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Functional Apple-1 With Original Box Signed by Steve Wozniak Goes to Auction
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I know what you're thinking, but 666 is not actually the 'number of the beast'.
In fact it's 616.
It became known as '666' basically because of a typo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_the_beast
As a kid I was blown away by the arcade machines that my parents' friends kept in their garage.
For nostalgic's sake, getting a few of those for a few 100 $$ each would be kind of fun.
For nostalgic's sake, getting an Apple 1 for a few 100,000 $$ is mind-blowing.
Then again, this market's closer to the celebrities buying $14 million vacation homes with cash without batting an eye type of market. What better to adorn a $3 million room than a $1 million piece of nostalgia?
I can see a reason why I mean it would be a great item to have on display in a living room as a conversation piece.
It’s like I have a Bell system black rotary phone on an shelf next to my record player. Phone doesn’t work anymore
5% California sales tax means it retailed $699.99.
I was a apple level 2 repair technician a threw away about a half dozen of these boards in the early 80
Its original retail price of $666.66 translates to $3521 in inflation-adjusted 2020 dollars, so it's definitely appreciated since then!
I heard him speak twice, once in the late 90s when I was in college, and once about a decade later in the late 00s in Silicon Valley. He repeated the same talk, with the same anecdotes about hijinks he'd gotten up to the early 70s. I know he got lucky, and I don't begrudge him the pile of money he made and he can afford to relax on for the rest of his life, but it honestly felt sad that he hadn't done anything in the intervening ten years. He didn't have any new stories, he didn't have anything cool he was working on to tell us, it just felt like listening to some guy decades out of high school still wearing his letter jacket and telling you about back in the day.
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Also what I was going to add is that for a very long time now, it has become the 'norm' that when someone or some people create a company and they want to launch their first product to the world, they are usually advised that the first product they make needs to make a bold statement, a statement that says 'this is who we are, this what we are about and we have arrived' and it is usally done with a lot of fan fare because they need to make buyers aware that the product is now 'out there'.
The origins of Apple began in a garage with a group of guys working tirelessly to get an unimpressive looking piece of electronics out to potential customers. There was no huge statement trying to be made, no fan fair, just a case of get your head down, do the work and get the machine out the door. When universities and financial institutions are doing business lectures on the behemoth that is Apple and the lecturer is churning out insane figures into the billions of $$$, everyone in the building just in awe, bewilderment and amazement at how such a company has achieved all that it has achieved, in walks an unassuming person with an unassuming piece of electronics, wires dangling about the place, holds aloft the unassuming piece of electronics and says 'see this??, this is what started off what you see today'. I bet those in the audience would be shocked.
The origins of Apple began in a garage with a group of guys working tirelessly to get an unimpressive looking piece of electronics out to potential customers. There was no huge statement trying to be made, no fan fair, just a case of get your head down, do the work and get the machine out the door. When universities and financial institutions are doing business lectures on the behemoth that is Apple and the lecturer is churning out insane figures into the billions of $$$, everyone in the building just in awe, bewilderment and amazement at how such a company has achieved all that it has achieved, in walks an unassuming person with an unassuming piece of electronics, wires dangling about the place, holds aloft the unassuming piece of electronics and says 'see this??, this is what started off what you see today'. I bet those in the audience would be shocked.
To call it 'junk' would be blasphemous. Even today such a machine is a testement to just how brilliant of a man Steve Wozniak is an people like him. When people look at such a machine, they need to stop and think that Woz had no computer to help him design the PCB or the circuit like designers have use of today. He had to do every thing by the power of his brain (with a little bit of help from a HP calculator). He had to do all the electronic and mathematic calculations himself which meant he had to do all the error checking himself.
Inventors and designers have the luxury of using computers and software programs that do a lot of the work for them. It can give you real time feedback where an error has occured or about to occur. It can tell you instantly if a length is too long or short, if an angle is too steep or too narrow, if the value of a part is wrong. It can also error check your work and help you debug your work. Woz never had any of that luxury, which makes what he did ever so more impressive.
The Apple 1 is an impressive feat of engineering and should never ever been seen as 'junk'.
You mean like throwing QuickTime Pro at some random media file, dissect it, cut the audio track, export it to the format you want and mess around with system sounds?
I really miss QuickTime Pro.
Really cool to see these still out there, wish I still had my old IIc and the 200 or so disks I had for it!
Zork and Soft Porn Adventure FTW!
I still have a Apple IIc which, obviously, I bought many, many blue moons ago! It's packaged up nicely and resides in my attic. Last time I took it out, about 5 years ago, it booted up quite fine. (Took forever, or so it seemed, to do so.)
People need to stop responding to SeattleMoose post because Jobs did not pick the number, Woz did and it has already been explained why Woz chose that number.
wow, you just laid out what I had always kinda been thinking about Woz for years now but could never quite put into words for some reason. But what you say is so totally on point.
I take the 'Woz liked repeating digits' legend with a grain of salt because the original price with 5% California sales tax in 1976 came to $699.99 retail, and the subsequent drop in price in 1977 down to $475 (note, non-repeating digits) came to $499.
So it's just the basic 99.99 retail pricing you get on every product.