also Apple had the tie-up with Canon on laser printers. Although the Amigas worked fine with the “Apple” laser printers, the obvious purchase was to get the computer and printer together. So Apple won in the graphic arts market.
Apple also has simple networking (Appletalk) built in. Amigas had no networking for years. That kept the Amiga out of the education market.
Better management would have made a big difference.
However, the battle between Mac, Atari and Amiga was ten years later than the Apple I.
Competition back then was kits using the 8080 processor and cp/m.
It seems that OSNews has gotten stale. How many times do we have to take a journey back to first PC or the first whatever?
>And what united Apples, Amigas and Ataris (well, apart >from their initial)? Probably the greatest microprocessor >ever: the 68000.
Unlike IBM PC compatibles(X86), the mentioned 68K based PCs are incompatible with each other (out-of-the-box)…
>What year are you talking about? I got an Amiga 500 back >in 1988, and believe me, it kicked the crap out of any >IBM/PC offering of that era. It *ONLY* started to get >better in around 1994/95.
During around 1992 era, the A500 was technically uncompetitive for Doom style game graphics e.g.
Wing Commander, Mech Warrior II, Rise of the Triad and DoomI/II.
probably was the doom of the Amiga, well Wolf3d probably already was ist, that was exactly the time when the PC graphicswise started to beat the Amiga.
Still the Amiga when introduced was 7-8 years ahead of everything you could get in the sub 100.000$ area at that time, Commodore made the huge mistake to sell it as game machine instead of serious workstation (the europeans were smarter than the US people and there it was used as serious workstation)
If Atari and Commodore would not have sit on their high asses of having the home computer market anyway, both would not have gone down, and probably Apple would have had the fate Atar and Commodore now have, of only being brands sold every few years.
The machines definitely were better than anything Apple had to offer until the jump to the PowerPC.
The apple 1 is now a coveted piece for vintage computer collectors. But if you think about it, the Apple 1 is nothing but a motherboard with a few dozen ICs. I wonder if it would be possible to get those ICs today, and just recreate the damn thing from scratch. And I am not eve talking of FPGA stuff, just the ICs. It should be possible, and maybe it should be even possible to make it look like the original.
I am not talking about forgeries here, just about an idea for those that wuld like to play with one but don’t have $20.000 handy.
Ah, back in the day…
The first time I saw the Atari 800 running the StarRaiders demo!
Talk about your sprits, and simulated 3D on a 8bit processor.
You got to hand it to the guys how could write 8bit assembler language. I thought it was painful to have to carry an overflow of the 8bit register to another manually.
Atari’s Basic kicked Microsoft basics ass. Microsoft’s Basic was Buggy and had few features and it’s graphics library was crude. ( See any resemblance to today? Well, they’ve actually just gotten better under Balmer over the last 2-3 years. )
The Motorola 68000 was a Heck of a Processor. Was it 32 – 32bit registers?
It was a Mainframe in a micro.
There was true innovation in those days. But, it looks like IBM is giving us some real innovation with the PPC line and the Cell processor.
From my personal experience, I’d say that not being Mainstream has fantastic rewards and makes life interesting, in a good way. And as they say “Follow your dreams and the money will come.”.
But, that’s just my opinion.
Yes there’s a kit available called the replica 1.
Have a look at http://www.applefritter.com/briel for more information.
One of the biggest current mistakes occurring is IBM not doing EVERYTHING it can do to make Apple’s G5’s the fastest computers on earth. If ever there was a pie it wouldn’t hurt to take a 20% market share in it’s the PC processor business. For IBM to not spend the R&D to make this market a success is the worst mistake stratigic mistake they’ve Recently made.
Same with Freescale…
Apple has the OS, freescale needs to keep in the race.
What killed the A500 was the fact it was around for about 6 years with the 1.3 Boot Rom BIOS… then they came out with v2.00 and it broke a load of games. Then in the next 18 months out came the A600 and A1200 with different CPU’s 68020 I think??? So now you had 3 competeing Amigas and no one know what the differences where as people where really think about computers back then.
When I was living in Greece and being an Amiga geek (wannabe), I was reading about the Mega PC which was a PC + a Sega Genesis (Genesis in europe was called Mega System). This was the first, and last, time when a console was integrated with a PC. Any thoughts if someone will ever make that again?
Imagine it! Media Center PC + Playstation (or gamecube, or revolution) or G5 Mac + Playstation (or other consoles)
> At least Apple was willing to take a gamble in order to move
> forward. Unlike Intel and AMD who are still struggling with
> an almost 30yr old architecture and basic processor design.
Not really. Intel has made at least two attempts to replace the x86 design, namely the i860 and the Itanium. In both cases it was an utter disaster, since the installed base for x86 software is too big and the benefits of the new architecture are not so great that you can provide full-speed emulation of x86 for backwards compatability.
In both cases, the CPUs seem to have ended up in niche areas, and not the desktop.
The 68000 had 16, 32 bit registers: 8 general purpose and 8 address registers. I think the PowerPC is the one with 32 registers.
yea someone has to throw in that commodore should of ruled the market!!! awesome machines…..
And we’re all so sorry now with all those ripping fast 68000 machines dominating the market…
Stupid. Of course it didn’t develop much after it was abandoned by its producer (Motorola) and its main user (Apple).
Except that they junked it because they were sooooo slow in comparison to Intel’s offerings.
No, they weren’t. The fully 32-bit 68020 easily beat the 16-bit 286, while 68030 vs 386 and 68040 vs 486 were well matched. Also, the 68060 was very similar to the originial Pentium (e.g. two instructions per cycle, 60 MHz).
There’s no reason why the 68k family couldn’t have developed as quickly as x86. If anything, with its cleaner architecture and less 8/16-bit cruft it would have been easier to extend.
I know, I was stuck with the lame 68LC040 in my Centris. That 20Mhz processor got it’s butt kicked when comparing it to an Intel chip. At least when they switched to the PPC, they had some speedup for a short period of time.
Apple never used the 68060, probably because that would have beaten the pants off their shiny new PowerMacs at a disappointing 60 MHz.
In one corner we have the A500 with a sh**load of custom graphics and sound chips all soldered onto the mainboard, based on technology from 1985.
In the other corner we have the average 1992 PC, which besides being seven years newer than its opponent is a 386sx/dx that goes 40MHz. tops and is equipped with a TsengLabs ET4000 graphics card and possibly Adlib or SB1.xx sound.
The mentioned Amiga kicks the PC’s ass big time when it comes to displaying sprites, smooth scrolling platform games and complicated palette animation.
The 386 PC (barely) wins out when it comes to 3D graphics because of its much faster CPU clock, which allows it to set up and draw polygons faster than the Amiga. The stock A500 had nothing on board that could accelerate 3D.
The IBM-compatible PC finally overtook the Amiga only because of its growing raw CPU performance and the advent of VLB and PCI buses that offered a much faster pipe to the screen (no 3D acceleration at that time yet!).
I remember those days and I was only truly able to say that my PC overtook the Amiga completely in the gaming arena when I was running a Pentium I at 133MHz.That’s not bad at all considering the 8MHz. CPU speed in the aging A500 and the huge price premium on a P133 back in those days (1994 or some such, maybe even later).
So in short the Amiga held its own against all competition in the gaming arena for practically ten years straight without significant hardware changes and that’s just an A500, I’m not even comparing A1200 or A4000 here.
Just to be fair, a 1985 would pale on all fronts compared to the contemporary Amiga. It’d be a 8088 with no graphics capabilities worth speaking of, the internal bleeping speaker and a tiny amber or green screen. Anything more would cost an arm and a leg in those days. Amiga certainly rocked!! I’m happy I have UAE at good speed these days so I can still enjoy the great games.
Nice to read inspiring stories….what happened to those good ol’ days? Would love to do something like this today!
All we hear about today is outsourcing, joblessness, open source, greedy companies, one-click patent and enron.
At least Apple was willing to take a gamble in order to move forward. Unlike Intel and AMD who are still struggling with an almost 30yr old architecture and basic processor design. Too wuss to really move forward.
Yes, but. The 68000 had a clean 32-bit design from the start, so there wasn’t really the need to switch architecture that there is with the hack-upon-hack that is x86. (Well, at least AMD have cleaned up the mess a bit with AMD64).
I credit Apple for making the switch to ppc.
I don’t, because it hasn’t paid off.
The RISC concept emphasised simple instruction encoding (helps the compiler) and decoding (helps the processor designer). Over time software and hardware advances have meant that that these advantages made less and less of a difference.
At the same time, the code bloat caused by the fixed 32-bit instruction format and the load-store idea has, if anything, become more of a disadvantage. That’s because cache space and memory bandwidth have become the main limiting factors in processor performance.
The only area where PPC really managed to outperform x86 is floating-point, but that’s due to Intel’s particularly botched pseudo-stack architecture.
The 68k floating-point unit, on the other hand, had a standard register file with 8 registers, which would have been much better suited for parallellisation.
Huh, thanks a bunch! but that board doesn’t look anything like the Apple 1. It has way less ICs. Even if I accound for the reduced number of RAM ICs, I have to wonder what happened to all the glue logic. Probably replaced by a CPLD or such.
OK, now I see: they use two Atmel microcontrollers: an ATMega 8515 and an ATMega 8. Huh, the first one is only for PS/2 keyboard decoding. I am sure this functionality could have included in the Mega 8. A bit wasteful… but no CPLD needed.
It amazes me everyone here is whippin’ out their battle of the chip comparisons and how asininely dense it is to claim Apple didn’t want to be embarrassed by a 60Mhz 68060 Processor.
Catch a clue folks. Operating System design was a major hindrance on performance and can still be, today.
If I wanted to use a 68040 based CPU and enjoy a multi-tasking environment I used a NeXTStation Turbo Color Slab.
If Steve hadn’t axed Hardware the 68060 wouldn’t have been used because we had dual PPC systems known as The Brick already in the wings that weren’t the PPC 601. Motorola couldn’t stick to a roadmap to save its ass.
Apple and Motorola were moving to the PPC. Whether Apple chose the 68060 or the first revision PPC it doesn’t matter to Motorola. They make money either way.
Motorola’s pathetic track record of overhyping and not delivering scalable CPU roadmaps not only hurt Apple but rapidly buried Motorola–they’re still in recovery over that series of pathetic management decisions. I will guarantee you that every executive walked away as a multi-millionaire.
IBM is starting to fail when it comes to sticking to a roadmap for Apple as well.
Intel would have tanked years ago if it wasn’t for the sound efforts of AMD to challenge the marketshare.
Freescale is only becoming legitimate after Motorola got hosed outside of the embedded arenas thanks in part to IBM.
Without chip competitors who produce compatible chipsets companies don’t innovate–no incentive to do so.
HP if it were smart would leverage the DEC Alpha Chip technologies it owns and provide the world with some much needed innovation.
In the end, who gives a rat’s ass the cost of a system then or now.
What matters is the cost of the system relative to your budget and needs.
HP sold the Dec Alpha Chip tech to Intel.
IBM has the most to lose in the current situation. Apple has growing market share, and IBM could be the big winner here, but it looks like they see apple as competing with themselves.
Apple PPC verses POWER. In my mind this is a huge mistake.
It amazes me everyone here is whippin’ out their battle of the chip comparisons and how asininely dense it is to claim Apple didn’t want to be embarrassed by a 60Mhz 68060 Processor.
The first PowerMac (6100) had a PPC601 at 60 MHz. The 601 didn’t even have a second integer unit like the 68060 did. Coupled with its instruction-wasting load/store architecture this meant its integer performance was a lot lower than the 68060’s at the same clock.
And that’s before we got to the need to emulate much of System 7 and the applications running on it.
And remember there’s no reason the 68060 couldn’t have scaled up in frequency the same way the Pentium did. Also, the next step surely would have been an out-of-order design like the PentiumPro.
Catch a clue folks. Operating System design was a major hindrance on performance and can still be, today.
Yes, some people write bad operating systems. What’s that got to do with a 68060 vs. PPC comparison?
Motorola couldn’t stick to a roadmap to save its ass.
True enough. And probably that was at least partly due to switching architecture.
Without chip competitors who produce compatible chipsets companies don’t innovate–no incentive to do so.
Yep, shame AMD never entered the 68000 market.
http://www.chez.com/treza/tapes.html
They wouldn’t have succeeded since they have to take “second source”(cloning an ecosystem platform) issues seriously in the biz world.
A lonely Jedi Knight is no match against the countless of clones troopers.
The X86 PC (with the appropriate SVGA card) has “chunky” graphic format advantage over the Amiga 500’s planar graphic architecture for DOOM style games. CBM tried to remedy this issue with CD32’s AKIKO, but it’s too late. To compound this issue A1200/A4000’s AGA wasn’t fitted with AKIKO chip.
>besides being seven years newer than its opponent is a >386sx/dx that goes 40MHz.
Intel 386DX was release sometime in the mid 80….
>The only area where PPC really managed to outperform x86 >is floating-point
With SSE(mandatory in X64 mode), such generalisation is open to counter arguments, it’s dependant on applications and particular processor generation. Refer Bearfeats benchmarks as an example.