When Apple co-founder Steve Jobs wanted to price his new Apple-1 computer, he chose a price that was roughly three times the cost to manufacture: $666.66. The price made his co-founder and chief systems designer, Steve Wozniak, laugh for its proximity to a joke line he used to punctuate, and ultimately caused them both some grief for its numerical relation to, well, the sign of the beast.
Nearly 50 years later, that price is a fraction of what you might pay for Polaroid photos of the original Apple-1 prototype computer. A collection of three photographs of the board, the board and its uncased computer, and a monitor running Apple's own brand of BASIC are up for auction at RRAction House and are currently bidding at $2,148. The auction is open through August 22, so that price may change by the time you visit and perhaps place a bid.
Jobs used these images as part of his presentation, which he presented to his first customer, Paul Terrell of Byte Shop. By today's standards, the Apple-1 looked like a home-made system at best. However, according to Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, Jobs' presentation and those images ultimately convinced Terrell to sign an order for 50 pre-assembled Apple-1 systems.
For $666.66, Terrell got, by 1976 standards, a revolutionary 8K system (upgradable to 65K of RAM) that included an integrated video terminal and keyboard interface (rather than a TeleType system), which connected directly to a monitor or television. There was even 1K of dedicated video memory. And then, of course, there was Apple BASIC. While that may not sound like much, the system sold well enough to lay the groundwork for the better-known and much better-selling Apple II computer (I used an Apple IIe for a while and loved it).
The auction is a tour through the iconic history of Apple and Steve Jobs. Along with the Polaroids, it includes a leather jacket that Steve Jobs was wearing in 1983 when he was photographed making an obscene gesture at an IBM logo. IBM was, of course, a main rival to Apple in the early days of the personal computer revolution.
Among other items are checks written by Jobs and even a restored, fully functioning Apple-1 computer. Not surprisingly, you can get hold of such a system (registered as number 104 in Apple's Computer Registry). It may be capable of some simple math and basic low-level programming, but that's about it. Still, it's a real museum piece.
As for those photos, since they were likely taken by Jobs himself, they are much more than a record of early attempts at creating personal computers; they speak to how Jobs viewed his creation and how the future master of product marketing might have planned to market this magical piece of hardware. That's what might make one of the best MacBooks worth the cost.
