Niner Tenny

Kolchak: The Night Stalker rocking his Rollei 16s miniature camera.

Long before we were lamenting Firefly only going one season, we were missing this criminally-short-lived film noir show that basically invented monster of the week.

Apple I (1976)

Steve Wozniak had wanted to build his own computer for a long time. He finally started when he found the MOS Technology 6502 chip, which cost only 25 dollars instead of the 175 dollars Motorola asked for the 6800. He wrote the BASIC interpreter first, and then designed the computer around it, with a keyboard instead of switches and a video output you could connect to a TV.

A small 256-byte "monitor" program started when you turned the machine on. With it you could enter hex bytes, look at the memory, and run programs. The whole computer fit on one board, about 16 by 12 inches, with only 30 to 40 chips and up to 8 KB of RAM. It had no speaker, no graphics, and no color.

Steve Jobs suggested that they make printed circuit boards, and on April 1, 1976 they founded the Apple Computer Company. Paul Terrell, the owner of the Byte Shop, ordered 50 units, but he wanted them fully assembled.

So the two Steves built the machines in Jobs' garage, though they still came without a power supply, keyboard, or monitor. The Apple-1 came out in July 1976 for 666.66 dollars. They made 200 units and sold 175 of them within ten months.

At Terrell's request, Wozniak also designed a 75-dollar cassette interface card. It ran at 1200 baud, which was four times faster than most machines of that time.

Back in the mid 70s we bought our first video game console, I believe it was this APV Fun console or variant but it's a bit fuzzy 50 years later.

It played pong. And "Hockey" which tbh was pong with a goal. It's hard to imagine now how this could have been such a compelling, magical experience but then it definitely was.

I'm amazed it was fun looking back, and I was there. But you kind of have to remember that it came out into a world where there were no home computers or DVDs or VHS or even cable TV.

You had a couple channels on TV and that's it. There was no form of interactive home entertainment, whatsoever. The idea that you could control something on a TV and play a game on it was mind-blowing.

The magic of this console didn't last long of course. Pretty soon the video game dominated the arcade and the home video console market exploded too.

PCB assembly

x | x | x