When Apple co-founder Steve Jobs wanted to price his new Apple-1 computer, he chose a price roughly three times what it cost to build it: $666.66. The price made his cofounder and chief system designer Steve Wozniak laugh because of its proximity to a joke line he used to dial, and it ultimately caused the pair some grief because of its digit relationship to, well, the sign of the beast.
Almost 50 years later, that price is a fraction of what you might pay for Polaroid pictures of the original Apple-1 Computer prototype. A collection of three photos of the board, the board and its caseless computer, and a monitor running Apple’s own brand of BASIC are on auction at RRAction House and currently sit at a bid of $2,148. The auction is open until August 22, so that price might differ by the time you visit and maybe bid.
Jobs used these images as part of his pitch deck, which he presented to early client Paul Terrell of the Byte Shop. By today’s standards, the Apple-1 looked like, at best, a home-brewed system. Still, according to Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, Jobs’ pitch and those images eventually convinced Terrell to sign up for an order of 50 pre-assembled Apple-1 systems.
For that $666.66, Terrell was getting, by 1976 standards, a revolutionary 8K (expandable to 65K RAM) system that included a built-in video terminal and keyboard interface (instead of a TeleType system), that hooked up directly to a monitor or TV. There was even 1K of dedicated video memory. And then, of course, there was Apple BASIC. While it doesn’t sound like much, the system sold well enough to lay the groundwork for the better-known and far more widely sold Apple II computer (I used an Apple IIe for a time and loved it).
The auction is a walk back through some of the iconic history of Apple and Steve Jobs. Along with the Polaroids, it includes a leather bomber jacket Steve Jobs wore in 1983 when photographed giving the finger to an IBM logo. IBM was, of course, a chief Apple rival in the early days of the personal computer revolution.
Other items include checks written by Jobs and even a restored and fully functional Apple-1 computer. What you can do with that system (logged as No. 104 in the Apple Computer Registry) is a fair question. It might be ready for some simple math and low-key BASIC programming, but that’s about it. Still, what a museum piece.
As for those photos, since they were likely taken by Jobs himself, they’re much more than a record of early personal computer efforts, they speak to how Jobs viewed their creation and how the eventual master of product marketing might’ve planned to market this magical piece of hardware. That’s what could make it worth the cost of one of the best MacBooks.
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