An original Apple I computer just hit $475,000 in an auction sale (via Tom's Hardware). The Apple I was conceived as a bare circuit board for which enthusiasts would build their own case, but this unit was one of 50 made for Byte Shop and sold with a natty wooden case. Only nine of the 50 are known to survive today.
Apart from the sheer portent of an original Apple I and the particular rarity of this version (it's thought there were only around 200 Apple I computers ever built, so this machine is in a very rarefied niche, even among Apple I's), the incredible condition of this example and the fact that it's fully functional (as demo'ed in this YouTube video) no doubt contributed to the hefty hammer price.
The Apple I was of course the work of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and these "Byte Shop" machines are regarded as the turning point that made Apple Computer viable as a company.
At the time in 1976, Jobs and Wozniak were selling a small handful of bare boards to enthusiasts. But Jobs approached Paul Terrell at the Byte Shop in Mountain View, California, an early personal computer outlet. Terrell apparently offered to buy 50 Apple I machines, but only if they came fully assembled in cases.
It's said Jobs and Wozniak personally assembled all 200 of the original Apple I, though eventuality the Byte Shop Apple I's were actually delivered as bare boards. Terrell nevertheless accepted them, knocking up wood cases that were a cut above the hobbyist norm.
Whatever, that Byte Shop deal for 50 computers was absolutely critical in getting Apple over the line from being a couple of tinkerers in a garage to something resembling an actual company. "That was the biggest single episode in all of the company's history. Nothing in subsequent years was so great and so unexpected," Steve Wozniak later said of the deal.
And it is a pretty funky thing. It's actually remarkable just how familiar it looks, the case and keyboard being instantly recognisable as a personal computer. Indeed, keyboards have changed remarkably little in the intervening 49 years.
It's also not hard to imagine someone producing a hipster homebrew PC build that looked just like this original Apple I build. That said, today's computing enthusiast might be just a touch disappointed by the specs. A maximum of 8K of onboard memory, as fitted here, and a 1 MHz CPU isn't exactly the stuff of smooth Borderlands 4 frame rates.
Then again, watching ASCII art images of the Woz and Jobs emerge in text characters, line-by-line, on the Apple I's screen is pretty cool and in some ways more impressive than the latest ray-traced pixel fest. At the very least, it's awfully nostalgic, especially for someone who can very dimly remember the day his father brought an Apple II Plus back from the office. Now, whatever did happen to that...?
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