Malcolm Owen
A group of 12 Apple-1 computers were brought under the same roof as part of the Vintage Computer Festival West at Mountain View's Computer History Museum, making it one of the biggest gatherings of the extremely rare Apple computers in recent history.
The Vintage Computer Festival West, produced by the Vintage Computer Federation and took place on August 3 and 4, is an annual event with the aim of showing visitors older computers that evolved into the computing devices available today. The event featured many items, including a restored original Apollo Guidance Computer, with original, restored, and working models on display.
As part of the assembly, a total of 12 Apple-1 computers were brought to the same spot. The computer is a rarity, with approximately 70 units believed to still exist albeit not all of them functioning, so the appearance of 12 of them at the event is an extremely rare occasion.
— Dave Rahardja (@drahardja) August 5, 2019
Original and current owners of the Apple-1 were also in attendance alongside early Apple employees, with some taking part in a panel about the computers' history.
The Apple-1 is a sought-after relic of computing history, originally built by hand in 1976 by Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and sold through computer store Byte Shop, though only around 200 were ever produced and 175 units were sold.
Originally, it was sold for $666.66, and lacked features like a display, keyboard, power supply, or housing, elements which are taken for granted in modern-day computers.
The rarity makes it a potentially valuable piece, with it occasionally surfacing in auctions. One briefcase-based Apple-1 was sold in May for $471,000, while other sales have seen transactions exceeding $900,000 for the device. The high price also extends to the manual, with one recent auction in July seeing a copy sold for $12,296.
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3 Comments
It's funny that no one cares about old PC anything.
It was cool when the first couple of these were put up for auction. Now they're in the media so often, the shine has dissipated. Seem's like we hear about an Apple-1 every few months or so.
@Jimh2: There is a thriving community that collects vintage IBM PCs and clones! PC topics are covered in three subforums at http://www.vcfed.org/forum/forum.php. Also there are a couple of Facebook groups for PC collectors, each with thousands of members, and there's the Vogons.org forum which focuses on DOS.