[HN Gopher] The solved riddle of the Apple-1 serial number
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The solved riddle of the Apple-1 serial number
Author : DamnInteresting
Score : 67 points
Date : 2022-02-18 18:33 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.apple1registry.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.apple1registry.com)
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| The start of the greatest hustle of all time.
| sydthrowaway wrote:
| This article is written in a seriously weird manner.
| [deleted]
| adamhearn wrote:
| Link to the original article:
|
| https://www.apple1registry.com/en/serial.html
| dang wrote:
| Changed to that from
| https://9to5mac.com/2022/02/17/handwritten-apple-1-serial-
| nu.... Thanks!
|
| (From the guidelines: " _Please submit the original source. If
| a post reports on something found on another site, submit the
| latter._ " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| Why is It important to know who wrote these serial numbers?
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Obsessing over small details like this can be illustrative of
| the company culture at the time. Knowing that Steve Jobs
| himself wrote the numbers means that they handled all parts
| personally to some degree.
|
| More bluntly, on a site devoted to a single computer model,
| every shared scuff mark on some part will get obsessed over by
| someone.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| "company culture" may be overstating it a bit. It was just
| Steve and Woz, and _someone_ had to write the serial numbers.
|
| Ron Wayne had already come and gone, and Daniel Kottke didn't
| join Apple until the next year (although he had been a friend
| of Steve's for years).
|
| When I ran into Steve in June 1976 at Country Sun Natural
| Foods in Palo Alto (it's still there!) and he asked me if I
| could write a 6502 disassembler, it was pretty clear it was
| just the two of them. He wasn't even 100% sure on the company
| name yet, and tested it out with people he met. "My friend
| and I have this little company, we're calling it Apple
| Computer. Take a byte of the apple, get it?"
| scarface74 wrote:
| Out of curiosity and your story was interesting, I LinkedIn
| stalked you. You've had a long interesting career with a
| lot of overlapping jobs. Were you an independent
| contractor?
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Well thank you, I am flattered that you tracked me down.
| Yes, I kept bouncing back and forth between contract work
| and FTE over the years. It wasn't a grand plan to do one
| or the other.
|
| Since you're asking, I may as well tell more of this
| story. After Steve and I exchanged phone numbers, I
| thought the 6502 disassembler sounded like a fun project.
| So I went home and got to work on it. I didn't have a
| chip to test with, so I wrote out the code with pencil
| and paper and "tested" it by stepping through it mentally
| and writing the register and memory values at each step
| on a second sheet of paper. Kind of like what you would
| today call a "debugger".
|
| Then Steve called me: "Mike, I've thought about this.
| Your experience is all with mainframes. We're using a
| _microcomputer_ , and it works on completely principles.
| It is nothing like those mainframes you've used. So I've
| decided that you couldn't possibly do this job."
|
| (It wasn't exactly a "job" at that point, like I said we
| were just a couple of scruffy hippies who ran into each
| other at the produce aisle, discovered we were both into
| computers and electronics, and got to talking.)
|
| I tried to explain that I'd coded in assembly and machine
| language on two or three different architectures already,
| and the 6502 looked like just another one to me, with a
| simpler instruction set.
|
| He said, "No, I've made up my mind. You couldn't possibly
| do this, so forget it."
|
| So I thought "Who is this Steve guy telling _me_ I _can
| 't program_? I will go visit this Apple Computer and show
| him my code!"
|
| I found their address at 770 Welch Road near the Stanford
| Barn, walked in and looked around. It didn't look like a
| computer company, all I saw was a row of switchboards and
| telephone operators. I asked one of them, "Where's Apple
| Computer?"
|
| She said, "Uh, this is their _answering service_. "
|
| I thanked her and walked back out, shaking my head and
| telling myself, "These guys are flakes. They're never
| going to make it."
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Knowing that Steve Jobs himself wrote the numbers_
|
| I have been repeatedly told by the Woz worshippers on HN that
| Jobs was nothing more than a salesman who has zero
| involvement with the actual machines.
|
| If I can't believe revisionist internet historians, who can I
| believe?
| suprjami wrote:
| One of Jobs' first jobs was a board tech at Atari. He must
| have had some circuit-level skills to stay employed, even
| if he could only follow pre-made designs and the
| troubleshooting tactics of those around him. He could
| probably solder components on an already-designed board
| like any of us could if we put our mind to it.
|
| It seems correct that Jobs didn't have the skills to design
| a large circuit board from scratch then pore over IC
| datasheets to try and minimise the amount of components
| used, coming up with some beautiful triumph of electrical
| engineering. That was all Woz.
|
| (I'm not any sort of Jobs fan or Apple zealot, I just like
| tech history and truth)
| dhosek wrote:
| The downvoting proves it: irony is dead.
| tyingq wrote:
| Some Steve Jobs handwritten docs with numbers on them, if you
| wanted to make the comparison yourself:
|
| https://www.cultofmac.com/ezoimgfmt/cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-con...
|
| https://www.cultofmac.com/ezoimgfmt/cdn.cultofmac.com/wp-con...
|
| http://site-macgasm.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2012...
|
| https://www.mactrast.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Apple-1_...
|
| https://photos5.appleinsider.com/archive/jobs-111222.jpg
|
| https://cdn.hiconsumption.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Ste...
|
| https://news.justcollecting.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/j...
| SeanLuke wrote:
| It's the 7 that's the giveaway.
| tyingq wrote:
| The zero as well...the start/end stroke overlap happening
| top/left-ish.
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(page generated 2022-02-18 23:00 UTC)