Steven P. Jobs passed away on October 5th, 2011 after a long struggle with pancreatic cancer. He was just 56 years old. We mourn his passing, and wish his family the very best. The Apple chairman and former CEO who made personal computers, smartphones, tablets, and digital animation mass-market products passed away today. We're going to miss him. Deeply, and personally.

In 1976 he started Apple in a garage. Together with Steve Wozniak, he shipped the first true fully-built personal computer, the Apple I. He drove development of the Mac, understanding that it was the future of computers. The great thing that we would all see.

Prior to Steve Jobs, computers were alien to most of us. They were accessible to few people without an engineering degree. Not merely because of their complex operating procedures, but also because they were so cold and so inhuman. Jobs understood that they could be something more than that. That while computers would never be people, he could endow them with humanity. He could transform them into machines that not only anyone could use, but that everyday people would enjoy using thanks to the art of great design. He made them something that would be part of our lives. And he did that again and again.

He changed the way movies are made, the way music is sold, the way stories are told, the very way we interact with the world around us. He helped us work, and gave us new ways to play. He was a myth made man. Apple has lost a visionary and creative genius, and the world has lost an amazing human being. Steve leaves behind a company that only he could build, and his spirit will forever be the foundation of Apple.

The Apple 1 Registry

Apple 1's were built in batches and each batch had a slightly different mix of components.  This is an attempt to catalog known Apple 1s and provide as much detail as possible about each one.  The earliest known owner,  will be used as the base identifier.

  - Updated !

 If you are a retourning visitor you know the Apple Macintosh eBay pages. Since five years there has been also a Commodore Section at myoldmac.net where i offered some of my collectors items. Because I sold most of my vintage Commodore gems I changed the pages to a Commodore Locator. You can search for Commodore PET, VIC-20, C-64, C128k, Amiga Computer and their periphery. Have a look to the updated Commodore pages and check back often.

I am using the Commodore PET Font as headline font, many thanks to Rebecca Bettencourt at www.kreativekorp.com !

Urban Renewal by Rebecca Bettencourt is a set of insanely great TrueType versions of the long-forgotten city-named fonts of Mac OS Classic, not seen since System 7.1. These TrueType versions are kare-fully constructed to be as faithful to the original designs as possible, while breaking free of the bitmap grid in subtle ways. www.myoldmac.net is using the Los Altos Font as headline font, many thanks to Rebecca Bettencourt at www.kreativekorp.com !

Christie's auction house in London today sold an Apple-1 computer for £133,250, or $213,600.

The lot, which went up for auction at 9:30 a.m. ET today, had an estimated value of between $160,300 and $240,450.

The Apple-1 sold today came with the original packaging, manuals, cassette interface and basic tape, early documentation and provenance, and a commercially rare letter from Steve Jobs.

Two hundred Apple-1 computers are estimated to have been created and sold for $666.66 before Apple Computer Inc. was founded in 1977. Once the Apple II, the company's first official product, was released, many of the Apple-1 models were reclaimed as trade-ins. Only about 50 are still known to exist, many of them indexed by hardware developer Mike Willegal.

Of those 200 machines, Christie's Apple-1 is No. 82. This same Apple-1 is thought to be the same one that was sold on eBay in November 2009 by a user named "apple1sale" to "julescw72". At the time, it sold for a winning bid of $50,000.

The original Apple-1 was sold as a fully assembled circuit board with 4KB of memory but no case, power supply, keyboard or monitor. Christie's Apple-1 included the machine's original packaging, manuals, cassette interface and basic tape, documentation and a letter from Steve Jobs, but some parts may not have been original, said computer hobbyist and retrocomputing expert Eric Rucker.

"The CPU is a Rockwell plastic part, not a MOS [6502] white ceramic part," he noted, identifying what Christie's item description called "a few slightly later additions." Apple-1 inventor and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was on hand for the auction, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The winner of the Christie's auction was Marco Boglione, an Italian collector.

With the economy in the tank, you or someone you know is probably putting off the decision to buy a new Mac. But what about a used Mac? Sure, it doesn’t have all the glitz of a shiny new unibody MacBook, but an older-generation MacBook might just do the trick for a lot less money. Heck, you’d be surprised at how well an older iBook G4 can still handle just about everything that you might want to do.

Please visit my new project: www.myoldmac.com ! If you’re looking for a used Apple Macintosh or Mac-compatible peripherals, at myoldmac.com you can find a solution that fits your budget.

Interview with Rob Janoff, designer of the Apple logo

Rob Janoff in 2009 

Thumb drive made out of an old Apple keyboard - 04 Jul 2009

If you’re sick of all these new Apple fanatics and you want to show them all that you’ve been a diehard fan since the early days, even sticking by the company through Newton and Pippin, then this thumb drive made out of an old Apple keyboard is for you.

Apple Lisa Operating System Reference Manual (PDF, 1983) - 28 May 2009

Apple Lisa Operating System Reference Manual (PDF, 1983)

The Apple Lisa from 1983 was the first consumer-class computer with a graphical user interface and significantly more advanced than the 1984 Macintosh, which had a similar UI, but a comparatively primitive underlying OS. Here, I present a searchable PDF of the rare “Operating System Reference Manual for the Lisa” (1983), as well as a quick overview of the OS and how it compares to UNIX.

Download the Lisa Operatin manual here: 

http://www.pagetable.com/?p=241

An online version of the  LISA Reference Guide you can find at

http://lisa.sourceforge.net/ref-guide.html