“Someone has just bought one of the first computers built by Steve Jobs – and it still works,” Ashitha Nagesh reports for Metro.co.uk. “The rare Apple-1 was one of just 200 the late Apple founder and Steve Wozniak designed, created and sold in 1976. Now, it has been sold for more than £100,000 [US$130,360].”
“Although relatively humble looking now, it was this machine that gave birth to the humongous Apple empire. It was also the first ever ready-made PC to come on the market, costing $666 at the time,” Nagesh reports. 
Nagesh reports, “Uwe Breker, from the Team Breker auctioneers in Cologne, Germany, said: ‘The Apple-1 really is the symbol for the American dream. Two students had an idea, built and marketed it, and 40 years later it is the highest valued company ever.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: 8K of RAM. Good God, Woz! What a genius!
By the way, if you haven’t read it, yet, we highly recommend one of the best autobiographies we’ve ever read:
SEE ALSO:
‘Most important computer in history,’ Steve Jobs’ Apple I, star of Living Computers museum – April 10, 2017
One of eight working Apple 1 computers goes up for auction; price estimated between $190,000 and $320,000 – March 16, 2017
Rare Apple 1 goes for $815,000 in auction – August 26, 2016
Rare Apple 1 with original first manual written by Apple co-founder Ronald Wayne up for auction – October 19, 2015
Woman unwittingly drops off $200,000 Apple 1 at recycling center – May 31, 2015
Fully-operational Apple 1, sold sold directly by Steve Jobs, could fetch $600,000 at December auction – November 3, 2014
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
Its mind blowing how little memory the first computers had, even the more advanced machines going into the late 80s.
I remember moving to the Commodore 64 with its 38k of available memory after the Basic shell was loaded.
The 128k OG Mac.
various PCs with 640k of usable RAM in DOS.
so many memories.
I’m typing this on a machine today that has 32gb of RAM. lol
Sooooooo you’re probably not typing from the new Apple MacBook Pro with its 16 gb ram lol
There were timesharing computers available, and there was a time sharing company in Mountain View where we could get free time on. But we needed a terminal and we couldn’t afford one, so we designed and built one. That was the first thing we ever did. We really build it because he couldn’t afford to buy anything.
At one point Woz designed a computer terminal with video on it. At a later date, he ended up buying a microprocessor and hooking it up to the terminal and made what was to become the Apple I. That’s what an Apple I was, really an extension of this terminal, and putting a microprocessor on the back end. Really kind of two separate projects put together.
Woz and I laid out the circuit board ourselves, and we worked on the design for about six months. Woz was up till 4 in the morning for many moons. At that time Woz was working for Hewlett Packard and I was working for Atari. We liberated some parts from Hewlett Packard and Atari, and we build this all by hand. It would take 40 hours to build one and about another 30 to debug it. And it would always be breaking because there would be these tinny little wires.
We showed it to our friends and they all wanted one, and a lot of them wanted to build one too. And although they could liberate most of the parts as well they sort of didn’t have to skills to build them, which we had acquired by training ourselves building them. So we ended up helping them building most of their computers and it started getting to be a tremendous drain on our lives. I said, “Look, there are a lot of people that want to build it and they can get the chips, but they don’t want to solder it all together. So why don’t we make a printed circuit board, which is a piece of fiberglass with copper on both sides that is etched to form the wires, so that you could build an Apple I in a few hours instead of 40 hours. They can just plop their chips in the PC board”—soldering a printed circuit board is easy, there are no wires—”and they’ve got it done.” We thought if we only had one of those we could sell them to our friends for as much as it cost us to make them, and make our money back. And everybody would be happy and we would have a life again.
Excerpt from: “Steve Jobs: The Unauthorized Autobiography”
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/steve-jobs/id924800720?mt=11
Liberated the parts… Meaning, the stole them from work.
Pirates in deed.
ironic that this came up – genius in the garage – in the week everyone is writing about the (supposedly) 5 billion dollar New Campus where Jony Ive’s team spent one and half years designing the door handles. Raises all kinds of interesting thoughts. (As a Mac Pro user you can guess where mine are going …. )
How long did it take the MASTERS of design and engineering to come up with door handles for royal palaces? I mean if you are building the best the world can offer, why not go all the way with it… What about door stoppers, and hinges… Water fountains? Even the grommets under the sink, must be the best in the world.
Energy is energy and to be the best takes time. That’s why we used to have masters and apprenticeships that took years to complete.
What I am saying, it’s understandable that years on a silly handles is reasonable in certain situations. However it’s not balding computers either, which is why so many are upset.
eh…
your examples of royal palaces and grand expenditures on ostentatious display while neglecting ‘the peasants’ usually ended up with peasant revolts like Marie Antoinette’s experience…. or the Exodus…
(if Jobs was around the Spaceship would be great but ALSO every single Apple product Mac Pro, Mac Mini, Monitors, Macbook Air, Apple Tv etc etc — if they sold it , it would be the best. There would be no way Jobs would have a 2013 flagship Mac or a non 4K Apple TV on his website. Right now the ALSO is missing ).
are they going to move those Cheese Grater MPs from Jony’s lab (photo end of 2015) to the New Campus and hook them up to LG monitors and connect them to iPhones with third party routers while they have the BEST DOOR HANDLES at the lab entrance? Is Apple in the business of buildings or computer products?
Usually these things aren’t either or. So I don’t know. We do know Jony has been wanting to go home and be with his kids (home being UK). Maybe he’s had enough and he’s just twizzling things until they send him home. I mean he gets paid enormous amounts just to stay. Maybe he’s written into the company by laws or something. He goes with the walls etc.
Seriously I have no idea what it takes to design a system. Well I have some idea, but not Apple’s idea. Why it would take multiple years to do it.
Just seems depressing. If they brought back the Cheese Grater, would that mean failure or respect? What if the plan is to kill pro products the whole time. Do away with the trucks? Why not just say it? Why not say, the computing horizon at the top end is bleak and boring, we will sell Mac Pros for as long as we can but you don’t need one to run our pro tools.
Anyway, we do know that something is on the roadmap and dang my 2011 iMac runs great. What to do? Some people just have to spend money cause they got an itch.
I wonder if some of these movie leaks are the result of editing stations using Hackintoshes.
Lots to consider.
I actually can’t fault some of your points here.
yeah, it might be allow Ive free reign to do whatever he wants, Christmas trees, Coffee Table books, door handles or he goes elsewhere. What he does for iPhone ($$$) is probably enough reason for T.C to pamper him. Already there is those two design VPs who took over day to day management at the lab.
I suspect the rush of the new Kaby Lake MBPs (if true) is partly because they need some power at the lab (and to decorate those specially milled designer tables imported from Europe) , with 32 GB and TB3 for external GPU if required it might do for a lot of design stuff I guess (to take over from those probably upgraded Cheese Graters — the Cylinders GPUs being insufficient)
Wozniak may have designed one of the first personal computers, but he did not invent the personal computer. Many were around before the Apple I.