Original Prototypes

These images from Wired are so neat, early prototypes for some of our most popular tech today. Here's Apple I from 1975: A 25-year-old engineer at Hewlett-Packard, Steve Wozniak was using his spare time to design a language interpreter for a new 8-bit microprocessor called the MOS 6502. But even though the motherboard he created was smaller and less complex than other kits on the market, and even though Wozniak gave away the schematics for free, hobbyists still found the board difficult to build. So Woz and his high school pal Steve Jobs, who was working at Atari, decided to sell preassembled boards—which they dubbed the Apple I. They built them at night in Jobs’ parents’ garage, paying Jobs’ sister $1 a board to insert chips. In 1976, they produced 200 units and sold 150 of them for $500 apiece, a tidy 100 percent markup over cost. The only drawback to the Apple I: It offered dynamic RAM but no permanent storage, so you had to plug in your own cassette drive to save anything.

And..the super soaker.