[rescue] It ain't really an Apple 1

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

The computer that he is making is a modern Apple I compatible. If you
read the article you'll see that he used modern chips and special things
to make them work the way the old ones did.

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.

Interestingly enough, Woz did not copyright or patent the design or the
software. He freely handed out all the necessary drawings and source
code to build your own computer. People bought the Apple 1 because they
could not or would not build their own.

In the days of the Apple 1, there was no competition and no plants in the
far east who would have grabbed it, or things would have turned out
differently.

In the current financial climate IMHO it would be impossible to get
funding, even a few thousand dollars, without the patents and
copyrights.

I hope he has a good intelectual property lawyer. If he succeds then maybe
we will see more modern reproductions of old computers.

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?

If I were to revive the computers of my youth, it would be a Philco-1000,
IBM 1130, HP 32 user BASIC time sharing system (2116 and 2118 processors, 
10meg drum, and 27meg hard disk), and ocassionaly an IBM 360/65. (1968-71)

Moving into adulthood, it was a CDC-6400 (the uniprocessor version of 
the first Cray), (1972-73) IBM 370/145 (1974-77) and a brief flirtation 
in 1977 with a Z80 based micro before going back to IBM Mainframes.

On the other hand, my 2gHz AMD PC clone runs with emulators a 68x00 Mac,
and an IBM 370 with much more disk space, core (ram for you new guys),
and a lot faster than either of them.  If only I could get a copy of VM/SP
for the 370. :-) (and a copy of the original Zork).

Geoff. 

-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson gsm at mendelson.com 972-54-608-069
Icq/AIM Uin: 2661079 MSN IM: geoffrey_mendelson at hotmail.com (Not for email)
Carp are bottom feeders, koi are too, and not surprisingly are ferrets.