Look on Ebay for kits, then a cheap USB-to-TTL connector and you too can run Wozniak's best from your top of the line mac/pc. The disassembler is crazy powerfull given the size of the executable.
The same KIM uno (6502 emulation from Arduino Uno) runs KIM, a contemporary of Apple 1 (with much better documentation, check archive.org) and a masterpiece of engineering: Microchess from Peter Jennings (not that one). Microchess, was at the time (and arguably still is) software that is just so unbelievably brilliant thay it must have been recovered from the Roswell crash site, just like whatever Fabrice Bellard puts out these days.
Not saying that the 6502 was the best thing in the computer industry, but then again, yeah maybe it was.
A mockup version of this for the Apple II recently popped up on Antiques Roadshow. An Apple employee grabbed it out of a dumpster in the late 80s. Appraised at $10,000-15,000.
The system is fully expandable to 65K, with the entire data and address busses, clocks, control signals ( i. e. IRQ, NMI, DMA, RDY, etc.), and power sources available at the connector.
Were any of those (few) sold boards ever expanded to the maximum possible RAM? That would be a beast of a machine, for cheap, in 1976.
64K of random access memory, plus 1K of linear access (shift register) memory.
The 1K shift register was used as the 40x24 screen buffer. This is the biggest limitation of that machine; you can't modify the screen directly, you can only push characters on to the end like a serial terminal.
I think what would surprise younger people is how in the very old days it was unclear that RAM would win over all other forms of access and there was quite a bit of non-random access hardware available such as "bubble memory" and CCDs and various delay line schemes and magnetic drums etc. Much like trying to tell young people that tape was once used as primary storage for computing not as backup-only storage.
On one hand its annoying having to pump addresses and later rows and columns at memory vs "here's a stream, best of luck using it" but the program complexity and performance gains of random access are very high so RAM wiped out ideas like using CCDs as anything other than video sensors.
Seeing as tech is an endless wheel of everything old is new again (see 70s programing paradigms and stuff like that) "someday" someone will try to disrupt some corner of computing with non random access memory.
The experience would likely be similar to ladder logic programming where all the instructions operate repeatedly and simultaneously, well, at least as a programming model. Another analogy would be spinning rust hard disks, here's a continuous stream of bits pouring off the drive head, now write a program to simulate a block store that uses that bitstream, and that is called hard drive firmware or back in the old days that was a MFM or RLL drive controller.
> The Apple Computer Company hereby warrants each of its products, and all components therein contained, to be free from defects in materials and/or workmanship for a period of thirty (30) days f r o m date of purchase.
And the product they were selling was a bare (well, populated, but not enclosed) PCB which the user was expected to wire up to power, a keyboard, and a monitor themselves. Long-term reliability was more the responsibility of the owner than the manufacturer.
Look on Ebay for kits, then a cheap USB-to-TTL connector and you too can run Wozniak's best from your top of the line mac/pc. The disassembler is crazy powerfull given the size of the executable.
The same KIM uno (6502 emulation from Arduino Uno) runs KIM, a contemporary of Apple 1 (with much better documentation, check archive.org) and a masterpiece of engineering: Microchess from Peter Jennings (not that one). Microchess, was at the time (and arguably still is) software that is just so unbelievably brilliant thay it must have been recovered from the Roswell crash site, just like whatever Fabrice Bellard puts out these days.
Not saying that the 6502 was the best thing in the computer industry, but then again, yeah maybe it was.