Apple I On display at the Smithsonian (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

AS LEGEND HAS IT, the first Apple computers were made in 1976 in the garage belonging to Steve Jobs's parents. Of that run of roughly 200 Apple 1s, only a few working models remain. One is currently up for auction at Christie's. (click below to read more)


The machines originally sold for $666.66 (Apple Computer co-founder Steve Wozniak was reportedly fond of repeating numbers). Christie's estimates that the model on auction—which includes the manual, a printout of the computer's schematics and a signed photograph of Mr. Jobs and Mr. Wozniak—may fetch up to $500,000. Another functioning Apple 1 offered with different accessories sold in May for 420,000 euros, or about $546,000, through Auction Team Breker in Germany.

The Apple 1 was a relatively bare-bones product by today's standards. It consisted only of a motherboard; no case was included, and buyers were expected to provide their own keyboard and monitor. Installing the BASIC programming language required a cassette recorder and a special card.

Stephen Edwards, a professor of computer science at Columbia University with an "unhealthy appreciation of antique computing hardware," as he put it, consulted on the pieces for Christie's. He believes that the Apple 1 being auctioned, like others of the period, was most likely made by Mr. Wozniak, Mr. Jobs or one of their friends. "I don't know that we can definitively say that Wozniak touched it," said Mr. Edwards, "but the board was assembled by those guys."



Christie's is auctioning nine other Apple relics, drawn from two private collections in the U.S. A prototype Macintosh SE with a translucent case (starting bid: $5,000) was likely used in-house to test for airflow inside the machine, as the SE was the first Macintosh with an internal fan. Mr. Edwards was particularly excited to see an Apple Lisa (starting bid: $20,000) with 5.25-inch floppy drives, which are rarely found on this model. The Lisa was the first personal computer with a graphical user interface, said Mr. Edwards. "Everything we think of as Mac started there."