When Apple co-founder Steve Jobs set a price for his new Apple-1 computer, he chose a price that was about three times what it cost to build: $666.66. The price made his co-founder and chief designer Steve Wozniak laugh, since it was close to a joke line he used to make phone calls, and it eventually caused the pair some grief because of the number’s association with, well, the Mark of the Beast.
Nearly 50 years later, that price is a fraction of what you’d pay for Polaroid photos of the original Apple-1 computer prototype. A collection of three photos of the board, the board and computer without the case, and a monitor with Apple’s own brand of BASIC are up for auction at RRAction House and are currently sitting at a bid of $2,148. The auction is open until August 22nd, so the price may be different by the time you come by and possibly bid.
Jobs used these images as part of his pitch deck, which he presented to his first customer, Paul Terrell of the Byte Shop. By today’s standards, the Apple 1 looked like a homebrew system at best. Yet, according to Walter Isaacson’s Biography of Steve JobsJobs’ pitch and the images ultimately convinced Terrell to place an order for 50 pre-assembled Apple-1 systems.
For that $666.66, Terrell got, by 1976 standards, a revolutionary 8K (expandable to 65K RAM) system with a built-in video terminal and keyboard interface (instead of a TeleType system) that connected directly to a monitor or TV. There was even 1K of dedicated video memory. And then, of course, there was Apple BASIC. While it doesn’t sound like much, the system sold well enough to form the basis for the better-known and much more widely sold Apple II computer (I have a Apple IIe (for a while and loved it).
The auction is a walk back in time through some of Apple and Steve Jobs’ iconic history. In addition to the Polaroids, it includes a leather bomber jacket that Steve Jobs wore in 1983 when photographed giving the middle finger to an IBM logoIBM was of course one of Apple’s biggest competitors in the early days of the PC revolution.
Other items include checks written by Jobs and even a restored and fully functional Apple-1 computer. What you can do with that system (registered as #104 in the Apple Computer Registry) is a fair question. It may be ready for some simple math and modest BASIC programming, but that’s about it. Still, what a museum piece.
As for those photos, since they were likely taken by Jobs himself, they are much more than a record of early PC efforts, they tell the story of how Jobs envisioned their creation and how the eventual master of product marketing might have planned to market this magical piece of hardware. That’s what might make it worthy of one of the best MacBooks out there.