# First Light — A Living Apple-1 for Apple's 50th Date: 2026-07-06 Fifty years ago two guys in a garage sold a bare circuit board for $666.66. No case, no keyboard, no screen — a computer was something you *built*. For Apple's 50th anniversary I wanted to put that machine back on a workbench, and that's what **[First Light](https://github.com/d4rkwyng/first-light)** is: a native Mac app where the Apple-1 is alive in front of you, chip by chip. ![[fl_bench.webp]] ## What it is The board is rendered from the original fabrication gerbers — every chip is socketed, pullable, and fails the way real hardware fails (pull the PROMs and the 6502 executes noise; pull bank W and the first subroutine call walks into the void). Underneath is a real cycle-counted 6502 emulation running the actual 1976 software: the Woz Monitor, Integer BASIC, and the era cassette catalog. The details are the point: - The cassette deck plays each tape's **actual bytes** as bit-true ACI audio. Flip on real-time loads and you get the full 1976 experience — a 6-second leader, thirty seconds of FSK warble, and the machine reading it off the bus through the real cassette-interface ROM. - **Blackjack** is the image recovered from an original 1976 tape in 2005 — it opens "WELCOME TO 21", exactly matching the screenshot in Kilobaud's February 1977 review. (The dealer talks trash when you win. 1976 was like that.) - The monitor is a proper tube: Metal CRT shader, phosphor persistence, a V-HOLD knob you can actually detune. - There's a 6800 "what-if" — the processor Woz designed around before the 6502's $25 price changed history — and it waits forever for software that never existed, authentically. ![[fl_blackjack.webp]] ## Built with a machine, about a machine There's a fitting wrinkle in how this got made: First Light took shape over about a month of bench sessions in June and July 2026, built in collaboration with Claude — Anthropic's coding models — across several of their generations. An AI helped resurrect the machine that started personal computing, tracking down verified ROM dumps, walking tokenized BASIC line chains to repair a corrupted 1976 tape image, and arguing with me about whether the cursor should be a block or a blinking @. (It's an @. The block was the Apple II.) Fifty years from hand-assembled 6502 code to this felt like the right way to honor the distance. It came together in bursts. The first day laid down the whole spine — a working cycle-counted core, the 1976 software library, the Metal CRT shader, and even the 6800 "what-if" all landed on June 12. The sessions after that were about fidelity over flash: snapshot save/restore, a multi-agent code review that hunted its own bugs, and a UX dig that argued with the emulator over what the real hardware would actually do. Late June brought the cassette deck, keyboard, and scope work. Then July 6 was the long push to daylight — repairing the BASIC tape loads for real, replacing the last borrowed Apple artwork with something of our own, signing and notarizing, and finally making it public. One version shipped, but it was earned a burst at a time. ## Get it ```sh brew install --cask d4rkwyng/tap/first-light ``` Or download the notarized app from [Releases](https://github.com/d4rkwyng/first-light/releases) — macOS 15 or later. Source is [MIT on GitHub](https://github.com/d4rkwyng/first-light), with full provenance of the bundled historical software in [NOTICE.md](https://github.com/d4rkwyng/first-light/blob/main/NOTICE.md). Type `E000R`. It answers `E000: 4C`, and then it's 1976.