Apple I Computer Could Bring $500000 or More

Apple I Computer - It's the sort of electronic junk that piles up in basements and garages - a classic pc motherboard with wires sticking out.

But because it was created by two college dropouts named Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, it might be worth over fifty percent a million dollars.

An Apple 1 Computer from 1976, among the first Apple computers ever built and forerunner of today's MacBooks, IPads and IPhones, goes on the auction block at Christie's a few weeks. The bidding starts at $300,000.

'This is just a piece of history that made a difference in the world, it's where the computer revolution started,' said Ted Perry, a retired school psychologist who owns the old Apple and has kept it saved in a cardboard box at his home outside Sacramento, Calif.

The 11-by-14 natural bit of plastic covered using a copper-colored network of memory chips was one of the first 2-5 such computer components, and sold for $666.66.

About 200 were made but most have disappeared or been removed. Various estimates place the amount known to still exist from about 30 to 50. They came with eight kilobytes of memory - one million times less-than the typical computer today.

Vintage Apple products have become an especially warm object since Jobs' demise in October 2011, surrounding the mystique mounted on this entrepreneur who joined forces with Wozniak to build pc prototypes in a California garage.

Another Apple 1 Computer was sold last month for a record $671,400 by a German market house, breaking a past record of $640,000 set in November. Sotheby's bought one this past year for $374,500.

'This may be the seed where the entire orchard grew, and without this, there will be no Apple,' said Stephen A. Edwards, professor of computer science at Columbia University. 'I have been shocked auction rates got into the six numbers. The marketplace has just gone crazy.'

The latest auction at Christie's, 'First Bytes: Iconic Technology from the Twentieth Century,' will be done o-nline only from June 24 to July 9. The Apple 1 is to be displayed starting Monday at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, west of San Francisco.

Perry, 70, received his Apple 1 in either 1979 or 1980, as a second-hand piece h-e saw advertised.

He paid nothing for it; it was a trade using the owner.

'I dealt various other computer equipment I had for that Apple 1,' h-e said.

At the time, he was working as a psychologist in a school in Carmichael, a town near Sacramento. While watching special needs kids, he noticed that a teletype machine 'made a massive huge difference' in how a deaf child deploying it responded and learned.

Perry learned to plan them, since the first computers came out there. Then he approached Wozniak, who decided to give what the psychiatrist calls Apple's 'internal signal' therefore he can create online lessons for his students using the new technology.

A professional chosen by Christie's lately came to Perry's home to look at the old Apple and attempt to turn it on. Only the Apple motherboard is unique. A keyboard, monitor and a storage device in this case a transportable cassette tape deck - were included later.

'I was a bit scared to run it, but it still works, with the original chips'! He says.