On Tuesday, at an auction bid in the United States, an original hand-built Apple computer by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs around 45 years ago was sold for $400,000.
At the price of $666.66, the first-ever Apple-1 was sold in the year 1976.
Today’s sleeky and stylish MacBooks great-great-grandfather, the functioning Apple-1, was expected to fetch around $600,000 in California when it went under the hammer.
The computer is known as “Chaffey College” Apple-1, was one of the 200 computers made by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak during their startup from a garage to a big company worth around $2 trillion.
The computer is named “Chaffey College” because the original owner was an electronics professor in Rancho Cucamonga’s Chaffey College, Calif.
The professor sold the computer to a student in 1977 to buy the Apple-II computer, the student who bought that computer remained unidentified and has kept the computer till now.
According to the Los Angeles Times report, the unidentified student paid only $650 to buy that Apple-1.
The Apple-1s came as motherboards initially, and the keyboards, cases, and monitors were sold separately.
The first store to sell Apple products was The Byte Shop in Calif’s Mountain View; they used to put a case on the computer unit.
According to the auction house, the case was made of Koa wood which is one of only six known koa wood cases.
Koa wood was in abundance during the 1970s but got rarer and expensive over a period of time due to cattle grazing and logging.
Ahead of the bidding, Corey Cohen, an Apple-1 expert, while in talks with Los Angeles Times, said that this is a kind of holy grail for the people who are interested in buying/collecting vintage computer tech and electronics.
Corey Cohen further stated that for a lot of people, this is really exciting.
In 2014, a working Apple-1 was sold for more than $900,000 by Bonhams that came into the market.
After the departure of Jobs and Wozniak, Apple was foundered after racing to success during the late 1970s and early 1980s.
In the late 1990s, Steve Jobs was brought back into the fold as Chief Executive of the company.
He looked after the launch of the iPod and the world-changing smartphone iPhone before his death in 2011.