Of course, you know about the Apple-1 computer. There have been replicas around for quite some time ,there are also reprints of the original manuals available. Most of them are just printed out copies on cheap laser printer paper, so Armin made a version on my own using a proper print job on high quality laminated paper and with binding to have it done properly.
But although the results really do look amazing, the quality is limited due to the fact that they are done using scans which are kinda okay but far from being perfect.
And then Armin did what a man has to do: In some painstaking, incredible painstaking weeks of work, Armin totally recreated the “Apple-1 Operation Manual” (incl. the schematics!) and the “Preliminary Basic User Manual” from scratch using the scans as the blue print. To understand this in full: This is a proper typeset job (Adobe Indesign) that is super “true” to the original.
1. Armin researched the typefaces that had been used in the original (including one that resembles the IBM “Electric” Typewriter that had been used for the main copy of one of the manuals – that was incredible hard to find)
2. Every single characters has been manually placed, so its position on the page resembles its original location down to the fraction of an inch
Have a look at this video (time-lapse) to see this process in action:
And here are pictures of the finished products, for sale here or on ebay.
Operation manual. Basic Manual, Cassette Manual, Advertising page.
PS: All of those recreations are 100 percent legal! This is due to US law: Material published before 1977 that does not feature a copyright notice is public domain under US law (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain_in_the_United_States ). All manuals have been published in 1976 and none of them features a copyright notice.
