Old is gold, as they say. And if that gold still is in a functional state, even better. An Apple 1 computer which went on sale in the year 1976 has been auctioned for £371,000, which is 100 times more than the £3,600 price tag it sported back in the day. The auction took place at Christie’s auction house in London. This is often recognized as the first true personal computer, and had a MOS Technologies 6502 microprocessor and 8KB of RAM. Incidentally, this particular Apple 1 computer is still fully functional.
The auction price works out to an eye-watering approximation of around Rs 33,219,124 in direct conversion. When this went on sale back in the day, the advertisement put out by Apple Inc co-founder Steve Jobs had read, “'[a] truly complete microcomputer system on a single PC board... an extremely powerful computer system that can be used for anything from developing programs to playing games or running BASIC. […] Since the Apple comes fully assembled, tested & burned-in and has a complete power supply on-board, initial set-up is essentially "hassle-free" and you can be running within minutes.”
One of the unique characteristics of this Apple 1 computer is that it is housed in what is essentially a briefcase. It was expected that this Apple 1 computer would fetch between £300,000 to £500,000 and that means this was finally auctioned within range, but towards the lower end of the expected spectrum. It is believed that Apple only made 200 of these Apple 1 computers, and around 80 are believed to be still operational.
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