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Apple-1 goes for $213K in Christie's auction

It was No. 82 of about 200 Apple-1s made
Apple-1

Apple-1

Christie's auction house in London today sold an Apple-1 computer for 133,250, or $213,600.

The lot, which went up for auction at 9:30 a.m. ET today, had an estimated value of between $160,300 and $240,450.

The Apple-1 sold today came with the original packaging, manuals, cassette interface and basic tape, early documentation and provenance, and a commercially rare letter from Steve Jobs.

Two hundred Apple-1 computers are estimated to have been created and sold for $666.66 before Apple Computer Inc. was founded in 1977. Once the Apple II, the company's first official product, was released, many of the Apple-1 models were reclaimed as trade-ins. Only about 50 are still known to exist, many of them indexed by hardware developer Mike Willegal.

Of those 200 machines, Christie's Apple-1 is No. 82. This same Apple-1 is thought to be the same on that was sold on eBay in November 2009 by a user named "apple1sale" to "julescw72". At the time, it sold for a winning bid of $50,000.

The winner of the Christie's auction was not identified.

The original Apple-1 was sold as a fully assembled circuit board with 4KB of memory but no case, power supply, keyboard or monitor. Christie's Apple-1 included the machine's original packaging, manuals, cassette interface and basic tape, documentation and a letter from Steve Jobs, but some parts may not have been original, said computer hobbyist and retrocomputing expert Eric Rucker.

"The CPU is a Rockwell plastic part, not a MOS [6502] white ceramic part," he noted, identifying what Christie's item description called "a few slightly later additions."

Apple-1 inventor and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak was on hand for the auction, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Read more about macintosh in Computerworld's Macintosh Topic Center.

Join the CIO Australia group on LinkedIn. The group is open to CIOs, IT Directors, COOs, CTOs and senior IT managers.

More about: Apple, Apple Computer, Christie's, eBay, inventor, Rockwell, Wall Street
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