There is collecting old computers, and then there is rebuilding the earliest Apple machines closely enough that the circuit board itself becomes a historical document. Mike Willegal’s site lives firmly in the second category.
Visit Mike Willegal’s Apple II pages
Willegal became known in the vintage-computing community for projects recreating the Apple I and the earliest revision of the Apple II motherboard. His pages preserve far more than finished glamour shots: board layouts, assembly information, troubleshooting notes, scans, downloadable documentation and years of project history.
One of the best surviving pieces is an Apple II assembly and bring-up guide. It reads like real bench documentation because it is. The guide walks through tools, donor components, ROMs, memory, monitors and the practical reality of powering up newly assembled vintage-compatible hardware.
The Mimeo 1 and Revision-0 Apple II
Willegal’s Apple I project became known as the Mimeo 1. Contemporary posts from the late 2000s show him working through component sourcing and PCB reproduction while trying to keep the design faithful to the original machine.
His Revision-0 Apple II work similarly documented the earliest board configuration rather than merely producing a generic Apple II clone. Other preservation projects later built on that work, which is a strong sign that the documentation mattered beyond the original batch of boards.
The site also preserves correspondence with Steve Wozniak about early Apple design decisions. One exchange discusses the Apple I video circuitry and Wozniak’s recollection that it grew out of his earlier terminal, Pong and Breakout-related design experience rather than Don Lancaster’s TV Typewriter.
That kind of firsthand technical context is hard to replace once scattered forum posts and personal pages disappear.
A Workshop Notebook That Accidentally Became History
The best thing about Willegal’s site is that it was not built as a museum exhibit after the fact. Much of it was written while the work was happening.
You can see problems being found, boards revised, documentation improved and obscure early-Apple details being argued over in public. That makes the site useful to restorers, collectors and historians in a way a cleaned-up retrospective often is not.