Last Wednesday, an Apple-1 computer sold for $905,000 (about £562,021), almost twice its highest estimate, at a Bonhams New York auction. This is one of the first 50 Apple A-1 computers, which Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak built in 1976 in Job’s family garage (or was it his sister’s bedroom?) for an electronics retailer – Byte Shop. The computer was demonstrated in July 1976 at the Homebrew Computer Club in California.
These computers sold for $666.66 back when they came out almost four decades ago, which is just a tiny bit of what one of them sold for last week. A representative from the Henry Ford Museum took an intact motherboard, a keyboard, a monitor, and a wooden-box power supply “home” with him after the auction.
The Apple-1 computers are extremely rare nowadays, and many buyers would pay a lot of money for them (as you can see based on the price above). Last year, an “anonymous entrepreneur from the Far East” bought one in Germany, at the price of $671,400.
The Apple-1 (also known as Apple Computer or Apple I) is actually the computer that started the personal computer trend, and turned Apple into the giant that the company is today.