Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I get occasional emails from Syngress advertising their books and saw a book about a week or so ago about building your own Apple 1 so I made a note to take a look. This evening I went over to Amazon to find the book. The book is called Apple I Replica Creation and is written by Tom Owad and John Greco. This sounds like a great book, it starts with an introduction by Steve Wozniak the creator of the Apple 1 the computer that kick started the personal computer revolution in the mid 1970's. The book then describes how to build the computer so that you can create your own, how to program it and then how to play with it an how to modify it. You can either find all the bits yourself and build your own Apple 1 the hard way or buy a kit and put it together.

This post is off topic but for me very interesting. I have always been interested by the computer revolution and have read most of the classic books on the history of it, including Accidental Empires by Robert X Cringely and of course Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy of which I have 3 copies of, one of which has circumvented the globe twice with me.

The Apple book looks great and I will probably order it, whether I would build an Apple 1 or not is another thing. I did build a Microtan 65 around 1980 - which I still have in my loft along with an oscilloscope I built from scratch in 1979 / 1980. It would be great to see a detailed book like Apple 1 book for some of the other classic computers such as the MITS Altair 8800 - regarded as the first real micro-computer. Great idea for a book though, how to build a classic computer.