Filed under: Cult of Mac, Apple History
Resurrecting Apple I BASIC
This is a fascinating tidbit for the Apple history fans out there. Michael Steil has the story of how the original Apple I BASIC was recovered from an audio cassette which had been digitized into a MP3. Apple I BASIC was the first piece of commercial software sold for the first Apple computer. Only about 200 Apple I's were produced and not even all of them came with the BASIC cassette. Apparently this is the first time a "confirmed perfect dump of the 4096 bytes" of Apple 1 BASIC has been produced. So now you can see the original 6502 assembly that is the "spiritual" ancestor, as it were, of all of Apple's software.
[via Mac OS X Internals: The Blog]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
tony said 12:08PM on 7-15-2008
I'm getting a chubby just thinking about it.
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Frank said 12:38PM on 7-15-2008
ok, so is an emulator next? someone waaay smarter than i am must surely be working on this...
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Fritz Laurel said 12:52PM on 7-15-2008
Instead of "Applesoft BASIC" we used to call it "Applesauce BASIC..."
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Don O\'Shea said 2:08PM on 7-15-2008
When my family visited Art Schawlow at Stanford in the early 80's, he showed us an Apple I that he kept under a table in his office. Although I don't think his computer had the classy cut-out "backsplash". He told me that he provided some suggestions for improvements to its inventors and builders.
Don O'Shea
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Kev Orng said 2:18PM on 7-15-2008
That's just a Wine box!
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Rog said 3:13PM on 7-15-2008
"Spiritual ancestor" in more ways than one. The 6502 was the processor in the Acorn Atom. Acorn made the first ARM processor; a design inspired by the 6502's risc-y ISA. Acron more or less became ARM and now license the IP that powers the iPhone's processor.
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Randy Bryan said 4:08PM on 7-15-2008
Spiritual Ancestor by marriage, not blood. Apple changed family lines when they decided to quit making their own kernel and switched to the BSD/Unix kernel. I think that was the smartest move Apple ever made. It "freed up" resources which could be put into designing better products.
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