First Apple computer expected to fetch ?100,000 at auction

Auction house Christies is set to sell a piece of personal computing history: the first Apple-1 computer motherboard along with all the original documentation from 1976.

Expected to fetch between £100,000 and £150,000 at auction, Christies describes the Apple-1 as a ‘superb example’ with original packaging, manuals, cassette interface, basic tape, early documentation and a letter from Steve Jobs. The return address on the package even shows that it was sent from the garage of Steve Jobs’ parent’s house.

The motherboard featured a 6502 processor and 8K of RAM. The original printed wrappers with the original company logo (featuring Sir Isaac Newton sat underneath the fabled Apple tree) and an invoice which shows the $666.66 cost of the motherboard which along with the tape drive cost in total $741.66 in 1976, as sold by salesman ‘Stephen’. There’s also a signed letter from Steve Jobs.

One can’t help but wonder if any technological items today could be similarly stored away for nearly 35 years and find themselves worth 60 times as much at auction.
 The auction completes on the 21st of November.

Image source: Christies.