I really wished I had documented the process of building this machine, but unfortunately I was too preoccupied with actually making sure I didn’t screw anything up.

The Obtronix Apple I reproduction is a kit produced by Steve Gabaly. I won this computer off eBay, and when I say ‘won’ I don’t mean in the typical eBay sense. Steve had posted on one of his eBay auctions that if anyone could find out all the differences between the two Apple 1 production motherboards he would give away one of his kits. I was up to the challenge. I scoured the net for images of Apple 1 computers and compared them, noting down the subtle differences. The whole process probably took about 3 hours. After I thought I had found everything, I posted on his eBay listing and won. Thanks Steve.

The kit arrived about a month later and I immediately started assembling it. The first thing I did was to ditch the cheap single wipe sockets that came with the kit and purchased a complete set of machined sockets. I like to build and fix all my machines with machined sockets as it ensures a solid connection between the IC and the socket for years to come. The last thing I want to do in the future is have to repair my repairs.

Building the actual kit was fairly straight forward, if not extremely time consuming. It took me about a week to get most of it together. I found the tricky parts where the building of the power supply, and making the keyboard adaptor. At the time there was a lot less information available on the net, and Steve’s build instructions consisted of a single sheet of paper with absolutely no photo reference at all. I had to use common sense and a bit of guesswork to get it all up and running. The power supply was particularly nerve racking as I didn’t want to blow anything up.

I did have one small issue. When I was testing the unit I accidentally plugged the keyboard in the wrong way and blew a couple of IC’s. It took a while to track down the exact problem to the keyboard itself, but once I did it was relatively easy to resolve.

FInally I had to find a nice solution to housing all the parts. I decided a good idea was to assemble everything in a suitcase. This has the added benefit of making the Apple 1 somewhat portable. Below you can see the final build of my Obtronix Apple 1 replica.

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