NEW YORK CITY, New York (KMID/KPEJ) – The first-generation Apple desktop computer created by the company’s co-founders will be up for sale at Christie’s in New York next month.
The computer, taken from Steve Jobs’ desk after he left Apple in 1976, is from the collection of Paul Allen, Microsoft’s co-founder. It is being sold alongside other innovations of computing that shaped what we carry in our pockets today.
The Apple-1 personal computer “had just four kilobytes of Ram,” Devang Thakkar, former Microsoft computer scientist and current Global Head of Ventures at Christie’s, said.
The computer scientist said Apple-1 is a motherboard soldered together by Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. All the other peripherals, the monitor and keyboard, were commercially sold components, “but the computer alone was just the motherboard.”
Computers before Apple-1 were the “size of a room.” Thakkar described Apple-1 as being “the first time the computer was personal… it was something you could put on your desk.”
“What it could do was very basic… you can’t run today’s games on it or even Word or Excel. It’s a very, very simple, basic computer.”
Gen One: Innovations From the Paul G. Allen Collection includes the Altair 8800 computer that led Allen to co-found Microsoft with Bill Gates. The collection also contains the Alto computer created by Xerox. The Alto’s graphical user interface is said to have inspired Jobs and Gates.
“Both of these groups were independently developing computing… and they both see the graphical user interface and are inspired by it,” Thakkar said. “That led to the creation of Macintosh and Apple, as well as the Windows operating system and Microsoft’.”
“For me, as a computer scientist, this is my era’s DaVinci,” Thakkar said. “DaVinci only had a limited number of paintings, there is only one of these, there is no other comparable to this. Period.”
Apple-1 is estimated to sell for between $500,000 and $800,000 USD. Bidding starts online August 23rd with a live auction being held on Sept. 10th in New York.