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Apple I Advertisement (1976)
https://computerhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Apple-I-Advertisement_Oct1976.pdf https://computerhistory.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Apple...
- aaronbrethorst 9mo agoWhat's up with all of the weird typos, such as: "APPLE Computer Compagny" "Palo Atlt"
- chocochunks 9mo agoProbably OCR'd with no editing.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- fsckboy 9mo agoit appears to be a website in the french tongue
- dagmx 9mo agoWhomever scanned it , enabled some kind of OCR correction which left the typos.
- jibal 9mo agoSee https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Apple_1_Advertisement_Oct_1976.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Apple_1_...
- amelius 9mo agoThe full sentence: > And since our philosophy is to provide software for our machines free or at minimal cost, you won't be continually paying for access to this growing software library.
- titzer 9mo agoThey forgot to mention that the growing software library is also shrinking as they deprecate support for older OS versions and hardware. On the one hand they go to heroic lengths (fat binaries, Rosetta 2) to enable a migration to a new hardware platform but get bored in ~5 years and drop support. "Growing software library" it ain't.
- renewiltord 9mo agoIt’s been half a century of Apple. At this point if FireWire, Flash, and a half dozen other things didn’t convince you that Apple deprecates then removes old functionality pretty rapidly I don’t know what to say.
- titzer 9mo agoIf only those trillions of dollars of market cap and hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue could support...a couple dozen small teams maintaining legacy support. For the old hardware, pretty decent open source emulators exist that can run older versions, like all the way back to MacOS 7. It can't be that hard to keep the pilot light on for those old things.
- renewiltord 9mo agoIt's a product choice. If you want long-term backwards compatibility, Windows is probably the best option, perhaps the Win32 API on Linux via WINE. Overall, backwards compatibility is a drag on future development. In general, I prefer to drop it myself unless that's the crucial feature. In this case, I'd say I'd make the same choice. Those last few bps of users can simply remain on old software/hardware.
- raw_anon_1111 9mo agoYou just can’t imagine my lost from not being able to use my 7 device deep SCSI chain including my Zip and Jaz drive
- 9mo ago
- gignico 9mo agoAt $666.66 this must have been a diabolic deal!
- jagged-chisel 9mo agoMore devilish
- esafak 9mo agoSame thing.
- bigyabai 9mo agoNot really. The Apple I was discontinued within a year of release, if you saved that money until 1978 then you could get an Apple II that would be supported for almost 20 years give-or-take.
- tracerbulletx 9mo agoBut very really if you bought it and kept it until now.
- chocochunks 9mo agoPart of the reason the Apple I is so rare, is that Apple offered an Apple I trade in program. Apple would destroy the boards of Apple Is that were traded in for Apple IIs. * Not that there was really many to begin with.
- biofox 9mo agoWhat was the reasoning behind that?
- paulryanrogers 9mo agoProbably to reduce support costs. I recall my junior high school had only Apple IIs in 1995.
- jrochkind1 9mo agoA lot of corporate "philosophies" are actually just business models. There have been times between then and now they charged for the OS. They do charge for other software. But largely it's been a good business model for them.
- wlesieutre 9mo agoIn the 2000s I remember the OS releases being $130, which (depending on exactly what year you start from) is equivalent to $200-250ish today. Not a yearly cadence because back then they only released a new OS version when it was done and had features worth releasing, but even every two years that wasn't a cheap update.
- jrochkind1 9mo agoi think it was only a few years that lasted, but not positive. There was a brief period where you could actually license MacOS to run on non-Apple hardware, I bet they charged for that too.
- subtlesoftware 9mo ago"Compared to switches and LED's, a video terminal can dis- play vast amounts of information simultaneously." The beginning of the end.
- enzosaba 9mo agoReally. You start with 40x24 chars and after a little span of time end up doom scrolling
- rpastuszak 9mo agoHaha, excellent timing: I opened HN just now because: 1. I got tired of waiting 2h for my app to get notarized because 2. I can't sell it on the AppStore in the EU... because 3. the AppStore Connect page gets stuck at their DSA compliance form (it's been 10 days). And, to add insult to injury, the whole thing could be a PWA, without any compromises in the UX whatsoever. I misread the title, but I still posted this comment as an example of confirmation bias* in the orange book for posteriority. Time to step away from the computer! * (sunk cost fallacy)
- echelon 9mo ago> the whole thing could be a PWA Apple neutered the web as best they could to force you to use their rails. I'm still angry they killed flash. There has never been a better platform for non-technical folks, kids especially, to make animation, games, and mini apps, and deploy them as single binary blobs. A single swf file could be kept and run anywhere. For the younger generation: imagine right clicking to download a YouTube video or a video game you'd see on itch.io. And you could send those to friends. You could even embed online multiplayer and chatrooms into the apps. It all just worked. What we have now is a soup of complexity that can't even match the feature set.
- marcosdumay 9mo agoJust like Microsoft before them. But flash specifically deserved to die.
- NewsaHackO 9mo agoAbsolutely. Apple had the balls to be the first major tech company to take the first material step to actually end the security nightmare that was Flash for good.
- as1mov 9mo agoI'm sure it was the security that of Flash that worried them, and not the fact that a third party was encroaching on their walled garden that couldn't be extorted.
- dlcarrier 9mo agoI worked at a place that tested software releases on a VM of every supported operating system, including OS X. We didn't have any Apple hardware, because no one wanted to deal with that, but someone had brought in the chassis of an old Apple computer and the host computer was inside it. We didn't run it by any lawyers or anything, but as far as we could tell, running OS X inside a computer that had all of its guts replaced was entirely within the license requirements.
- bryogenic 9mo agoThe Mac of Theseus
- dlcarrier 9mo agoExcept int this case, we pulled a single plank off of ship of the ship, burned the rest of it, and nailed the plank to a brand new ship built in a competing ship yard.
- pbhjpbhj 9mo agoThese sort of letter-of-the-law arguments don't tend to do well in court in my very limited experience (UK). But I love the essence of it!
- dlcarrier 9mo agoThe UK has been slowly codifying laws over time, transitioning from common law to written law. In the Americas, we kind of jump started that processes, and are far more focused on the law as written, to the point that the positioning of a comma can have million-dollar implications: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/business/worldbusiness/25comma.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/25/business/worldbusiness/25... If a literal interpretation of what you wrote allows for something, even though it's clear that you hadn't intended to do so, then it is going to be allowed.
- mirashii 9mo ago
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- wmf 9mo agoThere was discourse in the 1970s about whether software should all be free or if paid software would be better. Apple and Micro-Soft had different perspectives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
- TheJoeMan 9mo agoI appreciate that the software and updates are made "free" to me, and it may be their right to disallow "downgrades" and have time-limited windows for redemption. However, as a developer for their platform, it is quite frustrating that these restrictions are at odds with industry practice to guarantee support for older OS versions than current. I cannot purchase a new iPhone, put iOS 18 on it, install my app, and test updating the iPhone to 26. This can have very real negative consequences for the very same shared customers of mine and Apple's.
- cwicklein 9mo agoExpandable to 65K. I don’t recall seeing SI units used in this context until by hard disk manufacturers years later.
- randomme 9mo agoI think that comes from 64k + 1k ("the video display section contains its own 1K bytes").
- zweifuss 9mo agoThe text was mangeled by some OCR-software. This ad can be found as image on Wikimedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_1_Advertisement_Oct_1976.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Apple_1_Advertisemen...
- jnpnj 9mo agoMakes me wonder who printed their motherboards early on
- yashasolutions 9mo ago> "you won't be continually paying for access to this growing software library." Well... the apple used to be sweet and has turn pretty sour with the years...
- PlatoIsADisease 9mo agoInteresting to think that: >If Microsoft never bailed Apple out, this wouldn't be on the front page today >If Apple didn't have the greatest marketing team of all time and nail the ipod commercial, this wouldn't be on the front page today >If Apple charged competitive prices for the iphone, rather than make it a veblen good, this wouldn't be on the front page today. If I could only consider how much luck is involved in life, it might make setbacks feel better.
- raw_anon_1111 9mo agoWhich is another myth that needs to die. Apple had a couple of billion in the bank from a loan that they secured and they lost much more than the measly $250 million that Microsoft invested. Not to mention that Apple
- MaxPock 9mo agoHeard to believe that all this (product and ad) was by kids barely out of teenage.
- cellover 9mo agoNot related at all: oh my, chez.com still exists? That's my very first website I did in 2000: http://w2000.chez.com/ http://w2000.chez.com/
- Foobar8568 9mo agoThat was my first surprised as well...
- qingcharles 9mo agoGreen PCB Prototype #0 Apple I just sold yesterday for $2.75m https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46843037
- divbzero 9mo agoThis anecdote from history feels timely given the recent shift of Apple’s iWork suite (Pages, Numbers, Keynote) from being bundled with Macs to being a freemium subscription. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/28/apple-updates-keynote-numbers-pages/ https://www.macrumors.com/2026/01/28/apple-updates-keynote-n...
- lisper 9mo agoWhat do any of these comments have to do with this advertisement for the Apple1?
- tenahu 9mo agoYes, I was wondering if I missed some context.
- locao 9mo agoThe post had a different title hours ago. Something along the lines of "it's Apple's philosophy to offer our software for free forever". I didn't followed the link before, so I don't know if it was the same content, but I'm sure the comments are related to the previous title.
- lisper 9mo agoAh. Thanks.
- croisillon 9mo agoblog title police in action https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46746666
- mrcwinn 9mo agoI know people are rightly amazed by Woz’s engineering prowess, but it’s fascinating to see Steve’s fingerprints all of Apple I. Look at the product commitments and they’ll ring a bell: - It’s all in one - Hassle free to set up - Something that usually doesn’t work (cassette board) now just works They rightly identified the hobbyist market (I want to tinker) was actually the smaller market within a larger one. Seems obvious in hindsight. It wasn’t obvious then.
- bwoah 9mo agohttps://archive.is/dJvc https://archive.is/dJvc
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Perenti 9mo agoI first saw an Apple I at a Maths Camp in late 1976. It was from the first batch to arrive in Australia. We were all enthralled. We were slightly less enthralled waiting for the floating point libraries to load from cassette tape. Earlier that year I'd been on a school excursion to Lismore "to see the computer". Richmond River High had got themselves a computer. It was a WANG the size of a washing machine, with a separate mark-sense card reader and a separate RF adapter which connected to a big black and white TV. It was new by the way. The rate of advance from the WANG to the Apple I was incredible. I'm still intoxicated by it.
- Dwedit 9mo agoThe Apple I computers got bought back by Apple for the release of the Apple II. That's why they're so rare, Apple wanted them gone. They were not a user-friendly computer. It booted to the Monitor prompt, and did not include BASIC in the ROM.
- wolvoleo 9mo agoWeird that they say "4 Ko RAM". That's how the French refer to bytes (octets) but everything else is in American units and dollars.
- einr 9mo agoAn artifact of bad OCR; not actually there. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Apple_1_Advertisement_Oct_1976.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Apple_1_...
- virtualritz 9mo agoThis is not an original copy of the advertisement. This is typeset horribly from the original text of the ad, probably. Giveaways are brutal/ill placed line breaks, zero quotes being curly ones (single and double), -- instead of a en/em dash, missing hypenation or existing one that does not align with typesetting "dis- play", etc., etc. Why not use an image of the original instead? [1] Jobs would have never signed off on a typographic eyesore like this. :] [1] https://www.alamy.com/stock-image-an-advertisement-for-the-apple-1-computer-released-in-october-1976-167000525.html https://www.alamy.com/stock-image-an-advertisement-for-the-a...
- jibal 9mo agoYes. Numerous typos were introduced, Even misspelling "Palo Alto".
- kens 9mo agoThanks for pointing that out. The real ad appeared in the computer magazine Interface Age, September 1976 page 13, as can be seen in the Internet Archive. I think it's important for Hacker News to avoid fake/replica historical info so it doesn't end up like Reddit, where you can't trust anything. https://archive.org/details/InterfaceAge197609/page/12/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/InterfaceAge197609/page/12/mode/...
- nunez 9mo agoThe downfall of Reddit is so depressing to think about. I trusted Reddit wholeheartedly in the 2010s. Redditors taught me the life advice I didn't learn growing up: how to shave, how to negotiate job offers, how to do things around the house, and so on. Huge subs aside, you could that every post you read had a human on the other side of it, and no-one wanted more than upvotes and Reddit Gold. Once spez and crew decided to push the MAX GROWTH button, all of that flew out the window. Now that LLMs make infinite content generation child's play and there are financial incentives for being a content provider, there's no going back. I'm doubtful that another service like that will exist ever again. All that notwithstanding, I still search for stuff on Reddit because the rest of the Internet IS EVEN WORSE. SEO ruined websites, CPM ruined YouTube, and LLMs might not even tell you the truth! I wasn't expecting to start yelling at clouds in my late 30s, but I guess we're here now.
- srinath693 9mo agoThis was less a philosophy and more a competitive jab at Gates' "Open Letter to Hobbyists." Apple bundled BASIC for free because Woz wrote it himself, they had no software costs to recoup. Easy to be generous when your cofounder is the product.
- veltas 9mo ago> Apple bundled BASIC for free because Woz wrote it himself, they had no software costs to recoup. But in respect of Gates' letter, Woz didn't write that BASIC for free, he wrote it to enable his hardware platform and the time spent writing it is a cost/investment in the platform. Gates was just trying to make a business writing software without the hardware. Also Apple are the ones that made Gates' sentiments a reality with the precedent set in Apple v Franklin (1983) defending the copyright of their BIOS software.
- vertnerd 9mo agoI was a 14 year old digital electronics hobbyist at that time. At $666 it could just as well have been $1 million. The most I could possibly afford at the time was about $50. For me, personal computing didn't become truly affordable until the Commodore 64 came along in the 80s, and by that point the Apple II was about 4x more expensive. The Apple computers were revolutionary, but to me they have never been affordable.
- heyaco 9mo ago'crystal control timing' lol great feature to have! :D
- ghc 9mo agoBreadboard area? That's a super cool! I had no idea the Apple I had such a hobbyist-centric inclusion. I wonder what people did with it.
- lasgawe 9mo agoWhen I read this, I got a feeling of nostalgia. I do not know why. I was not even born when this was released.
- dieselgate 9mo agoPer the address and contact number at bottom did the (415) area code formerly encompass Palo Alto?
- yasmineroy33 9mo ago[dead]