In 1979 I was an 11-year-old who desperately wanted an Apple II. My parents wanted to buy me one, but $2,000 was just too much money. Then one day my dad came home with a pile of photocopies of the poster-sized wiring diagram that shipped with every Apple II. He taped it together, began dropping wire-wrap sockets into a big prototyping PCB, and we were building one ourselves.

I helped a bit, but my dad did most of the work. He sat at the kitchen table late into the night for months, wire wrapping the board and tracing the diagram in yellow pencil crayon as he finished each line. The wire-wrap gun looked like a ray gun. I’d hear it steadily zip as I was falling asleep. When the diagram was solid yellow, we started checking continuity. I remember buzzing out the board with a multimeter as Dad called out endless wire start- and end-coordinates from the diagram and then marked them in orange if they worked.

When it was finally finished, it was an ugly piece of hardware with a giant, old teletype keyboard, a case-less CRT he pulled out of a dumpster somewhere, and a blue Fisher-Price kiddy tape recorder for “storage.” The power supply was a separate box connected by a long wire.

It worked for a couple of years before corrosion in the wire-wrap connections started hanging it too often. By then the guys at my dad’s workplace had used in-house CAD software to replicate the Apple II board and had a couple hundred made. There was hell to pay when management

found out. We cannibalized most of the chips for the new board and bought a proper case, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw out the old board. I still have it. It’s kinda busted up from a dozen moves and covered with dust and cobwebs. But it’s my first computer.

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Photograph by Gareth Palid wor

My First Computer By Gareth Palidwor

192 Make: Volume 01