Apple-1 Replica Remastered

Apple-1 Manuals & Bill of Materials

Sat, 12 Nov 2022 14:50:51 GMT

Here, you can download scans of the original manuals of the Apple-1.

Click here for the Apple-1 Operation Manual.

Click here for the Apple-1 Cassette Interface Manual.

Click here for the Preliminary Basic User's Manual.

Looking for our highly acclaimed replicas of the manuals? See our shop and get your high-quality printed recplica!

Want to build your very own Apple-1 Replica? You can download a "Bill of Materials" here .

Collector bought original Apple-1 Manual for $42.660. Or – did he?

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 14:10:14 GMT

On March 17th, 2022, the hammer fell at 42,660 USD for an allegedly original Apple-1 Operation Manual from 1976. Half a year later, the story takes a spectacular turn. Did the buyer purchase a reprint from the 80ies?

The Byte Shop Situation

183:878470124 (Armin Hierstetter) — Fri, 20 Aug 2021 11:27:25 GMT

How Byte Shop owner Paul Terrell sparked the founding of Apple.

Have you read the story about the recreation of the Apple-1 manuals? This little feature is an anecdote that happened along the way, and it goes like this…

After I had finished re-typesetting the Apple-1 manuals, there was "one more thing" that I thought would be really cool to accomplish, now that I have come that far. While researching the "Operation Manual" I came across a picture that featured the Byte Shop logo and address stamped onto its cover. But unlike the manual itself, I could not go ahead re-creating the stamp without risking a copyright infringement (btw: the manuals themselves are in the public domain as they have been published before 1977 and do not feature a proper copyright statement). I needed permission, and there was only one person in the world who could grant it: Paul Terrell , the former founder, and owner of the Byte Shop.

I asked if anybody had any contact information but was told that people tried to reach out to him for years, but he never replied. Still, against all odds, I tried my luck, found an email address, and sent Paul a mail…

The first 50 Apple-1

Back in 1976, Steve Jobs tried to market Steve "Woz" Wozniak's computer and met Paul Terrell to see whether he would be interested in selling the (unpopulated) Apple-1 PCBs. Back then, it was not unusual to complete the board yourself. Almost everybody knew at least of somebody that could handle a soldering iron if they had not been able to deal with one themselves. But Paul Terrell wanted to have a finished product to sell to his customers, so he told Jobs that he would buy 50 completed boards for a whopping 25,000 USD cash on delivery.

Boom.

It was that order that got Steve Wozniak – working for Hewlett Packard at that time – thinking. And when he was done with thinking, he was done with Hewlett Packard, too, and ready to found Apple together with Steve Jobs and Ronald G. Wayne , who not only designed the first Apple Logo (Newton sitting under the Apple tree) but the Operation Manual, too. Not many people have heard of Ronald, though. The reason: Only 12 days after Apple had incorporated, Ronald sold his 10 percent back to the other two. "I couldn't keep up the pace," he said later, "I would have been wealthy, but I would have been the richest man in the cemetery." I have always liked this quote very much. Ronald is a very nice person. If you want to show him some love, head over to Ronald's websit e and look if his store has something you'd be interested in.

Who knows what would have happened without that very first order of 50 Apple-1 from Paul Terrell? There is a good chance Apple would not exist today. No Apple, no Mac, no iPod, no iPhone. Without getting too emotional, I believe that it is fair to assume that the world would look different today if Paul Terrell had had a really bad day when Steve entered his shop that day back in 1976.

The answer from Paul

So I sent Paul an email in which I told the whole story about the manuals and asked him whether he would grant me permission to re-create the Byte Shop logo stamp. And then: I waited.

Not for too long. though, Within a day, I received the following answer:

Armin,

Absolutely you have my permission to replicate the Byte Shop Logo Stamp but more importantly I am trying to figure out how I could replicate the actual event by giving you a cash on delivery purchase order for 25 of Your Apple Computers for $500 each, just like the original seed capital event that occurred in 1976 and caused Steve Jobs to quit his job at Atari and Woz to quit his job at Hewlett Packard to Form Apple. Woz told me that it was that $25,000 cash on delivery purchase order that convinced him to take his hobby computer serious and quit HP to spend full time on his new company with his friend Steve Jobs.

Thanks for the pics. Nice job.

Paul

Maybe I lack the necessary amount of phantasy, but I can hardly imagine it could get any better than this.

Equipped with permission, I thought the rest would be a walk in the park. But trying to figure out the typefaces the stamp used, I could not find the font the words "Computer Store" had been written in. You might think it is just the same as the words "BYTE SHOP," but they are different typefaces (compare the "O," for example. Then I got (again) help from the great community of typography.guru : User Riccardo Sartori could not find the typeface either, so he created a vector image of the words needed and sent it to me. Two days later, I had the physical stamp in my hands.

"Why didn't you just integrate the stamp in the design file and printed it?" you might ask. Sure, that would have been the easy way. But I knew right when I saw the picture with the stamped manual that it had to be the real thing. A stamp is a unique tool. Its footprint changes every time you use it. It makes each of the replicas kinda unique. If that sounds bonkers to you, I totally understand …

End of story: When you purchase your Operation Manual (or any of the sets), it's up to you whether you want your copy to be stamped. There is an option available before you add the item to your cart.

Apple-1 Replicas Receive International Acclaim

Wed, 11 Aug 2021 14:40:58 GMT

Museums worldwide add the Apple-1 manual replicas to their collections: It all started with The Deutsches Museum in Munich…

This week, something truly magical happened…

A few weeks ago, after I had finished the painstaking project of recreating the Apple-1 manuals from scratch , I contacted bloggers, YouTubers and staff writers of online and offline magazines to see if anybody would be interested in that crazy story. I did not really expect much feedback to be honest and was gobsmacked by the positive responses I got! 9to5mac ran the story, so did Mac|Life (in their August issue) and a few other websites. David Murray, better known as "The 8-Bit Guy" mentioned the manuals in his latest video about building an Apple-1 replica .

Among the people I wrote to about the manuals had been the curator of the cryptography section of the Deutsches Museum, which is the world's largest museum of science and technology. It felt a bit naive to expect them to include the manual in their exhibition but that did not prevent me from sending them a few sets after they had indicated that they find the project interesting enough to include the manuals in their inventory i.e. in some hidden corner in the vaults of the museum where they store everything that is not shown publicly.

But this Monday, I sent an email to inform me that the manuals have been added to the microelectronic exhibition. I was totally over the moon. The world's largest museum cared enough to make a little space for my project. I mean: It can not possibly get better than this, can it?

Of course, the very next morning I jumped on my bike and cycled to the museum to see it in person. I just had been to the museum a few weeks before with two of my nephews, so I knew exactly where to go. I do not feel ashamed admitting that my heart rate increased on my last meters to the showcase. Follow me on my way through the museum…

More museums to follow the "Munich example"

Meanwhile, many more museums have shown interest in the project, among them the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum, the ZKM in Karlsruhe and many more technology related exhibitions and museums from all over the world.

Re-Creating the Apple-1 Manuals

Mon, 09 Aug 2021 11:08:15 GMT

Re-Creating the Apple-1 Manuals

A few months ago, in March 2021, I started selling self-made acrylic cases for the KIM-1 on eBay. In case you don't know: The KIM-1 was one of the very first single board computer used by chip manufacturer MOS Technology to showcase their newest processor, the 6502. The computer came without power supply and without case. So the ones sold on Ebay come without a case most of the time, too, of course. I bought a KIM-1 in December 2020 and – because no case with that machine either – I decided to design a case on may own.

Once it was finished, I was pretty pleased with it and thought that other KIM-1 owners might want to purchase them. So I produced a few more cases and offered the acrylic KIM-1 cases on Ebay.

One of the buyers asked me whether I had a case for the Apple-1, too. I had not. Like the KIM-1, the Apple-1 was sold bare naked most of the time, although a wooden case was later available. During my research of the measurements and positions of the mounting holes of the Apple-1, I came across reprints of the original Apple-1 manuals. I dug a bit deeper and realized that all of those (pretty ugly) reprints – usually cheap laser printer copies – originated from the same poor quality scan.

In a first attempt to make better quality reprints, I took the scans, enhanced them and had them printed by a professional printer, saddle stichted, nice paper – the usual things. And while the result had been far better than the stuff that some people are still selling on ebay, I was not really happy: It started with the wrong format (DIN A4 instead of US Letter), frayed letters (because of the bad scan), pixelated schematics … yech! And the fold-out schematics were missing, too. The whole thing was unworthy of being shown, really.

Then it dawned on me: What if I recreated the whole manual from scratch in a modern DTP program like Adobe InDesign. Instead of relying on a scan, I would re-typeset the whole thing and would have a properly printable design file that ends up being a super high quality PDF to print from.

Oh boy: Had I known what path to insanity I was about to step onto, I would have thrown in the towel immediately. But back in March, I really did not think to much about how long this journey would take.

Researching the type-faces

Several steps were necessary to implement the project: First of all: I had to research all the typefaces used. And this is by far easier said than done, especially as the main copy of the manuals had been written on a typewriter (probably an IBM Electric and IBM Selectric). Usually, typefaces from typewriters made some 50 years ago have not been converted to modern computer typefaces. But thanks to the great users of typography.guru , all character sets (almost a dozen) were gradually identified.

But: Knowing the exact typefaces was merely the beginning. For the reprint to be as true to the original as possible, the position of each individual letter had to be accurate down to the fraction of a millimeter, of course. Without that precision, I simply could have typed the manuals copy and disregard the design specifics completely. That, of course, was absolutely out of question. If I did this, it would have to be as close to the real thing as humanly possible.

I think it was then when I wondered whether I had lost my marbles…

I have created a little time-lapse video in which you see the painstaking process of positioning each and every single character of the manual to its original position.

Now: If you thought that was hard, you ain't seen nothing yet. The absolute worst part was re-drawing the schematics that had been drawn originally with a leroy set (or something similar). Which means: Ronald G. Wayne (the third Apple founder and designer of the Operation Manual), drew every character by hand, which makes finding a typeface particularly difficult, too.

But finally, after more than 100 hours of work, all manuals had been re-created: The "Apple-1 Operation Manual", the "Preliminary Basic Users Manual" and the instructions for the "Apple-1 Cassette Interface ".

The rest was rather simple: Finding a printer that was able to give a decent quote on a small print run of the manuals keeping in mind that a 6-page-gatefold was needed to re-create the fold-out schematics.

The Byte Shop logo stamp

There was one more thing missing, though. During my research I found pictures of original manuals that had the stamp of the Byte Shop stamped on their cover. I had come so far, so I decided to give it a go and try to get permission to re-create the stamp, too (as I did not want to have it printed on the cover but manually stamped).

Against all hopes, I have managed to track down Paul Terrell, the founder and owner of the Byte Shop from 50 years ago. I reached out to him and told him the story you just have read. Here is what he replied:

Armin,

Absolutely you have my permission to replicate the Byte Shop Logo Stamp but more importantly I am trying to figure out how I could replicate the actual event by giving you a cash on delivery purchase order for 25 of Your Apple Computers for $500 each just like the original seed capital event that occurred in 1976 and caused Steve Jobs to quit his job at Atari and Woz to quit his job at Hewlett Packard to Form Apple. Woz told me that it was that $25,000 cash on delivery purchase order that convinced him to take his hobby computer serious and quit HP to spend full time on his new company with his friend Steve Jobs.

Thanks for the pics nice job.

Paul

When I received that email I had tears in my eyes.

So, that's the story behind this website and the recreation of the Apple-1 manuals. I hope you liked the little read and – in case you purchase the Apple-1 manuals – enjoy them as much as I did making them.