Steve Jobs’ original Apple-1 computer expected to fetch $500k at auction

In 1976 at the age of 21, Steve Jobs sold an Apple-1 computer to Charles Ricketts from his parents’ garage in California. This is the only known surviving Apple-1 computer with a direct link to Jobs and now it will be sold at an auction later this year on 11 December. As a result of its pedigree, its expected to fetch around US$500 000. Jobs originally sold the computer for US$600.

The computer is reported to be still fully operational. An Apple-1 expert serviced and started it, running the standard original software program, Microsoft Basic, and an original Apple-1 Star Trek game to test it out. It is now called Ricketts Apple-1 personal computer after its original owner, Charles Ricketts.

“It all started with the Apple-1 and with this particular machine,” said Andrew McVinish, the auctioneer’s director of decorative arts said.

“When you see a child playing with an iPad or iPhone, not too many people know that it all started with the Apple-1. So to be able to own a machine that started the digital revolution is a very powerful attraction.“

The computer is being sold by Robert Luther, a Virginia collector who bought it in 2004 at a police auction of storage locker goods without knowing all the details of its history.

“I knew it had been sold from the garage of Steve Jobs in July of 1976, because I had the buyer’s cancelled cheque,” Luther wrote on a Kickstarter page soliciting funding for a book on the machine’s history. “My computer had been purchased directly from Jobs, and based on the buyers address on the check, he lived four miles from Jobs.“

Before Luther, the Apple-1 was owned by Bruce Waldack, an entrepreneur.

The computer will be sold with the cancelled cheque from the original garage purchase. Last month, the Henry Ford organisation paid US$905 000 at auction for one of the few remaining Apple-1 computers, which was more than twice the pre-sale estimate.

Though no concrete evidence is available to back this up, fewer than 50 original Apple-1s are believed to be in existence of the few hundred originally produced.