Rare Apple-1, said to be Woz-built, up for auction

Ella Castle

Get out your checkbooks, Silicon Valley geeks and Apple fan folk! You’ve got a chance to view — and even buy — one of the very first Apple computers, hand-soldered by legendary Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Well, maybe. A leading expert and the auction house say the device — a […]

Get out your checkbooks, Silicon Valley geeks and Apple fan folk! You’ve got a chance to view — and even buy — one of the very first Apple computers, hand-soldered by legendary Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Well, maybe.

A leading expert and the auction house say the device — a broken circuit board apparently crammed in a drawer for years — is a rare Wozniak-built computer that Steve Jobs, Apple’s other co-founder, used to woo a pioneering retailer at a Mountain View computer shop in a seminal tech-industry moment in 1976. But the claim touched off a lively debate among veterans of the era contacted by the Bay Area News Group, with the retailer and even Woz himself saying they’re not at all sure it’s that computer.

“My hunch,” Wozniak said in an email Thursday after being sent photos of the device, “is that it’s one of the first but not that we hand-soldered.”

In any case, all involved agree — it is an early version of Apple’s first retail home computer and extremely valuable.

The Apple-1 will be displayed this weekend at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. Once considered “lost,” the device has a circuit board with solders indicating work by Wozniak and represents “the holy grail of Steve Jobs and Apple memorabilia,” according to the auction house expecting to sell it for at least $500,000. As of Friday morning, bidding stood at $407,029, with the auction live until Aug. 18.

An extremely rare "Apple-1" computer, Apple's first product, launched by company co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976. Up for auction until Aug. 18, 2022 and on display at the Computer History Museum on July 6-7, 2022, the device is said by the auction company and a vintage computer association to be a prototype hand-wired by legendary Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and used by the other co-founder Steve Jobs to woo Apple's first retail vendor, but its role in Apple's history is disputed. (Courtesy of RR Auction)
An extremely rare “Apple-1” computer, Apple’s first product, launched by company co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976. Up for auction until Aug. 18, 2022 and on display at the Computer History Museum on July 6-7, 2022, the device is said by the auction company and a vintage computer association to be a prototype hand-wired by legendary Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and used by the other co-founder Steve Jobs to woo Apple’s first retail vendor, but its role in Apple’s history is disputed. (Courtesy of RR Auction) 

While revolutionary at the time, the device had 256 bytes of memory. Today, a modern Mac computer has four to eight million times more than that.

Mike Graff, spokesman for Boston-based RR Auction, said Jobs gave the Apple-1 to its current owner, who wants to remain anonymous, around 1990. The device had languished for years in a drawer “with things on top of it and below it” in the famed “Apple Garage” where Jobs and Wozniak did their early work in Jobs’ childhood home in Los Altos, said Corey Cohen, a board member of the Vintage Computer Federation and a prominent Apple-1 expert.

Cohen and the auction house say Jobs used this prototype to demonstrate the Apple-1 to Paul Terrell, owner of the Byte Shop in Mountain View, one of the world’s first personal computer stores.

Now 78, Terrell remembers watching Jobs and Wozniak — “kids with long hair and sandals trying to start a company” — touting their new computer in 1976 at a monthly meeting of the now-legendary Homebrew Computer Club. As the owner of 13 Byte Shop computer stores, Terrell regularly attended the gatherings, he said.

Terrell remembers Wozniak telling club members in the auditorium of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park that if they wanted to see the device in action, they should stop by the exit on the way out for a demonstration.

“When I went outside the door and saw what was going on there I said, ‘Oh my God — I’d love to have that in my Byte Shop to sell,’” Terrell said.

He invited Jobs to come by his shop in Mountain View the next day. “I told him I wanted a fully assembled and tested computer that I could sell to people like programmers and so forth,” Terrell said. “And I would give him $500 each.”

Here’s where things get a little murky: Terrell believes Polaroid photos he took in 1976, which the auction house and Cohen say show that the device at auction is the one Wozniak and Jobs showed off at the computer club, actually show one of “the first delivery” of 50 computers he received to sell at his shops.

Despite his disputing what’s shown in the photos, however, Terrell believes “The circuit board shown and being auctioned off is certainly a prototype and could have been the one I saw demonstrated at Home Brew Computer Club.”

Achim Baqué, of Germany, curator of the “Apple-1 Registry” that tracks the computers, agreed that the device up for auction “is 100% a prototype (circuit) board, nothing you would sell.” But Baqué thinks the computer was the factory-made “one and only production prototype” representing a final design before mass production — not hand built by Wozniak but featuring some modifications he made by hand. “I have no doubts it is the prototype (Jobs) presented to (Terrell),” he said.

Cohen believes the device was not factory produced but hand-soldered, bearing tell-tale signs of Wozniak’s work, Cohen said.

“The wires run in a very tight way, and the shape of the solder is unique to how the soldering technique is done,” Cohen said. Wozniak is “famous for doing this. He puts the soldering iron in one hand, puts the wire in the other hand, and he puts the lead solder in his mouth. Very few people do this. They use tape to hold things in place. Because he’s doing it with his mouth, there’s a little less precision. It’s literally an up-and-down motion from his head.”

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A “lost” artifact from the dawn of the age of the personal computer is going up for sale. Steve Job’s original, hand-soldered “Apple Computer A” prototype built in 1976 to support Apple’s first big contract is on the auction block at RR Auction. The 1970s were something of a Wild […]
“Lost” Apple computer prototype goes on the auction block