The original manual comes with the Apple 1 up for auction on eBay.
There’s another Apple 1 on the eBay auction block, this one comes with enough collateral to stand as its own museum exhibit.
The starting bid is $50,000, the auction is on for another two days.
The owner, who wished to remain anonymous, told us how this Apple artifact got there.
CoM: How did you get your hands on an Apple 1?
Anonymous Owner: I came to own the Apple 1 through a very convoluted story, but in short I found a guy in Minnesota who bought it from the original owner in 1990 and, eventually, he sold it to me.
CoM: What made you decide to sell it?
AO: It is killing me to sell it but I’m on very hard times and I’ve sold everything else of value. I want to keep this magnificent piece of history forever. There is no price I would willingly put on this item…but I have kids and of course that takes priority.
CoM: How did you decide the price?
AO: I set the opening price because a) an Apple 1 has sold for as much as $43k and b) if I have to sell my most prized possession and I sold it for an inadequate amount I’d have to take my life.
So, really, the price is all about saving lives. lol.
CoM: In the selling info, you say that Woz looked at it and said that it probably wouldn’t boot because the first batches of Apple 1s used a brand of chip they later replaced because they blew out easily.
There are only thought to be about 50 Apple 1s still in the wild, this is the second one up for auction on eBay in a month.
The last one sold for about $18,000, several thousand over its estimated value, to an anonymous computer collector who also tipped us off about the sale of this 1976 progenitor of the personal computer. The starting bid is $50,000.
So why is this Apple 1 , which the seller states won’t boot up, priced at 177% more than the other one?
It’s pretty much a capsule history of early Apple: the wise person who first bought it for Electric City Radio Supply in Montana kept everything — the invoice, the box (which shows the return address as Steve Jobs’ parents house), a cassette with BASIC, the operation manual and a typed letter on ring binder paper from Steve Jobs answering questions about it, including how to hook up a keyboard. Even if you don’t have the cash, the photos are worth checking out.
We wrote to the seller, more when we hear back.
Hit the jump for the letter signed “Steven Jobs” on notebook paper and more details…
So it’s nearly the middle of November, which means that those of you doing NaNoWriMo this year should be almost half-way through your novel. Assuming you’ve kept up the daily word count.
Among NaNo writers there’s a thriving subculture of AlphaSmart users.
“AlphaSmart?” you say. “What on earth is that? Doesn’t sound like a Mac.”
When I saw this snap in the Cult of Mac Flickr pool, I wanted to find out more. Who is the owner of the little family of Macs old and new, and how did they end up on this desk?
Just a week ago, the iPod celebrated its eighth birthday. It wasn’t long before defunct versions of the now-museum piece took on new life as something else.
Here a dear, departed iPod (dock connector, circa 2003) gets new life as a clock thanks to the addition of a quartz drive movement. It runs on an AA battery.
It costs $40 on Etsy, but creator pixelthis, who also made the G4 clock, says: “I am always looking for any kind of cool junk, computers, cameras, watches, you name it! I am especially fond of anything Apple. Let’s make a deal.”
This is a hard one to watch: a 1984 Mac 512K meets its end in an industrial microwave oven.
Watch as it goes up in flames -- then witness the after effects of the burning on the keyboard, screen.
It’s the work of Dovetastic, aka Kenny Irwin, who has been zapping everything from 1960s telephones to gas masks in the microwave on YouTube since February 2006.
Ouch. After it comes out of the oven, hours later, it keeps sizzling!
Need a stiff drink to get that happy face in charred plastic out from under my eyelids before it haunts me forever.
On October 3, a collector bought a rare Apple 1 on eBay for $18,000. The computer, one of about 50 thought to be still in existence, had an estimated value of $14,000 – $16,000.
Back in July 1976, the Apple I sold for $666.66; there were 200 of them hand made by Steve Wozniak. Sold in a kit, it came with 4KB standard memory, you could bump up to 8KB or 48KB with expansion cards. You had to add your own case, keyboard and display. (If you’d like to see one, check out the Smithsonian.)
The seller of this Apple 1, Monroe Postman, wasn’t even sure if it would still work.
So, who would pay $18,000 for an Apple I?
A self-defined “PC person,” who believes that today’s Macs are overpriced. The collector, who wishes to remain anonymous for now, may one day launch a computer museum.
And perhaps trade that PC for a modern Mac.
Interview by Leander Kahney.
CoM: Why did you buy it?
I have been collecting vintage computers for number of years. Obviously, original Apple I is a dream for any serious computer collector and for me, this dream came through.
I have 150+ vintage computers in my collection, which I try to maintain in working order. Occasionally, I take some to local middle and high schools to show to the students. I have an exact working Apple I replica, which is always a hit. Students love playing Lunar Lander.
CoM: What are you going to do with it?
One of those days, I am planning to open a real “museum” for public and the Apple I will take one of the central places.
CoM: What does your spouse/significant other think of it?
Even though my wife is in the computer business herself, she does not pay much attention to my hobby. Obviously, $18K raised her brow, but she understood it in the end.
The first iPod launched on Oct. 23, 2001. It had a scroll wheel, cost $399, could store 1,000 songs and looks like a yoga block compared to later models.
This promo for the first-gen iPod is charmingly dated (only 6.5 ounces, over 10 hours of battery life! ) — though there must be a portrait of Jonathan Ive in an attic somewhere, he looks the same as he talks about it as one of his “most personal designs” at Apple.
Also stumping for the product, among others, are Moby (”I’m having a hard time getting my head around the fact that you can transfer a whole album on this in 10 seconds.”) and Steve Harwell from Smash Mouth (”You’ve got your own record store on this damn thing.”)
Unlike an 8-year-old human, an iPod that age doesn’t enjoy an increase in stamina or conversation at an almost adult level.
Mine (the best Christmas present I got the year it came out) is still in the graveyard drawer of iPods I Have Loved, however.
What do you remember most about your first iPod?
Apple has updated the list of products it considers “vintage” or “obsolete” and will no longer provide service, parts or documentation for as of next month.
The Cupertino crew defines “vintage” as products discontinued over five but less than seven years ago. (One notable exception: California residents can still get service and parts from Apple Service Providers in the state).
Obsolete products are any product discontinued over seven years ago, no exceptions.
Hit the jump for the complete list of the walking dead, updated from the last list published in February.
The rare Apple I we noted was going to go on the block about a month ago has sold on eBay for nearly $18,000, a couple of grand over what guesstimates had it valued at $14,000 – $16,000.
And that’s without knowing whether it actually works: in the eBay description, seller Monroe Postman notes:
“I do not know if it is functional and I do not intend to power it up. If a trace on the board were to burn up due to a shorted component, it would radically decrease its value as an historical artifact and as, in my mind, a work of art (signed by the artist!). A few of the chips were missing when I purchased it and they have been replaced with the proper ones, although dated a year or two later, in some cases.”
If the buyer wants to come forward and talk about the purchase, CoM is all ears.
Thanks to eagle-eyed reader Bob who alerted us in the comments.
Although the $9,995 price tag was one of the reasons the computer Lisa didn’t sell well, showing some love for Lisa in T-shirt form will only set you back $32.
Often considered one of Apple’s flops, the ill-starred Lisa was the first computer on the consumer market with a graphical user interface (GUI) but despite this innovation the high cost, lack of software programs and general sluggishness led it to the computer graveyard in 1983 after two years and 100,000 units sold.
Bruce Tognazzini, the interface guru at Apple once said, “The Lisa was a great machine. We just couldn’t sell any.”
Show that you agree with this T-shirt, available on Etsy.
Here’s some pictures of the rare Apple I that will be up for auction on eBay early next week. Hit the jump for more.
As reported earlier, the historic machine will be up for auction shortly, likely next week. The owner, Monroe Postman, hasn’t announced the date of the auction.
Postman picked up the Apple I at an estate sale around 1980. He doesn’t remember the details, including how much he paid.
Back in the mid-1990s, there was one thing incredibly obvious to anyone using a Mac: Apple wasn’t ever going to develop a modern successor to the classic Mac Operating System. Despite screenshots of the planned Copland system, the ship date kept getting pushed out, and the pages of MacWeek, MacUser, and MacWorld all started devoting more time to other possible replacements for the core Mac experience. Some mentioned NeXT (the true eventual source of Mac OS X), others ludicrously suggested Windows NT on PowerPC might suffice (seriously), but the consensus was that Jean-Louis Gassee’s BeOS would be the winner.
The upstart operating system had a lot going for it: Native PowerPC support, remarkable multiprocessor optimization (this thing screamed on dual PPC 603s), and, of course, the requisite modern multi-tasking support. Though it ended up losing out to Steve Jobs, a fact almost no one mourns, a lot of us longtime Mac-heads still have a soft spot for the Be-fueled Macs that never were. The software is now mainly found on embedded devices (Palm tried to make it the next Palm OS long before the creation of the Pre) and has no real future.
But you can relive the glory days of the BeOS today, now, on any Intel Mac, provided you have VMWare, Parallels, or VirtualBox (caveat: I’ve only gotten this working on VMWare — the others should work, though). Meet the Haiku Project, an open-source effort to recreate the magic of Be for the modern era. That’s pretty much the pitch — and it mostly delivers. It’s fairly impressive for what it is, though it’s more novelty than anything else for the time-being.
Any true Be-lievers out there? Head to Haiku to get your install disks. If you’re on VMWare, just get the VM file here and go to.
Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry owned the first Mac Plus, and it’s about to be auctioned off next month.
Roddenberry’s Mac Plus will join one of Michael Jackson’s gloves in an auction on October 8-9 by Profiles in History, an auctioneer of Hollywood memorabilia.
The Mac Plus — serial number F4200NUM0001 — was given to Roddenberry in January 1986. The auction house expects it to fetch $800-$1200.
Roddenberry created Star Trek in 1964 as an intergalactic cowboy saga, a “Wagon Train to the Stars.”
The Mac Plus originally retailed for about $2,600. The iconic beige computer was the third model in the Mac product line, introduced two years after the original Mac and its successor, the beefed-up 512K. It featured such breakthrough technology as double-density floppies (remember them — 800KB instead of a measly 400?), an astonishing 4MB or RAM and an external hard drive via its external SCSI port. I had one with an 80MB drive if I recall.
The Mac Plus was featured in the best Star Trek movie in the series: the highly entertaining Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986). Having traveled back in time, chief engineer Scotty tries to talk to a Mac Plus, but obviously it doesn’t respond. Told to use the mouse, he picks it up and speaks into it like a microphone. Classic.
Roddenberry’s Mac was the first off the line at Apple’s automated Mac factory in Fremont, California. Built by Steve Jobs, the factory was judged as a disaster: Apple never produced enough Macs to justify its enormous investment. Nonetheless, the Mac Plus was one of the longest-lived Macs. Apple continued to make them until 1990.
Roddenberry’s computer includes the original keyboard and mouse, an external floppy drive and an Apple-logo carrying case. It will be accompanied by a signed letter of authenticity from Roddenberry’s son, Rod (yeah, Rod Roddenberry).
More pix and the purple prose press release from Profile in History after the jump.
UPDATE 1: The auctioneer made a couple of goofs in its press release. the machine did belong to Gene Roddenberry, but it’s not a real Mac Plus. It’s a Mac 128K that was upgraded to a Mac Plus — hence the discrepancy between the picture and the serial number. According to spokesman Marc Kruskol: “The conflict between the photo and the serial number is as follows. This computer, given by Apple to Mr. Roddenberry, is an early production Macintosh 128 (#776), which was then upgraded by Apple for Gene to a Macintosh Plus-thus the model number / serial number / panel that “belongs to” a Macintosh Plus. The 0001 led us to mistakenly believe that it was the first one off the line.”
UPDATE 2: Roddenberry biographer and tech journalist Joel Engel sent a note:
As a journalist who covered the Apple annual meeting the day Steve Jobs introduced the original Mac–and bought one that day; and as Roddenberry’s biographer who, coincidentally, wrote the book on, yes, my then aging Mac Plus, I can assure you that Mac Pluses did NOT come with 4 megs of ram or anything close. My recollection (and I still have my Plus in the garage, so I can go check) is that they came standard with 512K. Moreover, they absolutely did not ship with external hard drives (by the way, my recollection is that the first built-in hd came with the SE). In 1990, I bought my first external hard drive, which held a then colossal 40 megs, for $700. As late as 1994, Power PC’s came standard with 8 megs of ram, and an additional 8 would set you back hundreds.
One last thing: It’s highly unlikely that Roddenberry himself used the Plus. Why? Because in those days, about the only thing they were good for was word processing…and he’d already stopped writing. Besides, none of the papers in his archive pertaining either to ST or the NG appear to have been created on either MacWrite or M Word. The Roddenberry family, led by the late widow, is notorious for suddenly “discovering” lost creations by the Great Bird of the Galaxy when, in fact, they were likely commissioned post mortem. The Great Bird did that frequently when alive, too; he paid others to write scripts that he put his name on.
