Teen Funds Incredible Apple Collection With Lawn-Mowing Money

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Although it would have been nice if this kid collected PCs instead of Macs, that doesn't diminish the fact that this is an extremely impressive collection for a fifteen year old. Hell, it is impressive even for adults! What were you doing when you were fifteen?

Now 15, Alex Jason is on the verge of opening a public museum that will feature rare prototypes, a bound original copy of Steve Wozniak’s Woz Pak coding notes for the Apple II, and even a rare Apple I that may be the only one in existence with working original chips.
 
GL to him on that one, I really don't see the point.

But people have done way odder things in the past, of course.
 
I thought this would be stupid - but I was wrong. That's actually a pretty impressive collection with all the prototypes and whatnot. It's neat how he's hunted down engineers and looted their personal prototypes.
 
I thought this would be stupid - but I was wrong. That's actually a pretty impressive collection with all the prototypes and whatnot. It's neat how he's hunted down engineers and looted their personal prototypes.

I get the feeling he may "know a few people" myself.

But that is immaterial really.
 
First computer my family bought for us as kids was an Apple IIc. I played so much Karateka and Lemonade Stand! I would love for my kids to understand how far things have come; you can enjoy a lot of old software through emulators, but you miss out on some of the perspective without working with the actual hardware and media.
 
All I care about apple are the //c and the //e which really are the same machine. The original Apple ][ was a POS. I have one totally worthless. My //c rocks.
 
I get the feeling he may "know a few people" myself.
But that is immaterial really.

Yeah the title is a little misleading; I'm sure the kid tossed in a few bucks but it is obvious he had a lot of help from his parents, hardware donors, not to mention having a building donated for his museum.

Still, it is very cool. I would loved to have held on to more of my old hardware but you eventually just run out of space :(
 
First computer my family bought for us as kids was an Apple IIc. I played so much Karateka and Lemonade Stand! I would love for my kids to understand how far things have come; you can enjoy a lot of old software through emulators, but you miss out on some of the perspective without working with the actual hardware and media.
Space Quarks (apple at play) Kicked ass! Still have the game/disk. I still want the original Oregon Trail written in BASIC. Loved that game used to cheat all the time.
 
All I care about apple are the //c and the //e which really are the same machine. The original Apple ][ was a POS. I have one totally worthless. My //c rocks.

//c was my gateway to CRPGs, starting with the original Bard's Tale, then Ultima IV. Loved it!
 
I'm not an Apple fan by any means, but I did learn to type in 1987 at age 15 on an Apple IIe, and the adolescent in this story can do a lot worse with his money than to open a museum dedicated to preserving and teaching an obscure piece of legacy computer history. I wish him luck.
 
I recently bought an Apple IIc off of eBay for $75. My family bought one back in 1984, and it was a great little computer. I decided to get another one because the Apple II was such a fun machine to program. You had completely direct access to every piece of hardware in the machine, to the point where simply reading a single byte of memory from a single memory location might set a "soft switch" in the hardware which enabled or disabled a feature. Even the floppy controller gave you full access to its hardware, with commands for spinning up the disk and advancing the read head. That was one of the reasons that the Apple II line had such effective disk copy protection. Software developers would directly access the floppy drive and do wacky things like throwing the read process out of sync by a few bits, so all of the data on the drive was essentially bit-shifted.

Before I decided to buy a IIc again, I stumbled onto the 4AM software collection at archive.org ( Apple II Library: The 4am Collection : Free Software : Download & Streaming : Internet Archive ). It's part of an effort to save some of those copy-protected disks for posterity by reverse engineering/cracking the protection in a very elegant way. The guy who does all of the work documents everything he had to do to disable copy protection in a text file for each piece of software. It's a fascinating read, because some companies went to amazing lengths to keep their disks from being copied. This is a good example:

https://ia601304.us.archive.org/13/items/MrDo4amCrack/Mr. Do (4am crack).txt

Anyway, reading through all of that machine code made me want to get an Apple II again. I have a much greater appreciation for the machine 30 years later than I did as a kid.
 
First computer my family bought for us as kids was an Apple IIc. I played so much Karateka and Lemonade Stand! I would love for my kids to understand how far things have come; you can enjoy a lot of old software through emulators, but you miss out on some of the perspective without working with the actual hardware and media.

Although not Apple, I am in the process of building a few retro PCs. One for DOS/Win98SE with a Voodoo 5-5500, one for Win98SE - X800XT PE, and one for XP - HD 6870 (maybe 2 of them) and an AGEIA Physx card. Would switch to an Nvidia setup IF I got one or two good cards for free or close to it.

That will cover mostly everything PC based that has ever been made even though the speed of the machines will be way higher than what was available at the time.
 
This isn't an iPod collection, this a real piece of history.
Not many people have the passion and innovation to do something like this, and the kid is only 15, and look at what he has already accomplished!

More and more systems like this are going away, and not many of them remain.
While I get the modern-Apple hate, Apple from the 1970s to the mid-2000s was very innovative (Steve Wozniak gets most of that credit) and competitive in the industry.

From the MOS 6502 to the Motorola 68000 and IBM 970MP, Apple equipment utilized a lot of amazing technology from its time, just as other systems have done.
It is good that such a young person actually cares enough to learn about this kind of history and preserve it.
 
I mowed a heck of a lot of yards at that age and all I could think of was (hot chicks, chicks, chicks, chicks, chicks, cool car, chicks chicks, cool car with chick in it, chicks)
 
Cool collection. I never could afford Apple's - went with Commodore 64 & Amiga before getting into PCs. I used to want a IIgs when I was a teenage - looked very cool, but pretty sure the Amiga could do more (and was definitely cheaper).
 
Cool collection. I never could afford Apple's - went with Commodore 64 & Amiga before getting into PCs. I used to want a IIgs when I was a teenage - looked very cool, but pretty sure the Amiga could do more (and was definitely cheaper).

Oh, the Amiga's definitely could.
The IIgs was really cool for its time, but it had a weak 16-bit CPU (65C816 - same CPU in the SNES), and compared to the 68000 through the 68060, there was no comparison in terms of performance in favor of the Amiga systems.
 
On a serious note, I had a Minidisc player when I was 15 (1996)....that was the extent of my coolness. It was lost on most people.
 
I never owned an old Apple. I remember my C64 with fond memories of plating Bards Tale as well as Might & Magic and Blue Max.
 
At 15, I was probably all over Street Fighter II at the local arcade or laundromat.
 
I still want the original Oregon Trail written in BASIC. Loved that game used to cheat all the time.

Oregon Trail on the IIc was the game that taught me about save scumming, I didn't know the term then but after figuring it out I never paid for river crossings.

I didn't care for Apple once the mac era started but their early hardware was great(for the time).
 
He has possibly the only running Apple I with working chips? I don't think he bought that with lawn mowing $$$
That is worth a small fortune isn't it? He couldn't even pay the insurance on all that equipment!
 
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