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Pristine Apple I Sells at Auction for a Jaw-Dropping Price
If you think Apple products are overpriced now, wait until they’re 50 years old.
This original Apple I recently sold at auction for $375,000, making it one of the most expensive 6502-based computers in history. Given that only something like 60 or 70 of the machines were ever made, most built by hand by [Jobs] and [Wozniak], it’s understandable how collectors fought for the right to run the price up from the minimum starting bid of $50,000. And this one was particularly collectible. According to the prospectus, this machine had few owners, the most recent of whom stated that he attended a meeting of the legendary Homebrew Computer Club to see what all the fuss was. He bought it second-hand from a coworker for $300, fiddled with it a bit, and stashed it in a closet. A few years later, after the Apple ][ became a huge phenomenon, he tried to sell the machine to [Woz] for $10,000. [Woz] didn’t bite, and as a result, the owner realized a 125,000% return on his original investment, before inflation.
The machine was restored before hitting the auction block, although details of what was done were not shared. But it couldn’t have been much since none of the previous owners had even used the prototyping area that was so thoughtfully provided on the top edge of the board. It was sold with period-correct peripherals including a somewhat janky black-and-white security monitor, an original cassette tape interface, and a homebrew power supply. Sadly, there’s no word who bought the machine – it was an anonymous purchase.
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 10 2018, @02:17PM
I used to work at Hambrecht & Quist, a brokerage located in San Francisco.
Hambrecht & Quist handled the IPOs of both Apple AND Genentech. So you could sort of say H&Q helped change the world.
I worked in their information technology department.
(As an aside, I encourage everyone to refer to it as 'information technology', and NOT call it 'IT', as the latter is dehumanizing. Really, folks. You tell people you work for 'IT', then complain that they treat you like an object? Connect the dots.)
H&Q had a huge collection of Apple computers. They had invested heavily in Apple from its very beginning and they had a huge collection of Apple experts.
H&Q occupied the office building located at 1 Bush Street.
At one point I was involved in handling the repair of a legacy Apple computer and I needed a hard drive, or perhaps it was some memory. I was told there was a large collection of Apple computers up in the 'attic'.
The 'attic' was a storage space at the very top of 1 Bush Street. I might have had to use the freight elevator to get up there, any maybe climb some stairs, too.
It was lined with steel shelves. The shelves were lined with old Apple computers. Dozens or maybe hundreds of 'em.
This was right around the end of the last century. Amost twenty years ago. H&Q was going through a crisis, back then; Bill Hambrecht left and started hambrecht.com, taking the best & brightest with him. H&Q abandoned Apple computers and went through a painful shift to Windows NT, replacing perhaps 98% of the entire information technology department.
I'm not sure what happened to all those Apple computers.
For all I know, they are still up there, accruing in value.
Food for thought ...