[rescue] It ain't really an Apple 1

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Mon, Sep 08, 2003 at 08:38:43PM +0300, Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:

> IMHO quite an effort. He should be able to get some patents and 
> copyrights out of it. I hope he does so that he can make some money from
> it. It would be a shame if a production plant in the pacific rim took
> all the work he did and sold them for $29.95.

What the heck would there be to patent?

Further, he already has a copyright to the schematics, even if he
doesn't bother to register them.  If he did register them, what would he
do if a pacific rim plant made knock-offs anyway?  I doubt he has the
finances to do anything about it.
 
> In the current financial climate IMHO it would be impossible to get
> funding, even a few thousand dollars, without the patents and
> copyrights.

Maybe things are different in your country, but overhere if you create
something, you get the copyright automatically.  There for, if you have
something, you have copyrights as well.  And lots of people manage to
create things without patents.
 
> I hope he has a good intelectual property lawyer. If he succeds then maybe
> we will see more modern reproductions of old computers.

And if he doesn't make money, others will draw up schematics and anyone
with a soldering iron and a few bucks can have boards made and
assembled.  Making an Apple 1 shouldn't be at all hard.

Especially if you just consolidate down to fewer chips and an FPGA.
 
> The problem with other commercial computers is that someone still owns
> the rights to them. For example, could you imagine trying to get Xerox to
> allow you build an  SDS940, or HP to allow you to build a PDP-7 complete
> with SCO allowing you to use the original UNIX?

People have built new PDP-8s, and released all the needed information,
so why not a PDP-7?

And SCO released the source two years ago.  
 
> 10meg drum, and 27meg hard disk), and ocassionaly an IBM 360/65. (1968-71)

Remaking the 360 would be cool, plus the source is already available to
my understanding.

k