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Rare Apple-1 Computer Sells for $375,000
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Let you enter and run some groovy new code from the latest issue of Byte!
The phone changed the entire phone industry, its a groundbreaking historic product.
Pretty much every phone you see today exists because of the iPhone. Took everyone else a few years before they could even catch up with Apple.
It's the only iPhone I ever kept. But mine is the 8GB version which came out a little after launch. Everything you needed was in the box. They even included a phone stand.
Only 40 columns!? I don't think there's any Java class name could be displayed in so few columns without wrapping or something!
I suppose that explains how incredibly terse a lot of the early languages were... and maybe why DOS limited you to 8+3 filenames. I know the Apple I wasn't running DOS (or was it?) but it was a contemporary and they would have had similar displays they were outputting to.
I'm surprised there's no keyboard included. I get the expectation that the buyer would have a TV for output, but... why would somebody have an ASCII keyboard laying around unless they had a computer? Seems like a chicken and egg situation... were there really a ton of ASCII keyboards to buy when there weren't many home computers, or does it have some other utility that predates a computer? Like... maybe for faxing or typewriting...? I am arguably middle aged but... the Apple 1 predates me by nearly two decades so the world it was in is foreign to me.
Apple 1 predates DOS by five years or so. Things being terse wasn't about the limited display nearly as much as limited memory. I'm not sure the exact history of keyboards sold to home users but keyboards were in use for larger non-personal computers and maybe some of those found their way to early home users. When the Apple 1 came out I was using some computers with keyboards at the local college while I was in high school. Two years after the Apple 1 came out I recall being hired to write some software for a TRS-80 that came out a year or so before. That was using BASIC the source code could take up multiple floppy disks. The printer he had to use was a crude thermal printer that only printed maybe 40 columns or so. About a year later I got a job writing bookkeeping software on a Z80 based computer running CP/M. That was much more powerful than the TRS-80. So much nicer now days.....
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There have been lots of iconic products in history. The iPhone was not exceptional. If anything I would say the iPod was more important.
It wouldn't be a stretch to say that the first iPhone brought the effective end of Nokia who ruled the cell phone market. Whether exceptional specs, marketing, eases of use it was the case that it caught the imagination of a very large number of people and basically forced all other cell phone companies to come up with similar phones or leave the cell phone business. It may not be the biggest/most iconic of all products in history but it comes close to that for the cell phone business.
I think you are confusing historic with successful. The iPhone was successful but it’s not historically important IMO because it largely embraced existing technologies into a new format.
As did the iPod that you felt was more important. When the iPod came out there were already a number of mp3 players to the point that I never did buy an iPod because I had an mp3 player built into my early cell phone. Every product pretty much leverages mostly existing tech. It's very often the packaging of the total product as well as the marketing that decides success and success is mainly what keeps something in the history books. That's why Edison is better known than those who initially created the tech he promoted.
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I agree that neither the iPod or the iPhone invented anything new or revolutionary. They were both technical iterations rather than groundbreaking inventions. The iPod led to the iPhone so in that sense it was more important but neither product was historic. Success is not the benchmark for historical significance. Many of the world’s greatest inventors, scientists and artists died in poverty but their groundbreaking work lives on.
Even if the previous owner deleted all the files on that thing, the media was unencrypted. Someone can go in and recovery the data and see what the previous owner was looking at. 😀
$375,000 for a dusty plank of circuits that couldn’t even run Snake? Bold move. Imagine spending luxury car money on a museum piece that does less than your microwave.
It's unfortunate you weren't alive back then to experience the excitement of the birth of the computer generation. Kids nowadays have no idea what that feeling is like. It's not about what it could do (it could do things that no other device could) but what it was -- and it was unlike anything we'd seen that we could actually own!
"Looking at"? Do you even know what you're talking about?
I don’t know Homie, I was born in 1976, and I still have no idea what the hell this does.
Yes, but the people who spend luxury money on Ferrari? The true collectors? Those cars aren’t driven. They sit in a room. Just like this thing will. People like what they like.
The executives at IBM said the same thing...
Wikipedia: "The Apple I went on sale in July 1976 at a price of US$666.66"
There's something unusual about that number, although I can't quit put my finger on what...
There's something unusual about that number, although I can't quit put my finger on what...