My Replica I board has arrived on thursday. I ordered the “barebones” kit with just the board and the rare integrated circuits (ICs) from Vince Briel — the creator of the replica I. Since then, I’ve been scavenging around the house and garage the parts I need to complete my Apple I. As of last night, I’ve got most of the small components sorted out and installed, and placed an order for the missing parts at Jameco. If anyone is interested I’ll put up a detailed shopping list for this project, although you can just order the complete kit from Vince. I’m throughly having fun with this little project, and it’s had some beneficial side effects.
First, I’ve had to rummage around and find all of my electronics gear; there’s quite a bit of it, and it’s been spread around the house. I’ve even discovered my old single board computer from college — Dr. Hawkin’s V40 board. Unfortunately, my V40 board no longer seems to work; I sent off an e-mail to Dr. Hawkins hoping for some of the old notes on the board to see if I can bring it back to life.
Fooling around with getting the V40 working meant cracking out the good, ol’ logic probe, and that led oddly enough finding my probescope. I hadn’t realized how cool the probescope really is. I remember basically going broke and eating ramen for a week to get it, but I had either not realized, or not known that it’s a 2MHz oscilloscope (I remembered it being less than 1MHz). While I’d still like a scope capable of working on more complicated systems (1GHz) this one will be great for noodling around the Replica I.
Anyway, part of rummaging through all this old computer and electronic stuff got me aggravated with how cluttered the house/garage/life is, so I called up my friend Austin, and gave him anything he would haul away. Essentially he got: 3 complete PC’s (486, Pentium, Pentium II), a PowerMac, a monitor, a DVD-rom, a (broken ?) Playstation, a bunch of expansion cards, a 12-port hub, plus some junk I made him haul off as payment. Oddly, Austin was excited since he currently gets a kick out of rescuing and rebuilding computers. He’s got the all the parts necessary to make a homebrew Tivo, and now there are only five or so spare computers around here; everyone is happy!