You can download this story from my new feature story web page. As well documented as the Apple 1 is, this story contains a few tidbits that haven’t been published before.
Going forward, I hope to add a new story to this page every month or two. These stories are going to a be a little more polished than my blog entries and other web pages.
I just ran across this old image that was used to make a poster for the first VCF that I had an exhibit at. Based on the date on the files, it looks like the poster was designed in 2008.
![Apple ][ replica poster](http://www.willegal.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/apple-add.gif)
The main thing that struck me is that I can’t believe what I was thinking, selling those kits for only $349! You can’t imagine how much effort it took to gather together all the parts and then assemble kits. Eventually I gave up on the kit idea and just sold bare boards. All told, I think I sold something like 16 boards and kits and kept a couple of boards for myself. I made a little money on the project, but if you counted up the hours and calculated an hourly pay rate, it had to be way below than minimum wage.
You don’t find many electronics kits manufacturers these days. I think the main reason is that it is now actually cheaper to build an electronic item than package a kit.
I am sometimes surprised at how little money that some people ask for bare reproduction PCBs. Sometimes, I see people asking less money than what I paid for those PCBs. I suppose if you really dig around, you may be able to find a fab house in Asia that will make a PCB for almost nothing, but my investigations always showed that for larger PCBs and small runs, the most popular offshore fab houses, really weren’t that much cheaper than domestic ones. Thus, I always have my PCBs made here in the USA.
I decided to see what happened if I put up a short youtube video.This one shows how much (or little) is working on my City Point Terminal Model Railroad. I could make more of these videos, who knows.
Quest Components had them and I was able to pick up a few for $8.00 each. I was able undo the work-around hack for the “A” part and the board works perfectly without mods with the non-A part. Quest has both the “A” part and a “P” part, so if you decide to order from them, be sure to order the “P” part.
In this post, I’m going to briefly compare two Civil War battles. Both battles had very similar results. Both of these battles were surprise attacks on strongly entrenched defenders.
The Battle of the Crater
Union Attacker: 8,500 troops and suffered losses of 3798 men
Confederate Defender: 6,100 troops and lost 1491 men
Result: Attackers were thrown back around midday
The Battle of Fort Stedman
Confederate Attacker: 10,000 troops and lost 4000 men
Union Defender: 14898 troops and lost 1044 men
Result: Attackers were defeated by around 8:00AM
Detailed accounts of both battles reveal a pretty similar chain of events. At first a breakthrough, but confusion and strong counterattacks caused high casualties among the attackers. In both cases, it was particularly difficult for the attackers to find a way to return to friendly lines.
Both attacks involved surprise in order to initiate the breakthrough. The Union Army used a mine to blow a hole in the Confederate lines to start the Battle of the Crater, while the Confederates used men posing as deserters to surprise and overcome the initial defense of Fort Stedman. The Union had more men to engage in the defense of Fort Stedman, and were able to defeat the assault early in the morning. The Confederates had less men involved in the Battle of the Crater, and took longer to completely throw back the assault.
To me, one of the the most interesting things about these two battles is how the results were reported by the defeated army commanders.
The complete text of all of these messages can be found online in the Official Records, just follow the embedded links and you will find yourself on the right page. Scroll down to find the relevant messages.
The day after the Battle of the Crater, General Grant sent a telegram to his Chief of Staff, General Halleck, and classified the battle as a disaster. The next day, in another letter to Halleck, a court of inquiry was requested by General Grant. Generals Burnside and Ledlie lost their commands and a number of other Union Generals were censured by the inquiry. In contrast, Lee’s message to Secretary of War, Breckinridge, was in a more matter of fact style. He did under-report the losses as “not heavy”. Lee was very complimentary of his troops and their leaders.
I think that there are some questions that are worth asking about the reports of each commander.
One last point. It is interesting to think about how each of the losing commanders initial reports has carried down through history to today. Even though the results of each battle was about the same, the modern historians perception of the management of the two battles largely mirrors the commanders initial reports.
Last year, during my research in the National Archives, I took many pictures of entries from a journal kept by the US Military Rail Road Construction Corps. One of these entries discusses the construction of a platform for the 13″ mortar. The weapon now known as the “Dictator.”
Thursday, August 25th, 1864
Mills gang “Carpenters” Erecting platform up the railroad for large 13 inch Mortar intended to shell Petersburg. Browns gang laying side track to the same, which is in rear of Battery No. 5, in front of Petersburg 1 1/2 miles distance.
Though this entry notes that the intention was to shell Petersburg, the reality was different. The 13″ mortar was positioned with an intention to suppress Confederate artillery that were posted in a rather advantageous position that flanked the right of the Union lines. The artillery in this position troubled the Union troops from the Second Battle of Petersburg through to the end of the siege, as the Union troops never were able to effectively suppress it. The nature of this flanking position can be clearly seen in this map of the positions of the Union 1st Division of the 9th Corps on April 1st, 1865. I added the red arrows showing the field of fire of the flanking Confederate batteries.
More can be found out about this problem and the 13″ mortar’s role in it, in the book, “History of the First Connecticut Artillery.” This unit operated the Union siege artillery during the siege of Petersburg, including the 13″ mortar. This regimental history is put together much like the Official Records, and is largely a compilation of surviving documents concerning the regiment. There are some additional notes added by the editors. This particular note spans pages 68 and 69 and describes how the 13″ mortar was used.
Though I haven’t done an exhaustive search through this book, the earliest reference to the 13″ mortar is on July 8th, 1864. In this memo, it is clear that the 13″ mortar is already in position on a truck carriage.
This additional message seems to indicate that the 13 inch mortar is just being brought up into line on the 8th, so Captain Osborne must have been the first commander of this mortar.
Right now, that’s all I have time for. I’ll elaborate on why there are orders to build a platform for the 13 inch mortar on the 25th of August, more than two weeks after it was first put into service, in a follow up post.
Today Gizmoto reported on this iPhone enclosed in a case that is supposed to made from a piece of authentic Apple 1 circuit board
The biggest problem with this product is the likelihood that the circuit board fragment is from a reproduction. On that same site are images of what are unquestionably reproduction Apple 1 circuit boards. I’m quite sure about these images since no Apple 1 circuit boards have ever been found that weren’t populated with components.
Quite a while ago, Wendell Sander sent me an example of his Apple 1/Apple ][ compatible keyboard design. Over the past couple of years, I’ve used it with my SCELBI as it can also be connected to a SCELBI keyboard interface. I didn’t have an enclosure, but had it mounted on a couple of blocks of wood.
For a long time, I’ve envisioned building a proper enclosure for it. Well, I finally got around to doing just that. I recycled some red oak that I had cut to a bit less than 3/8″ thick and had used for a while in another project that is now not needed.
I think it looks quite nice. There is no rear cover, but I suppose I could add a sheet metal cover , if I decided I really needed one.
For those that are interested in making their own Apple II compatible keyboard enclosure, the following drawing can be used to cut out the faceplate.
Back in 2017, I started on a hardware manual for the SCELBI computers. This originally was a digital copy of the original SCELBI 8B hardware assembly manual, which described construction and basic operation of the SCELBI 8B CPU. The original SCELBI 8B manual was 86 pages long and did not include any software or information on peripherals. Over the past couple of years, I have greatly expanded this manual. The draft now includes the following sections:
My goal, up to now, was to gather as much relevant content as possible and get it into a draft manuscript. At his point, I think I have added most of the content that I think is important into the draft and will now start work on doing a complete job of editing. The goal would be to put the manuscript into a reasonable condition where it could possibly be published. This will take a while, as the document is currently 274 pages long, and up to now, there has been almost no serious editing done.
I’ve long held an interest in the siege of Petersburg, which was the decisive campaign that lead to the end of the American Civil War. Despite the importance of this siege, books that cover it in detail are few in number, especially when compared with detailed coverage of most of the great battles of 1862 and 1863. When I heard of this new book in 2018, which promised the coverage that I was looking for, I knew I had to read it and I bought a copy soon after it was released.
Though the book has good reviews, currently rating 4.6 on Amazon, it took me two years to finish it. Though very well written, I found parts of the book hard to read. I think that is because my point of view differs greatly from that of the author. The author is extremely critical of the generalship of the Northern leaders. While Greene mentions some of the mistakes of the Southern commanders, it’s almost as if Greene was still propagating some aspects of the myth of the “Lost Cause.” In my mind, Greene doesn’t really appear to understand the difficulty of what Grant and his armies were attempting to achieve.
Though this is a battle book, I found coverage of the various engagements, inconsistent. With the vast majority of these kinds of books, the author, after describing a battle, will summarize the results in terms of ground lost or gained and resulting casualties. This book is no different and some of the smaller engagements are described in this fashion, with little to no detail as to what happened. To me, this approach strikes me as completely ignoring the horrors of war, almost antiseptic in nature. The following example shows how a clash that cost 140 Confederate casualties and an unreported number of Federal casualties, is covered in only two sentences. I understand how a book covering so many events can only devote so much text to such a small engagement, but it still bothered me a bit.
However, at the other end of the spectrum, the description of the Battle of the Crater is extremely graphic and detailed. Every American should read Greene’s account of that battle. This account should dispel any misconceptions modern Americans have about the Civil War being a “clean” war. In actuality, it was an ugly, dirty, horrid affair. This account also explores the horrors of racism that persists in our society to this very day.
Just to end this review on a positive note, I found the description of Wilson’s raid very engaging and interesting, maybe because I knew very little about the raid before reading this book.
Finally, since I’m done with this book, and I don’t have room on my shelves for more books, I’ll send my copy to the first of my blog readers that reaches out to me expressing an interest in reading it.