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Earlier this month we reported that an original Apple-1 computer was set to go on sale at Christie’s. The Apple-1 was the brainchild of Steve Wozniak who designed and hand-built it. When Steve Jobs had the idea to sell the computer little did the two know they were giving birth to Apple Inc. Only 200 of the computers were made and as of 2008 only 30 to 50 are though to remain intact.
The computer didn’t look anything like the computers that Apple sells today. It consisted of just a fully assembled motherboard which put computer enthusiasts back $666.66. The price was apparently Wozniak’s idea because he liked repeating digits. Buyers had to actually complete building the computer by providing their own case, power supply transformers, ASCII keyboard and composite video display. The Apple-1 was still popular though because computer builders were used to having to build their own motherboard by soldering each chip individually.
The lot offered by Christie’s consisted of the Apple-1 motherboard (#82 out of 200), original packaging, manuals and a letter from Steve Jobs. Adding to the lot’s value is the fact that the original packaging’s return address was of Apple’s first headquarters located in the garage of Steve Job’s parents house. The lot was estimated between $160,300 and $240,450. When the smoke cleared this week the lot sold for $213,600 making it the highest price paid for an Apple-1 to date. That’s not too bad for a computer that came with a whopping 8K bytes of RAM, but it is believed the high price was paid more for the documents in the lot than the computer itself.
