William Gallagher
An Apple-I computer, hand-built by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, sold at auction and fetched $500,000.
More than doubling its $200,000 starting bid, the Apple-I Personal Computer was bought by a professor at Chaffey College in 1976. The Apple-I was famously originally sold for $666.66, or the equivalent of approximately $3,211 in 2021 money.
That original price is therefore 0.64% of the half million dollars achieved at is auction by John Moran Auctioneers and Appraisers, in Monrovia, California.
The auctioneer's final listing confirms the $500,000 successful bid, and states that the estimate was between $400,000 and $600,000. It's not know if there were a reserve price on the lot.
Alongside the computer with its original "NTI" motherboard, the lot included cables, programming manuals, handwritten index cards, and a 1986 Panasonic monitor.
Apple-I auctions are rare, but a model signed by Wozniak was auctioned in 2020.
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5 Comments
The man who created the personal computer is Steve Wozniak. Steve Jobs contribution was fonts. Steve Jobs got all the credit.
Don’t give me wrong, I like Steve Jobs Personna. But really all Steve ever was was an excellent salesman. He also was very good at delegating things to really highly intelligent people. And without his leader ship in those decisions I most likely wouldn’t be holding this device I’m typing this on today. We must give credit to where credit is due…
The greatest Apple invention was not the Apple I, or II, or the Mac, iPod or iPhone (or even the G4 Cube!), it was the company itself, which has produced all of these things and more. And I think if credit were to be fairly assigned, Jobs would get more credit than anyone else for creating the company we know today, although Tim certainly deserves a fair bit of credit too for his stewardship and successes in the subsequent years.
Steve Jobs had the vision; Woz implemented it.
If it wasn't for Steve Jobs' vision and business acumen, Steve Wozniak would have been selling his computer kits to hobbists through ads in the back of Popular Electronics, and that would have been as far as it got.