Woz OK's Apple I Resurrection  By Leander Kahney
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,60329,00.html

02:00 AM Sep. 08, 2003 PT

Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak has given his blessing to the production
of a replica of the Apple I -- the legendary machine that launched Apple.

Woz has given the go-ahead to Vince Briel, a computer technician, who plans
to sell $200 replicas of the Apple I from his garage in suburban Cleveland,
Ohio.

Limited production of the hand-built machines will begin shipping next
month. Briel is taking orders through his Replica I website.

As previously reported, Briel has been planning for some months to sell
replicas of the epoch-making machine, but was unable to get permission from
Apple to reproduce it.

Apple likely holds copyrights on the machine's design. And although Briel
redesigned the motherboard because some of the original chips are hard to
find, he may still need to license the ROM -- the set of hard-wired
instructions necessary to run original Apple I software.

Unable to get a response from Apple, Briel did the next best thing. He
wrote to Woz asking his permission to use the Apple I ROM.

"Sure you can use the ROM's," said Woz in an e-mail that Briel
forwarded to Wired News. "I'm sure that Apple would deny this request,
even though what you are speaking of is very noble and cannot hurt Apple in
any way."

Besides, Woz continued, he freely distributed the Apple I's schematics and
ROM code at the Homebrew Computer Club in 1975, long before he and Steve
Jobs went into partnership and began selling the machines from Jobs'
parents' garage.

"The best anyone could say was that it was mine and that I made it
public," Woz said to Briel.

Woz noted that he distributed the machine's design without regard to
copyright considerations, a situation Apple remedied with the Apple 1's
successor -- the Apple II.

A spokesman for Apple declined to comment; and Woz couldn't be reached for comment.

Briel will begin shipping his replicas on Oct. 11. He will be demonstrating
the machine at the Vintage Computer Festival next month at the Computer
History Museum in Mountain View, California.

Like the original Apple I, the replica will come without a keyboard,
monitor or power supply -- customers will have to add their own. Because
old ASCII keyboards are hard to find, Briel added a PC keyboard interface
that supports standard PS/2 keyboards.

A year in development, Briel's replica uses different components than Woz's
original, but is functionally identical, he said.

In fact, Briel said he spent a lot of time "un-implementing"
features offered by the modern chips he used -- features unavailable on the
chips Woz used in the late 1970s.

For example, when typing onscreen, the replica can perform a backspace,
which the original cannot. Briel said it took him weeks to figure out how
to disable it.

"I spent a lot of time trying to get every detail so the replica
functions completely identically to the Apple I," he said.

Briel said he has no interest in making money from the venture. He's doing
it for the love of retro computers.

"I'm hoping this project generates interest in creating hardware and
exploring computers the way they used to be," Briel said. "I just
want to help people relive the 8-bit computer experience and get more
people involved in the history of computers and collecting."

Sellam Ismail, producer of the Vintage Computer Festival and an Apple I
aficionado who has brokered sales of several of the machines, said while he
hasn't yet played with the replica, he's excited by Briel's work.

"It looks like he did a solid job," Ismail said. "He's put a
lot of effort into it and produced it at a very reasonable price
point."

However, Ismail warned the replica would not appeal to everyone. There's a
very limited library of software for the machine. Most Apple I software was
written by hobbyists and never published commercially. And what programs
there are will have to be typed in by hand -- in Basic or assembly code.

There's also no interface of any kind for a storage device. The original
stored programs on tape cassette, but Briel hasn't recreated the cassette
interface.

Nonetheless, Ismail said, "It's very cool to give people the
experience of playing with the Apple I. There's a segment of Apple
enthusiasts who will be very interested in it."


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