Rare Vintage Apple items are popular these days. An Apple Lisa 1 put up for sale on eBay last week has sold for $15,000 after 11 bids! The unit, in working condition, belonged to a former member of the Lisa production team at Apple and was sold by his brother. In an email received by Cult of Mac, the seller noted that the buyer intends to display the system in a museum in Italy.
Born of the pioneering work in graphical user interfaces done at Xerox PARC, the first Lisa used two proprietary 5.25″ floppy disk drives known as “Twiggy” drives. These were problematic and unreliable, and were replaced in 1984 with the Lisa 2 and a 400k 3.5″ floppy drive. Very few Lisa 1 systems survive today, most original models were updated to the 3.5″ disk package.
The auction’s bid history was a bit unusual. After quickly jumping to $25,100 in 6 bids over the weekend, two bidders dropped out and the unit reverted to $7,500. It finally sold after 11 bids at $15,000 to a buyer with no bid history, though a legitimate one (according to the seller) who is very excited about acquiring such a seminal piece of computing history.
Viva La Lisa!