It's the kind of electronic junk that piles up in basements and
garages — an old computer motherboard with wires sticking out. But because it
was designed and sold by two college dropouts named Steve Jobs and Steve
Wozniak, it could be worth more than half a million dollars. An Apple 1 from
1976, one of the first Apple computers ever built and forerunner of today's
MacBooks, I Pads and I Phones, goes on the auction block at Christie's next
week. The bidding starts at $300,000, with a pre-sale estimated value of up to
$500,000."This is a piece of history that made a difference in the world,
it's where the computer revolution started," said Ted Perry, a retired
school psychologist who owns the old Apple and has kept it stashed away in a
cardboard box at his home outside Sacramento, Calif.The 11-by-14 green piece of
plastic covered with a grid of memory chips above a labyrinth of wires was one
of the first 25 such computer elements, and sold for $666.66.About 200 were
made but most have disappeared or been discarded. Various estimates put the
number known to still exist from about 30 to 50. They came with eight kilobytes
of memory — a million times less than the average computer today.Vintage Apple
products have become an especially hot item since Jobs' death in October 2011,
surrounding the mystique attached to this entrepreneur who joined forces with
Wozniak to build computer prototypes in a California garage.Another Apple 1 was
sold last month for a record $671,400 by a German auction house, breaking a
previous record of $640,000 set in November. Sotheby's sold one last year for
$374,500."This is the seed from which the entire orchard grew, and without
this, there would be no Apple," said Stephen A. Edwards, professor of
computer science at Columbia University. The latest auction at Christie's,
"First Bytes: Iconic Technology from the Twentieth Century," is being
conducted online only from June 24 to July 9. The Apple 1 is to be displayed
starting Monday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, south of San
Francisco.Perry, 70, acquired his Apple 1 in either 1979 or 1980, as a second-hand
item he saw advertised.He paid nothing for it; it was a swap with the owner.He
traded some other computer equipment I had for the Apple 1
Do the words “vintage” and “tech,” strung
together, strikes anyone as odd?Well, better get used to the phrase because the
vintage-tech market is here to stay. In keeping with this trend, Christie’s is
holding an online only (but of course) vintage-tech product auction with an Apple computer, an Apple 1, as
its big draw. The auction includes the Apple original, designed and hand
built in 1976 by Steve Wozniak in Steve Jobs' parents’ garage. Of the
approximately 200 Apple-1’s built, most were returned for Apple-2’s. There is
even a web page dedicated to keeping track of the few left.Christie’s expects
the early computing device, which includes a keyboard (a ground-breaking
feature at the time) to fetch somewhere in the area of $300,000 to
$500,000. Over the past five years, as auctions started to drive prices up,
it’s been interesting to watch the Apple-1 go from about $20,000 to the
astronomical prices todayThe Apple 1 sadly does not have a diamond NTI logo etched into the
front copper layer.The working computer is has serial number 01-0025 and is signed
by Steve Woznaik, Apple's hardware hacking engineer who designed the primitive
Apple-1 computers.Auctions for Apple antiquities, including floppy discs
containing the company's first word processing and spreadsheet programs, as
well as a prototype portable computer several times thicker than today's Mac
book are also conducted
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