Apple-1 Sells For $671,400, Breaks Previous Auction Record 79
hypnosec writes "What is believed to be one of the six working Apple-1 computers has fetched a whopping $671,400 for its current owner at an auction in Germany. The Apple-1 was built by Steve Wozniak back in 1976 in the garage of Steve Jobs' parents. The model sold at auction is either from the first lot of 50 systems ordered by Paul Terrell, owner of the Byte Shop chain of stores, or part of the next lot of 150 systems the duo built to sell to friends and vendors. The retail price for the Apple-1 at the time was $666.66."
TYPICAL APPLE USER !! (Score:4, Funny)
A sucker !!
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Hell, I'd buy it. (Score:5, Funny)
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I'd buy it, if only for a chance to start harassing The Woz for tech support.
What's awesome about that guy? I bet he'd do it.
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When Jobs and Woz built and sold their blue boxes, Woz inserted a small slip of paper in it - a poem I believe. The deal was that if your blue box ever stopped working, you could bring it in, and as long as that paper was in there, he'd repair it. Doesn't matter how long ago you bought it, as long as it was in there.
Given the last blue-boxable line was killed around the mid-2000's (yes, there was ONE phone company who still maintai
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Essential for museums (Score:1)
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The science museum in London does have an apple I...Along with various other rarities (a PDP-8 for example and other even older things).
I don't think any of those is in working order though.
Metaphores. (Score:5, Funny)
$666.66... The Biblical Apple was from the tree of knowledge. The Apple's salesman was snake, and the users were deceived. Steve Jobs aspired to be devilishly clever in marketing. In Faustian style, his life was cut short ahead of its time... Oh what stories that would be told, if only this silicon could talk.
Re:Metaphores. (Score:5, Informative)
Except that the 'apple' in that bit of biblical symbolism is a later European Christian addition. The forbidden fruit of the Bible was most likely a fig, grape, apricot or pomegranate [christadelphianbooks.org].
Though I do recall an early computer sold in Aus (through DSE?) called the Apricot, which IIRC was a rebadged MPF-II (an early Apple nearly-compatible clone...)
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well, W is transposed to the same numerical value as 6 in Hebrew. So when you type in your www guess what your doing..
Actually, V is 6 and there is no W in hebrew so 6 is used. Also the numbers are added together when they are places together similar to roman numerals so www would be 18 (6+6+6) and not 666.
This WWW=666 was a popular thing on the internet back in the mid 90s.
The number of the beast is only 666 in later christian scripture. According to 3rd century christian texts unearthed by Archeologists the number of the beast is actually 616 and methinks that constitutes prior art.
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well, W is transposed to the same numerical value as 6 in Hebrew. So when you type in your www guess what your doing..
Actually, V is 6 and there is no W in hebrew so 6 is used. Also the numbers are added together when they are places together similar to roman numerals so www would be 18 (6+6+6) and not 666.
This WWW=666 was a popular thing on the internet back in the mid 90s.
The number of the beast is only 666 in later christian scripture. According to 3rd century christian texts unearthed by Archeologists the number of the beast is actually 616 and methinks that constitutes prior art.
This is interesting, but here is an argument [endtime.com] against, saying that there was another contemporary text found that had 666.
Much of the recent stir about 616 has arisen due to renewed studies of a group of very old manuscripts originally discovered in 1895 by archaeologists at the site of an ancient garbage dump in Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Many of the Oxyrhynchus manuscripts consist of New Testament papyri, and are very old when compared to other manuscripts. One of them named P115 (also called P. Oxy. 4499), da
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Not only that, but the "number of the beast" is actually 616. During one of the many translations of that work of fiction, it was assumed by the translating monks to be the equivalent of a typo, so they changed it it 666.
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668: The Neighbor of the Beast.
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668: The Neighbor of the Beast.
Are you referring to that smokin' hot succubus of a girl next door?
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"and the users were deceived" Everything the snake said about the fruit was actually true though. The only deceiver in the story was god.
The Church of Apple Computer (Score:1)
So the Apple Computer is THE Apple.
Jobs is the snake.
Woz is God.
The Tower of Babble story is obviously the story about the ancient language of Assembly that people used to build so much of the software stack, which angered the God and then he split the language into many.
The Great Flood and the Noah's Arc is probably an RMS related story.
Makes sense. Now we have men that are men, women that are men and also the FBI agents. The only question remains where is Eve in all of this?
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Tim Cook?
Takes one to know one, right? (Score:1)
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Re:History? (Score:5, Insightful)
"a fascination with the early history of the computer age"
1976 was already the middle of the computer age.
Really? I feel the computer age hasn't even taken off yet, and speaking of a middle for something that is open ended is just silly. In fact, even though the age of the gene-manipulation/bio-tech might be starting now, let us not forget that it is progress in our computation capabilities that makes all this possible. There is still lots more to be done in computational mathematics/biology/engineeering/science.
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The computer age isn't over yet. We don't know how long it will last, but it could be thousands of years.
We have only completed the first 60 years or so.
That probably makes this still the beginning right now.
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"a fascination with the early history of the computer age"
1976 was already the middle of the computer age.
Really? I feel the computer age hasn't even taken off yet, and speaking of a middle for something that is open ended is just silly. In fact, even though the age of the gene-manipulation/bio-tech might be starting now, let us not forget that it is progress in our computation capabilities that makes all this possible. There is still lots more to be done in computational mathematics/biology/engineeering/science.
The home computer age, the personal computer age had barely started, but there had computers around for those with access.
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Really? I feel the computer age hasn't even taken off yet, and speaking of a middle for something that is open ended is just silly. In fact, even though the age of the gene-manipulation/bio-tech might be starting now, let us not forget that it is progress in our computation capabilities that makes all this possible. There is still lots more to be done in computational mathematics/biology/engineeering/science.
It's not like we left all the iron tools when we left the iron age, yes there are still radios but it'd feel very strange to say we're in the age of radio. It is not new, it is not something that right now is redefining our society. In that sense I feel the computer age maybe has come and gone - as in the moving from pen and paper, calculators and filing cabinets to word processors, spreadsheets and databases. It was already followed by the Internet age - which is of course using computers but that I feel i
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The Apple I was early in the personal computer era. Computers prior were based on vacuum tubes or individual solid state transistors, and were the size of a room. Silicon transistors were experimental during the 1950s, and slowly commercialized in the 1960s allowing business computers to shrink to the size of a car and eventually a cabinet. Intel got started around then. Silicon micropr
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Sure, big institutions may have had a mainframe and one or more terminals by that time. But the real revolution began when computing was brought to the home. It was home computing that enabled a whole generation to grow up with computers and learn the skills involved before they went to college and as such it acted like a flywheel to advance computing even more rapidly. The Apple I is very fundamental step in the process of bringing computing to the home.
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iPhone 1 (Score:2)
Re: iPhone 1 (Score:3)
It would really depend on the popularity (and existence) of Apple in 40-50 years. I think this thing wouldn't have raked in so much money if Apple did go bankrupt in the late nineties.
As technology goes, the Apple I is not that revolutionary. Not like the first mouse or first transistor.
Re: iPhone 1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, it sort of is - it's one of the first consumer computers, so it's different in that respect to an iPhone. Regardless of how far down the line we go, the iPhone will never be the product that launched a company and played a large role in the wider acceptance of home computing in general (note again, for slashdot mods: not saying it was *the* thing, or the *only* thing, or the *most important* thing etc).
It's like the auction of the first telephone - these things have cultural significance beyond that of a product from somewhere in the middle, regardless of whether the company is still going or not. I'm sure that didn't hurt, but it's hardly the only thing driving that auction price.
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Well, it was more properly one of the first computers available for purchase almost complete. Prior to this, you had to assemble the computer yourself. But Apple sold it as a complete board - you just added a keyboard, power supply and TV and you had a computer.
The first consumer computers will be the Apple II - at which point it was one of the first enclosed in a plastic shell available for the ma
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Probably not much, if anything at all. It lacks both significance and scarcity -- and doesn't have the interesting back story that comes with the Apple I.
Re:iPhone 1 (Score:4, Informative)
This Apple I is signed by Woz and includes a signed letter from Steve Jobs. The previous owner also got the machine running again.
http://www.macrumors.com/2013/05/25/working-apple-1-computer-sells-for-record-auction-price-of-671400/ [macrumors.com]
Inflation (Score:2)
Re:Inflation (Score:5, Informative)
Nope. $666.66 in 1976 dollars is worth about $2,724.41 today.
http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/ [usinflatio...ulator.com]
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Enough for everybody (Score:2)
An Apple-1 computer, made in 1976, sold for a record $671,400 on Saturday at an auction in Germany, including all fees and taxes, said Uwe Breker, the German auctioneer.
That surpassed the $640,000 record for an Apple-1, set last November at a sale at the same auction house in Cologne, Germany, Auction Team Breker. The fall 2012 sale was a sharp rise from the previous record price for an Apple-1 of $374,500, set in June 2012 at Sothebyâ(TM)s in New York.
- I thought 640K was enough for everybody, apparently not until zee Germans get here.
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As a side note
some irrational exuberance in the prices, for a machine that can do very little and originally sold for $666 (about $2,700 in current dollars).
- isn't that funny, how the official inflation (666 becomes 2700) is so far off the actual bubbles forming in various asset classes, that reflect the actual rate of inflation (666 becomes 641K) and almost none the wiser.
Holy Economics FAIL Batman! (Score:1)
- isn't that funny, how the official inflation (666 becomes 2700) is so far off the actual bubbles forming in various asset classes, that reflect the actual rate of inflation (666 becomes 641K) and almost none the wiser
The $641k number is not, in any meaningful way, a result of inflation. The product did not gain value due to the loss of value of the currency, it gained value because of its own diminishing supply and its associated historic value. The difference between its price in 1976 dollars ($666.66) and the value of that much money today ($2,700) is inflationary; you could describe it accurately as an inflationary difference of roughly four-fold. However the remaining difference between the $2,700 of today's dol
And adjusting for inflation (Score:2)
Or, in 1976 dollars, about $666.66 :-p
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(yes in reality it is more like $150K, but where's the fun in that?)
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Had an instructor one time who had worked for Apple when it was still in Wozniak's garage, she may have helped assemble this one (there's a photo of employees from this time period, she's the black woman). At one point the company was so short of cash they were paying employees in stock. She left the company after a couple of months of this because she needed to feed her kids and stock certificates weren't doing that.
when I first saw it at the Homebrew Club (Score:4, Interesting)
Story is Both Cool and Sad (Score:2)
It's always cool hearing about something like this fetching such a high price. The original Apple computer is somewhat of a holy grail among those of us who like these sort of things.
However, the knowledge that there are so few known to exist, the knowledge that most of those are accounted for, and the knowledge that the odds of one of these turning up in a thrift store, donated by some clueless mom who has no idea what it is, priced by some clueless worker who has no idea what it is, and passed up by othe
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famous last bids (Score:2)
I remember seeing one on display at The Byte Shop (Score:2)
Back when I was pressing my nose against the glass of The Byte Shop (San Mateo was it? Buggered if I can remember, I lived in Redwood City and it was nearby) wishing I could afford one of those nifty Apple ]['s, I saw an Apple I in the shop, under glass, listed for a cool $1 Mill. It was a board, with components. Not terribly impressive, but the ][ had only been out for a few months iirc. I don't think he ever really wanted to sell it.
I went to work for Apple shortly after, got one of their loan-to-own
I wouldn't have bid higher than $666,666.66 (Score:1)
It's hell lot of money (Score:1)