Apple-1 Computer Prototype Board #0 sold for $2.75M
(rrauction.com)42 points by qingcharles 3 hours ago
42 points by qingcharles 3 hours ago
The ZX81 had that too, at least the UK ones did.
The keyboard itself, er, takes some getting used to. But they are a little cheaper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81#/media/File:Sinclair-ZX81...
Apple 1 launch price $600. Googles ai said 1k investment at 1980's IPO worth 2.5m today. So if you invested 600 that is 1.5m. It would have sat idle 1976 to 1980.
So board #0 beat the stock price but only just. And I am comparing board 0 to any old apple 1.
For on additional $200, you could've had 10% of Apple
Paul Allen did this, until he died and really left no continuation for his museum, which is crazy to me.
For folks who are in the area (or might be visiting), the recently opened Interim Computer Museum has quite a collection of vintage systems:
Sick, now loan it to Computer History Museum so I can have a look
High capacitance, low voltage. Computers were somewhat unusual at the time in terms of requiring a lot of current at 5 Volts. The line frequency power supplies were inefficient enough even under optimal circumstances. I've seen some giant transformers from minicomputers of the day. And those huge blue capacitors the size of beer cans.
Apple II was one of the early PC's that used a switching power supply, and it wasn't particularly reliable. I worked at an Apple repair facility, and we replaced a lot of them. But our most common repairs were due to the huge number of chip sockets and low quality gold fingers on the disk controller board edge connector. We were a government agency (county run facility serving a bunch of semi rural school districts) and didn't charge a bench fee. If we could fix it on the spot by just pressing all of the chips back into their sockets, the repair was free and we didn't even log it.
I only remember the II+, but both were dense with chips. The IIe had fewer chips as I recall. That level of complexity wasn't unheard of at the time. When the IBM PC came out, only a few of the chips were in sockets (the CPU and RAM/ROM), and people were nervous about repairability, but IBM pointed out that they had studied it to death over the years, and that the chips were more reliable than the sockets.
The actual term is "computer grade electrolytic capacitor," designed for long-term service in high current linear power supplies. You can still get them, even though few computers use linear supplies these days: https://www.mouser.com/c/passive-components/capacitors/alumi...
Someone needs to create a Fallout 4 module that has the vibe of “Citizen Kane”.
I need that "RUB OUT" key on my keyboard