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Apple-1 Sells For $671,400, Breaks Previous Auction Record
hypnosec writes "What is believed to be one of the six working Apple-1 computers has fetched a whopping $671,400 for its current owner at an auction in Germany. The Apple-1 was built by Steve Wozniak back in 1976 in the garage of Steve Jobs' parents. The model sold at auction is either from the first lot of 50 systems ordered by Paul Terrell, owner of the Byte Shop chain of stores, or part of the next lot of 150 systems the duo built to sell to friends and vendors. The retail price for the Apple-1 at the time was $666.66."
A sucker !!
I'd buy it, if only for a chance to start harassing The Woz for tech support.
It is indeed a piece of modern history, it would be good on display in a museum of the 20th century (along a few other pioneering machines).
$666.66... The Biblical Apple was from the tree of knowledge. The Apple's salesman was snake, and the users were deceived. Steve Jobs aspired to be devilishly clever in marketing. In Faustian style, his life was cut short ahead of its time... Oh what stories that would be told, if only this silicon could talk.
"a fascination with the early history of the computer age"
1976 was already the middle of the computer age.
Really? I feel the computer age hasn't even taken off yet, and speaking of a middle for something that is open ended is just silly. In fact, even though the age of the gene-manipulation/bio-tech might be starting now, let us not forget that it is progress in our computation capabilities that makes all this possible. There is still lots more to be done in computational mathematics/biology/engineeering/science.
I wonder how much an iPhone 1 will be worth in 40-50 years... I suspect they made more of those than the Apple 1 though.
Sure, big institutions may have had a mainframe and one or more terminals by that time. But the real revolution began when computing was brought to the home. It was home computing that enabled a whole generation to grow up with computers and learn the skills involved before they went to college and as such it acted like a flywheel to advance computing even more rapidly. The Apple I is very fundamental step in the process of bringing computing to the home.
Pretty good is actually pretty bad.
"a fascination with the early history of the computer age"
1976 was already the middle of the computer age.
Really? I feel the computer age hasn't even taken off yet, and speaking of a middle for something that is open ended is just silly. In fact, even though the age of the gene-manipulation/bio-tech might be starting now, let us not forget that it is progress in our computation capabilities that makes all this possible. There is still lots more to be done in computational mathematics/biology/engineeering/science.
The home computer age, the personal computer age had barely started, but there had computers around for those with access.
Be seeing you...
The computer age isn't over yet. We don't know how long it will last, but it could be thousands of years.
We have only completed the first 60 years or so.
That probably makes this still the beginning right now.
The $666 of those days is worth about $666,666 today, so the value of the Apple 1 actually reduced a little...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Really? I feel the computer age hasn't even taken off yet, and speaking of a middle for something that is open ended is just silly. In fact, even though the age of the gene-manipulation/bio-tech might be starting now, let us not forget that it is progress in our computation capabilities that makes all this possible. There is still lots more to be done in computational mathematics/biology/engineeering/science.
It's not like we left all the iron tools when we left the iron age, yes there are still radios but it'd feel very strange to say we're in the age of radio. It is not new, it is not something that right now is redefining our society. In that sense I feel the computer age maybe has come and gone - as in the moving from pen and paper, calculators and filing cabinets to word processors, spreadsheets and databases. It was already followed by the Internet age - which is of course using computers but that I feel is something completely different, a revolution in communication not computing. I think now we're in the budding of the "always on" age, where you take both with you on the go but I think that is distinct from the former, just like cell phones was a different revolution than phones. If you want to take a more birds-eye view I'd call all of it the Digital Age, because that's really what it's been all about - we take analog information and we convert it to zeros and ones, which we can then compute, transmit, display and lots of other things with. And there we find constantly new ways to apply computers.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
An Apple-1 computer, made in 1976, sold for a record $671,400 on Saturday at an auction in Germany, including all fees and taxes, said Uwe Breker, the German auctioneer.
That surpassed the $640,000 record for an Apple-1, set last November at a sale at the same auction house in Cologne, Germany, Auction Team Breker. The fall 2012 sale was a sharp rise from the previous record price for an Apple-1 of $374,500, set in June 2012 at Sothebyâ(TM)s in New York.
- I thought 640K was enough for everybody, apparently not until zee Germans get here.
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As a side note
some irrational exuberance in the prices, for a machine that can do very little and originally sold for $666 (about $2,700 in current dollars).
- isn't that funny, how the official inflation (666 becomes 2700) is so far off the actual bubbles forming in various asset classes, that reflect the actual rate of inflation (666 becomes 641K) and almost none the wiser.
You can't handle the truth.
So the Apple Computer is THE Apple.
Jobs is the snake.
Woz is God.
The Tower of Babble story is obviously the story about the ancient language of Assembly that people used to build so much of the software stack, which angered the God and then he split the language into many.
The Great Flood and the Noah's Arc is probably an RMS related story.
Makes sense. Now we have men that are men, women that are men and also the FBI agents. The only question remains where is Eve in all of this?
You can't handle the truth.
Or, in 1976 dollars, about $666.66 :-p
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(yes in reality it is more like $150K, but where's the fun in that?)
--- Mercutio was right.
Certainly a deeply religious man such as yourself would know how to recognize cult behavior. You have your cult, they have theirs. The only difference is that they don't call yours as wrong, even though you say that of theirs.
- isn't that funny, how the official inflation (666 becomes 2700) is so far off the actual bubbles forming in various asset classes, that reflect the actual rate of inflation (666 becomes 641K) and almost none the wiser
The $641k number is not, in any meaningful way, a result of inflation. The product did not gain value due to the loss of value of the currency, it gained value because of its own diminishing supply and its associated historic value. The difference between its price in 1976 dollars ($666.66) and the value of that much money today ($2,700) is inflationary; you could describe it accurately as an inflationary difference of roughly four-fold. However the remaining difference between the $2,700 of today's dollars and the auction price ($641k) - I'll do the math for you since you failed math - is roughly $638k. That $638k is not driven by inflation. If it were driven by inflation then everything that sold in 1976 would be worth almost 1,000 times its 1976 price - and anyone with a car from the 1970s can tell you that is simply not the case.
But of course you want to sell this as inflation as it is part of your religious mantra. You lie to people repeatedly like this to further your church's agenda, which is to get people to hand over what little power and resources they have to those who already hold the vast majority of the world's power and resources. You want to produce more power for the wealthy, and fascism for the people.
back in 1976 at the Stanford Linear Acceleration I thought the Steves would take all the fun out of building a computer if you buy one already made. I was wrong.
The modern (digital electronic) computer age began in WWII with Colossus, used by the British to break German codes.
The Apple I was early in the personal computer era. Computers prior were based on vacuum tubes or individual solid state transistors, and were the size of a room. Silicon transistors were experimental during the 1950s, and slowly commercialized in the 1960s allowing business computers to shrink to the size of a car and eventually a cabinet. Intel got started around then. Silicon microprocessors really took off during the early 1970s allowing computers to shrink to desktop size, spawning personal computing.
So no, the Apple I was not early in the computer era. It's bad enough people think Apple invented MP3 players, smartphones, touchscreens, and tablets. Don't add computers to the list of mis-attributed inventions. The original Apple I as a product was pretty much the same as what Apple does today - buy a bunch of readily available parts, do some modifications, assemble it, and sell it. They don't actually make (much less invent) the crucial technologies. Their biggest technical strength is that they're damn good at making a pleasant and easy-to-use user interface.
It's always cool hearing about something like this fetching such a high price. The original Apple computer is somewhat of a holy grail among those of us who like these sort of things.
However, the knowledge that there are so few known to exist, the knowledge that most of those are accounted for, and the knowledge that the odds of one of these turning up in a thrift store, donated by some clueless mom who has no idea what it is, priced by some clueless worker who has no idea what it is, and passed up by other clueless shoppers who think that the people doing their pricing must be passing around some good weed to think that this old bare circuit board apparently from some broken Mac would be priced at $15 to $20, are pretty much zero, makes my inner Jawa sad. ;)
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$640K should be enough for anybody.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Back when I was pressing my nose against the glass of The Byte Shop (San Mateo was it? Buggered if I can remember, I lived in Redwood City and it was nearby) wishing I could afford one of those nifty Apple ]['s, I saw an Apple I in the shop, under glass, listed for a cool $1 Mill. It was a board, with components. Not terribly impressive, but the ][ had only been out for a few months iirc. I don't think he ever really wanted to sell it.
I went to work for Apple shortly after, got one of their loan-to-own units with a floppy disk and VisiCalc. Wasn't much, but damme, I was empowered.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Just because.
-- Jimtown Kelly
Did Woz got some share out of it?
Yes, merely a bump in the road. Perhaps a larger-than-average bump, but many of the larger bumps have not been recognized outside of this type venue.