If you’re a collector like me who lives on a budget, there are realities you have to accept. You’re never going to own an Apple-1, for example. There’s only about 50 of them left out there, many in museum hands. And then there’s the matter of value – being so rare, they’re worth more than houses.

One way to compensate for this reality is to recreate what you cannot buy. That was the approach I took with my TV Typewriter project. And in fact, I have an Apple I replica board on my desk, waiting to be assembled.

And that was the approach I had planned to take with Dr. Jon Titus’ 1974 Mark-8, the third microprocessor based computer (based on Intel’s 8008) ever offered to the public. The plans with PCB artwork are out there, and so are the vintage components. All it takes is the time, money and will to make one.

No, the Mark-8 wasn’t first. That honour belonged to the French Micral. Second place belonged to the American-made SCELBI. But there is something really special about Radio Electronics’ early ventures into computing. The magazine for ‘Men With Ideas in Electronics’ pioneered things we take for granted, like video terminals and keyboards. The Mark-8 was a kind of coup de grace, at least in the months before Popular Electronics responded with the Altair.

The Mark-8 was a tough project. Apart from offering a few board sets produced by a New Jersey company called Techniques, everything else was up to the hobbyist, including finding the ICs and parts and assembly. You had to find all that, follow schematics and bridge several pieces of missing information and errors. According to Byte Collector Bryan Blackburn, Jon Titus estimated 7500 plans were sold, and only about 400 board sets. To date, only just over a dozen Mark-8s are known to exist. So you’d think the odds of an average collector happening upon some in the wild, and being able to buy them at a reasonable price would be nil, right?

But you’d be wrong:

When I first saw that auction come up, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I don’t have any followed searches for ‘Mark-8 boards’ (why would I search for something impossible to find?). Rather my followed searches simply look for ‘boards’ listed in EBay’s Vintage Computing section. When I saw these I just about fell out of my chair. I had read, with envy, how Bryan had found his Mark-8 boards some years ago much the same way. I thought the odds of that ever happening again to be impossible. But there they were.

Anyway, I threw in a bid. The last time a Mark-8 sold, it went for over $5000USD, and that was 9 years ago. These appeared to be untouched, almost pristine condition original boards. I was sure a heavyweight collector would easily drop thousands on them. But I figured it’d be fun to pretend to own them for a while. I set my initial bid at $1000USD. And it held out the full 9 days, all the way until just the last minute, when somebody bid up to $1300. Believing these were never going to be mine anyway, as a lark I upped my bid to $1575. Then I watched the last seconds tick away, waiting for that last snipe to take ‘my’ boards from me. But it didn’t happen. The price settled at $1517. I was now a member of an extremely exclusive club: Mark-8 owner. Okay, they’re just the boards, but still. Untouched? How rare is that? I felt almost paranoid — had I been had? Just a few a years earlier someone on ebay had tried to pass off an Obtronix reproduction kit as original. Were these really good fakes that real collectors had spotted a mile away?

I did a lot of asking around, but the consensus was, they were the real deal! The original Techniques bags nailed it, along with the unique fab house markings on the PCB substrate. Wow!

Ladies and gentlemen, I present one of the few Mark-8s, in unbuilt board form, not in American hands:

It’s so weird to hold something in your hands that ordinarily you’d only be able to see encased in a glass box at a museum. This is such an important piece of computing history and it’s a real privilege to have it, to be able to look at it any time I want!

The only negative is I now find myself squarely in the situation I would have been in had I won some original TV Typewriter boards that appeared on ebay. I am in a very unique position that no one else is presently: I can build a real Mark-8. It’ll never be ‘original vintage’ of course, but I could assemble a machine that was otherwise indistinguishable from an original – using available vintage components!

The advice I’ve gotten on the matter is all over the map. Preservationists argue the untouched boards like these are so rare they need to be kept as is for posterity. But others take a more pragmatic view: that computers were designed to do something, and that leaving the boards unbuilt robs them of the chance to do what they were designed to do.

What do you think? Nothing is going to happen any time soon — I simply don’t have the skill to build a Mark-8, yet. But comments are most welcome!