An original Apple Computer was sold at auction this week for $905,000. Pretty good for something that was built in a garage.
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The "History of Science" auction was held in New York by auction giant Bonhams. The winning bid came from a representative from the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The stripped-down model up for auction doesn't look like much, but only a handful of these original Apple Computers are still known to exist. This early computer's motherboard was completely intact, and the lot included a vintage keyboard, monitor and two tape decks. The whole package also comes with a custom power source held inside a wooden box, as if you needed more proof that this thing was made in a garage.
The original Apple I (also known as the Apple-1) was made by hand by Steve Wozniak himself, who used Steve Jobs' garage as a manufacturing facility. The Apple I was first released back in 1976 and discontinued the next year to make room for the much more successful Apple II.
The Apple I sports an entirely unimpressive 4 KB memory that could be upgraded to 8 KB or, hold onto your hats, 48 KB. To put that in context, that's about the size of a Word doc filled up with a quarter-page of text. The computer ran on a MOS 6502 8-bit processor @ 1 Mhz. The computers went on sale for $666.66
When the Apple II released in 1977, Apple offered discounts toward the new computer for anyone who traded in an original Apple I. These original computers were then largely destroyed, which is why they can be hard to find. This helps justify the $905,000 price tag just a bit.
