Slashdot Mirror
Rare Operating Apple 1 Rakes In $374,500 At Sotheby's Auction
coondoggie writes "It's not one-of-a-kind, but it's pretty darn close. Sotheby's this week auctioned off a rare, working Apple 1 computer for $374,500 to an unnamed bidder. The price was more than double the expected price listed on the Sotheby's web site. Sotheby's notes about the Apple 1 say it is one of six thought-to-be-operational boxes and one of about 50 known to exist."
Sounds like a pretty run of the mill Apple mark up...
Still cheaper than an iPhone
No SSD? No retina screen? No ethernet or firewire port?! Worst Mac ever.
(yes, I know it's not a Mac)
Imagine a.. wait, I can't. there's only 6 of them.
I'd definitely want AppleCare for this one, those Apple 1 computers are notoriously fragile.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I wonder if they still have it, and if it still works.
If they do, that'd make one heluva good PTA fundraiser.
Very scarce and unique item, that thing should be pretty hard to copy as all the chips on the board are impossible to manufacture nowdays. Who does MOS at that big scale today ? Or the other rare electronic components inside..
Such an artifact might be worth millions in a few decades, should be a good anti-inflation bet.
I find it amazing that the three 2,400uF electrolytic capacitors are still working after 36 years! These capacitors slowly degrade over time--I wonder what their capacitance is today?
...a retail price of $666.66, a number that garnered complaints among conservative Christians
A new Apple I, $666.66. Upsetting conservative Christians, priceless.
There are a few replicas available for those of us who can't afford a real Apple 1. The least expensive is Briel Computers' "Replica 1" which is not a cosmetic replica but more of a "work-alike" computer. Applefritter.com's Tom Owad wrote a book based on that kit. On the other extreme is Mike Willegal's "Mimeo 1" which is an extremely accurate reproduction. I know the people behind these kits/sites and they're all very hobby-centric.
I have a TRS-80 in my attic. Haven't powered it on for a few years, but it worked last time I tried it. It was made in 1977. To be fair, there was no reality distortion field model released with this particular brand.
Was apple evil back then? Or did that only happen later?
A rare Granny Smith bearing the Apple logo was sold to a turtleneck wearing gentleman in exchange for his life savings.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
...if you take that puppy to a 'Genius Bar'. Most of those geniuses wouldn't even know what it was, and that the Woz actually built it with his bare hands.
Silence is a state of mime.
I'm curious if the buyer was a technology enthousiast, Apple lover or simply someone making a future investment? With all the craze for Jobs, it feels like such an item would probably rise in value in the future.
Not that hard it seems...
http://www.brielcomputers.com/wordpress/?cat=17
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
About 10 years ago I saw an Apple 1 sell for a little over $9,000 on eBay including the original wooden case and I thought that was marginally justifiable. This auction result is just ridiculous, it's simply too high.
It is only selling due to nostalgia.
I honestly doubt it will be worth much in 100 years.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
how in the hell can you claim that apple OSX is actually behind redhat, when the treuth is OSX is a spin off of the linix kernal as much as red hat is???
oh, new UID, troll, thats why
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
You might want to look into the difference between a Linux kernel and a BSD kernel (which is what OSX is based on). The differences are not... trivial.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
Nostalgia won't exist in 100 years?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Awesome analogy! I really want to learn that soliloquy from Devil Wears Prada..
For those who don't get it, http://youtu.be/1LVptO7o4L8#t=1m25s
"Go to CNN [for a] spell-checked, fact-checked summary" -- CmdrTaco
OSX is NetBSD with a propitary UI, supposedly based on next (ATT/SCO Unix System 4?) ... usually by people who have not used a next machine for any significant amount of time, anyway you can download the open source version called Darwin, with no apple code what so ever from Apple's website. To date the only unix operating system in a very small segment of consumer desktop computing ... either way not nearly as innovative as people like to think, it was over a decade old idea when it came out.
Also it wasn't really the Ipod that changed the music industry, its just a player ... during a time when everyfuckingbody had a MP3 player on the market, it was iTunes, the application and marketplace that allowed you to get qulity music virus free without stealing that changed the music industry ... maybe ... kind of sort of ...
And if you were not aware, those millions of jobs are in China, which compared to civilized work conditions are a dungeon, though slowly getting slightly better.
Anywho, I just think you should know some facts before getting all buthurt because people dont like apple... I dont like them because of their games going all the way back to their 8 bit systems with incompatible hardware for their own computers, moving on to proprietary ram and device bios's, onwards to prams that would lock up, and the manual says you need to take it to a dealer so they can hit the button hidden under the cpu for you (8500 I am looking at you) to today, where if you just happen to bought a small selection of apple computers you need a fucking magic SATA plug no one makes.
Piss on that, no thanks
If you kill this Apple 1, will all the other Apple devices around the world revert to a move open and less evil state?
I know a guy still on his first Xbox 360!
Nostalgia won't exist in 100 years?
The Nostalgia market generally peaks when guys who had that item as a teenager go through their mid-life crisis. Do you think that a lot of people born in 2000 have some emotional attachment to 8 track tapes?
It truly warms my heart that someone caught the reference, and the humor. And yes, the people who marked me down didn't get it; they were too busy feverishly googling BSD and Linux history to see that my post was actually a rant from a 2006 film about the fashion industry. Please stop being so serious, SD'ers :)
NetBSD? Hardly.
Much of the userland is a mishmash of all the various BSDs. How do I know? Someone once published all the version strings in all the libraries. You can do this too. Why do I say "much" and not "all". Well, Next, and then Apple have added a lot of their own special sauce, not limited to just the GUI.
As for Darwin source? On opensource.apple.com? That was the actual kernel source at one point, up to like Tiger, but then Apple forked and took their source tree private/proprietary. It started out originally as a CMU Mach monolithic kernel, which, not surprisingly, looks somewhat like most of the BSD kernels.
Depends on whether Apple's still a force to be reckoned with. If Apple's dominating the electronics-implanted-directly-into-your-eyeball trade the way it dominates phones a working Apple I assembled by none other the Woz's sister is gonna be pretty damn valuable.
Heck even if it isn't a force to be reckoned with if Apple is recognized as a pivotal and important company it's products will be valuable as antiques. Stradivarius violins ain't cheap.
thats true indeed, my only point was that it is not "just os-x" did not want to open that can of worms.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Anywho, I just think you should know some facts before getting all buthurt because people dont like apple... I dont like them because of their games going all the way back to their 8 bit systems with incompatible hardware for their own computers, moving on to proprietary ram and device bios's, onwards to prams that would lock up, and the manual says you need to take it to a dealer so they can hit the button hidden under the cpu for you (8500 I am looking at you) to today, where if you just happen to bought a small selection of apple computers you need a fucking magic SATA plug no one makes.
Ok, I'll bite.
As the owner of a working Apple 1, that I have personally owned since May, 1977, and as owner of many, if not all, of the Apple computers you mention in your off-base rant, I wish to dissect your infantile and incorrect diatribe one sentence-fragment at a time:
8 bit systems with incompatible hardware for their own computers
WTF are you even talking about here? What "incompatible hardware"? Are you talking about the Apple 1, Apple ][, or what? Because there aren't any other 8 bit Apple computers.
proprietary ram
Again, WTF? Are you speaking of the fact that they tended to use "non-parity" RAM? Hardly "proprietary"; just not the usual PeeCee standard.
[proprietary] device bios's
Incorrect use of the apostrophe aside, are you talking about Open Firmware? Because, if you are, that happened to be a PUBLISHED STANDARD that was largely spearheaded by Sun. And Apple hasn't used OF since the switch to Intel in 2005. That's seven years ago. Let it go... Oh, and the EFI standard that Microsoft and the PeeCee world had to be drug into kicking and screaming was ALSO a PUBLISHED STANDARD created by (IIRC) Intel and others. Hardly "Proprietary". But do rant on...
prams that would lock up
The PRAM wouldn't "lock up". It would occasionally (but FAR less often than people thought!) get corrupted data, necessitating a USER action to clear it up (Hold Down Command-Option-P-R on Bootup. Wait for the chime. Release keys. Done).
and the manual says you need to take it to a dealer so they can hit the button hidden under the cpu for you (8500 I am looking at you) to today
Oh, NOW you're conflating the PRAM reset (which I detailed above) with the FAR less common CUDA/Systems Management Reset. I think I've had to hit that one ONCE in over THIRTY YEARS of owning Apple computers. And that was when the next door neighbor's garage caught fire and burned through our overhead power lines, causing the AC line coming into my G5 tower to do all SORTS of interesting things before I finally flipped the main breaker on my house, about 30 seconds before the main "drop" into my house burned in HALF and dropped to the ground. I located the Systems Management button, pressed it, and my G5 tower? Well, I'm typing this post on it.
I NEVER had to press the CUDA button on my 8500, even after the mice (I mean REAL mice!) crawled into an open PCI slot-hole, and started to LIVE IN MY 8500, eventually ruining the CPU card by pissing on it. Replaced the CPU card, cleaned up all the mouse "droppings" (ewwwww!!!) Rebooted, and the 8500 still worked when retired a few years back...
f you just happen to bought a small selection of apple computers you need a fucking magic SATA plug no one makes.
WTF are you talking about?!? Thunderbolt? Or are you talking about the iMac hard drives with the thermal sensor integrated? Because the former doesn't make sense, and the latter was a case of Apple being ahead of an industry standard that appeared not to end up taking off.
If you wanted to bitch about something being "proprietary", then you SHOULD have been bitching about Apple's ancient, odd, penchant for TRULY proprietary Video connectors. But, being the ignorant fucktard that you are, you completely missed the ONE "Proprietary" thing I would have actually AGREED with you about!
Idiot.
1) apple II, disk drives, disk II, unidisk, duo disk and the 3.5 inch variants, depending on what you happen to own may or may not work, I have a IIC it works with the unidisk, some cable hacking it will work with the disk II, but not with the apple 5.25 disk without a rom upgrade. On the IIe a unidisk wont work with the disk 2 controller and etc, its a fucking dumb device why incompatible?
2) no I am talking about weird shit, name one other computer that used 168 pin 3 volt edo ram with a propitary dimm socket with the slot cut 2 pins away from standard
3) no I am talking about the stupid ass video bios, hard drive bios and cd rom bios you had to have or bypass in order to avoid the apple tax on otherwise standard hardware
4) bullshit, it would lock up every time you booted the computer with a slightly different hardware configuration, and I have personally had to reset it over 30 times ON one machine while fighting with video drivers cause I dared to change monitors, and re-arrange hard disks, the keyboard shortcut didnt make it in every version of the mac roms
5) oh so using a standard sata drive with a non standard pinout and connector that you could only get from apple is now being ahead of the curve, I call it being fucked over
6) video connectors? yea its a pain in the ass, but if you have delt with their bullshit above a 99 cent adapter is the least of your problems. I am not the retard here, I am the abused broken free, you on the other hand...
I see its apparent you are an appliance user, when apple tells you to jump to the new model you have zero problems plopping down another 2-3 grand shelving a perfectly good unit obsoleted by a rom upgrade while shouting "yes sir!"
Since you have nicely enumerated the list, I won't go through the pain of in-line commenting.
//c (I never owned a //c, so I may be wrong about the slots). What are you calling a "Disk II"? That's the Shugart (ribbon cable) drive. The unidisk was a completely different beast, being a 3.5" drive. It actually DID use the (at that point, Integrated) Woz Machine at the controller end (which is why you could plug it into a //c) but in an ENTIRELY different way. The UniDisk (actually UniDisk 3.5, IIRC) actually had a microcontroller on board the drive (the Liron Controller), which basically just used the computer-side's controller as a Serial Bus (rather than a raw "nibble" bus). In fact, when I first got my hands on a UniDisk, I immediately wrote an assembly-language program that ran IN THE DRIVE to do dump the Drive's ROM out, and also wrote a few other things that ran in that drive.
//c. So, stop being so butthurt about Moore's Law, willya?
1. Time does march on. The original Apple ][ (Shugart 400) drives and the later DuoDisk (Alps) drives were essentially the same, internally. That is to say, except for the connector, there was really nothing different about the controller card, data format, etc. Although I personally hated the Duo Disk, it was the only real way to get an external drive onto a "slotless" machine like the
But NONE of that was INTENDED to screw over users; in fact, the reason why the UniDisk was so complicated internally was PRECISELY so that it could work with an UNMODIFIED
2. Since it was part of the STANDARD, I assume you don't know what you are talking about here. And the proof is that those RAMs were READILY available from, oh, just about everybody. And that is while Apple had a single-digit marketshare. So, again, NOT "proprietary". Next!
3. Now you're just making shit up. WTF are you even talking about? Seriously. WTF? I have personally used commodity RAM, commodity Hard Drives, commodity VGA monitors, commodity optical drives in/with ALL of my Macs since they were "expandable" (so, since about 1988). So I repeat, WTF? There simply IS no such thing as a "video BIOS", or "Hard Drive BIOS" of "CD-ROM BIOS". Never heard of them.
4. Perhaps you had a bad machine. Happens. As I said, ONCE in 30 years and SEVERAL Macs. Both my own, and hundreds more that I have administered. There IS no Keyboard Shortcut for the CUDA/Systems Management MCU (actually, I think that there was one on ONE laptop). Are you conflating the PRAM with the CUDA again? But moving right along...
5 and 6. I really don't think Apple had "lock-in" in mind. At worst, they were pushing the industry to incorporate the pesky thermal sensor, and the cost-sensitive HD industry didn't want the extra cost, since other OEMs didn't seem to be interested in making it easier to swap hard drives (by not having to mess with a thermal sensor attached with STICKY TAPE). But, we'll call this one a draw; because I really don't know why they did that on some of the iMacs. What you don't consider is that sometimes Apple does things to make it easier for themselves to manufacture, OR (like the ADC) to make it easier for the USER (in the case of the Apple Display Connector, Jobs was trying to reduce cable clutter), that APPEAR to be about "lock-in", when in reality, is just their way of doing things in a different (and if the industry would follow) often BETTER way. But you go ahead and spin everything in the most negative light possible.
I am anything BUT an "appliance user" (but that DOES describe about 99% of the userbase of ALL computers!). I am an embedded design engineer (both hardware and software). And I HARDLY jump when Apple brings out a new model. In fact, the ONLY "new" Apples I have purchased have been my Apple ][+ (1980), and my G5 tower (2005). Everything else has been purchased through eBay (575, 6100, 8500), fished out of a dumpster and fixed by me
It will probably dominating in the same way that AT&T does today. It will be dominant, but hated.
1930, successfully developed the world's first deputy to protect the pilots eyes, green lenses Replica Ray Ban sunglasses, followed by Ray-Ban RB2132 sunglasses began sweeping the world in various corners of the world can see his figure why people are so fond Ray-Ban RB2132 sunglasses because he can not only prevent glare but also UV protection, visual aspects but also to maintain a clear and good vision, stylish design ideas much star welcome by the U.S. public naming trend of the pilot by ".
In 1937, the company officially put the glasses into the market and changed its name to "Ray-Ban. U.S. Admiral MacArthur was wearing Ray-Ban RB2132. During World War II, Ray-Ban RB2132 lens by the government as the standard of sunglasses, Ray Ban sunglasses 3025 really a combat mission to the Air Force has brought a lot of convenience, some people even call the Le Pen for the Second World War Allied one of the hero wins.
Ray-Ban RB2132 lens about the advantages:
(1)Hard coated lenses coated with multi-layer antireflection coating to reduce reflective lens, the lens has a high transmission rate, increase visual contrast and eliminate visual fatigue;
(2) anti-fade resistance, not easy to yellow, durable;
(3)Lens light transmission rate, depending on the material more clearly, at the same time, the lens dispersion is small, look at the scenery more fine, sharp, emerald green film has a strong translucent;
(4)hard coated lens surface is coated with special hardening layer can effectively enhance the wear resistance lenses, the lens surface wear resistance comparable with Ray Ban sunglasses sale lenses, greatly extending the life of the lens;
(5) plastic frames and metal mirror leg is fully integrated mirror leg pattern makes the whole lot of glasses look more lively.