Vintage Apple-1 Sells for $905,000

$905,000 but power supply, display, keyboard Not Included..

Bonhams auction house recently sold the  historical Apple-1 computer to the Henry Ford museum. Winning Bid $905,000!  When the Apple 1 was first released in 1976 it sold for only $666.66

Henry Ford President Patricia Mooradian said in a statement. "The Apple-1 was not only innovative, but it is a key artifact in the foundation of the digital revolution," 

 

 

What makes this item so special?

These motherboards were each hand-built by Steve Wozniak in Steve Jobs' garage in Los Altos, Calif.
It's one of only 50 known surviving examples.  A total of 200 Apple 1 computers were produced in 1976. This motherboard is one of the first 50 Apple computers and 1 of only 15 to be currently functional. Each board was signed "Woz" -- Wozniak's nickname.


"The provenance on the Apple-1 is excellent and the condition is outstanding, so it was not surprising that it did so well," said Cassandra Hatton, the senior specialist in charge of the auction. "We are thrilled to have broken the world record for its sale, and are even more thrilled that it is going to a wonderful new home at the Henry Ford Museum."

According to the auction house, the Apple-1 had been owned by John Anderson, the founder of the AppleSiders of Cincinnati user group, which still meets. Anderson acquired the computer in 1980. 

Recent Sales History of Apple 1:
In May 2013, another Apple-1 with its monitor sold at an auction in Germany for a $671,400. It also included the original owner's manual and a signed letter to the first owner from Steve Jobs offering a discount on an upgrade to the next model (the Apple II 4K), were included in the auction lot.

A retired school psychologist from Sacramento sold a working Apple-1 without monitor for $387,750 at Christie's online auction to an anonymous bidder on July 10, 2013.

Remarkably, the new record high price for an Apple-1 didn't beat the all-time record paid for a personal computer. In 2012 a custom one-off version of the 2013 Mac Pro, at the time not yet formally released, was auctioned off for The Global Fund through its (Product) RED campaign, and fetched $977,000 at auction.

Courtesy of Bonhams

Specifications:

Processor: MOS Technology 6502 processor running at 1.023 MHz.
Memory: Came with 4k RAM / expandable to 8k, 65k with hack
Ports: any standard ASCII keyboard that could be installed and any monitor.
Display: frame rate of 60.05 Hz, could support 40 characters per line at 24 lines, with automatic scrolling.

Operating System:

Woz built the Apple I to run BASIC, so games could be programmed and played on it. It was a game machine for the most part. Woz thought the binary switches of the Altair 8800 and similar PCs were not user friendly enough so he wrote a BASIC language assembler into the ROM by hand using only hex.

Interesting Facts:

Although the final pricing for the Apple I was $666.66, Jobs originally wanted to sell it for $777.77. Woz insisted that this price was too high so he agreed to sell it for $666. When he was later asked why he picked this satanic/mystic number he answered that he just took a lucky number 7, and subtracted 1.