An example of the very first Apple computer, hand made by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in
Jobs' parents' garage back in 1976, is to go on the auction block
this month with a guide price of £150,000.
The duo made about around 200 Apple-1 models back in the late
seventies, but few still remain. An estimated 30 to 50 units are
still known to exist, making them a hot commodity for retro computer collectors and helping boost the estimated
auction price almost 400 times the device's original
The computer debuted in 1976 at $666.66 (About £416, Wozniak
had a penchant for repeating digits), and was heralded as one of
the very first personal computers. Unlike the make-it-yourself kit
computers of the time, the Apple-1 came as a full assembled circuit
board with about 60 chips. The lessons learned on this computer led
directly into the humongous success of its successor, the
If you score the winning bid, you'll get the Apple-1 itself
and a cassette interface, which was originally a $75 add-on.
There's also the original shipping box, plenty of documentation and
even a letter signed by co-founder Steve Jobs, answering questions about keyboards and monitors
(some things never change).
It's potentially these extra snippets of history that are
boosting the guide price much higher than the usual price tag for
this item. Despite its incredible rarity, the Apple-1
has previously been known to fetch at best $50,000 (£30k) at
auction, and typically garners more like $14,000 to $16,000 (£8k to
£10k). That's a lot lower than the auction's $160,000 to $240,000
The collector's item will be sold on 23 November at
Christie's auction house in London. It's go under the hammer
alongside some other Wired-friendly goodies, like the first
announcement of the discovery of DNA from 1953, a code-breaking Engima machine from 1939 and
some offprints by Bletchley
Park's Alan Turing.