Apple-1 prototype sells for almost US$700,000 at auction

A potentially important artifact of PC history has reportedly just sold at auction. It is described as one of the very first devices made by Steve Wozniak and marketed under the Apple brand by Steve Jobs, which launched in 1976 with up to 8 kilobytes (KB) of RAM and a groundbreakingly "reliable" interface cassette system for its interface and read/write capabilities.

Accordingly, its extant units usually do very well when sent to auction: one recent example sold for nearly US$460,000, a price it may have achieved as it came in working order with its cassette as well as its display case, keyboard kit, PSU and other peripherals.

However, a subsequent Apple-1 has gone for even more - about US$200,000 more, in fact. That is because it has been "verified" as the unit that went with Jobs as a demo model to The Byte Shop, a US pioneer of PC sales opened by Paul Terrell in Mountain View, California.

Accordingly, this also-1976 event may be credited as the one that started the personal electronics era as we know it today. It has been sold through the Boston, MA-based RR Auctions house with a final bid of no less than US$677,196.

Furthermore, that figure, paid by an unidentified "Bay Area collector" is reportedly all profit to the seller, having kept the propitious Apple-1 as a gift from Jobs for the last 30 years.

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