“A fully operational Apple computer that company co-founder Steve Jobs sold out of his parents’ garage in 1976 for $600 will hit the auction block in December, where it is expected to fetch more than half a million dollars, Christie’s said on Monday,” Chris Michaud reports for Reuters.
“The so-called Ricketts Apple-1 Personal Computer, named after its original owner Charles Ricketts and being sold on Dec. 11, is the only known surviving Apple-1 documented as having been sold directly by Jobs, then just 21, to an individual from the Los Altos, California family home, Christie’s said,” Michaud reports. “The computer is being sold by Robert Luther, a Virginia collector who bought it in 2004 at a police auction of storage locker goods without knowing all the details of its history. ‘I knew it had been sold from the garage of Steve Jobs in July of 1976, because I had the buyer’s canceled check,’ Luther wrote on a kickstarter page soliciting funding for a book on the machine’s history. ‘My computer had been purchased directly from Jobs, and based on the buyers address on the check, he lived four miles from Jobs.'”
Michaud reports, “In 1999, the Ricketts Apple-1 was acquired by Bruce Waldack, an entrepreneur who had just sold his company, DigitalNation. Waldack eventually lost his fortune, left the country and died in 2007. The Ricketts Apple-1 was auctioned at a self-storage facility in Virginia, where Luther purchased it.”
Read more in the full article here.
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Apple 1 computer sells for $905,000 at auction – October 22, 2014
Apple 1 computer sells for $387,000 in Christie’s auction – July 9, 2013
Original Apple 1 computer sells for $374,500 in auction – June 15, 2012
$600k? I’ll bet it sells for much more than that.
Anyone who wins the bid at about $600K but doesn’t bid $666K doesn’t deserve it!
GO STEVE, YOU’VE STILL GOT IT!