Apple I may fetch $300K at auction

Steve Wozniak was giving it away free.

The Apple co-founder tweaked and soldered computer circuit boards in the mid-1970s from his cubicle at Hewlett-Packard and an apartment in Cupertino, Calif. He shared the design freely, showering enthusiasts in Silicon Valley’s Homebrew Computer Club with gratis innovation.

The members were wowed by the intricacy and beauty of crisp lines and symmetry of Wozniak’s handcrafted, meticulous design. One early club attendee, a local computer enthusiast, made note of the potential as talk of the board surged in the valley.

We’ll come back to him shortly. Steve Jobs saw the design — and the interest at the club — in July 1976, Wozniak told Bloomberg. That was three months after co-founding Apple with Wozniak. Why not sell the boards? The Byte Shop in Palo Alto agreed, but store owner Paul Terrell would only buy completed boards that did not need further tweaking at home.

Those computers became the Apple I.

More than 40 years later, one of about 60 surviving machines out of 200 made — and rarer still, fully functioning and untouched by modifications — will be auctioned Sept. 24. It is expected to fetch upward of $300,000.

“This computer tells a lot of about the history and genesis of the largest tech company in the world,” Bobby Livingston, a spokesman for RR Auction, told The Washington Post.

Even the manual points to the scrappy, renegade early days of the company: It has handwritten notations from an Apple employee, Livingston said.

Since then, Apple has moved from Wozniak’s cubicle and Jobs’ garage to be the first company worth $1 trillion. The Apple I, one of the first home personal computers, was modestly powered and ran very basic games and programs. It set the stage for the Apple II; its lower price point and accessibility completely changed how people interacted with computers.

A buyer paid $666.66 for this particular Apple I sometime between late 1976 and early 1977, the auction house said. But the buyer apparently wasn’t as wowed as the club members.

The enthusiast, a co-worker of the buyer, got it secondhand about a year later. He paid $300 and learned programming languages to work the machine. He kept it ever since. An imprint on the board reads: “Apple Computer 1, Palo Alto, Ca. Copyright 1976.”

RR Auction did not say who the man was, citing his privacy concerns. He tried selling it back to Wozniak for $10,000 in 1982, but the offer went unanswered, the auction house said.