courtesy Christies.com
A rare Apple-1 computer—one that Steve Jobs himself worked on—has sold at auction for $365,000.
The computer—one of about 60 from Apple’s first line of machines—was sold to an undisclosed buyer on Thursday by Christie’s in New York.
It was originally purchased back in July of 1976 by a man named Charlie Ricketts, who dropped by Steve Jobs’ parents’ garage in Palo Alto, California to plunk down $600 for the then-unknown computer. A month later, Ricketts paid Jobs another $193 for some extra programming work on the machine.
We’re not sure exactly what programming work Jobs did on the system, but the man who sold the machine yesterday, Bob Luther, thinks he probably just enhanced the system so that it could store programs on an audio cassette recorder and run Apple’s version of the Basic programing language. “He was actually quite a competent technician,” Luther says of Jobs.
Luther picked up the Apple-1 in a Washington, D.C. sheriff’s auction a decade ago, and became obsessed with the computer’s history, so much so that he wrote a 391 page book about the computer. He paid $7,600 for the Apple computer, manual, and Ricketts’ cancelled checks from back in the ’70s. “I think most people there thought I’d paid too much for it,” he remembers.
He got a pretty good return on his investment, but he says $365,000 was “definitely less than expected.”
In October, the Henry Ford Museum paid $905,000 for a different Apple-1. That’s two-and-a-half times what Luther’s system fetched. “It’s just the realities of auctions,” he says. “You take a chance when you go to auction.”
Luther did do a far sight better than Apple co-founder Ron Wayne. His archives, which included an early Apple logo and renderings of his proposed Apple II case design, went for just $25,000.
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