Apple prototype from 1976 could sell for $500k

One of the first Apple computers ever built goes on the Christie’s auction block in New York next week — and it could sell for $500,000 (€380,000), or more.

The Apple 1 from 1976 is a forerunner of today’s MacBooks, iPads and iPhones.

Ted Perry, a retired school psychologist from California who owns the old Apple, has kept it stashed away in a cardboard box. He says the green piece of plastic covered with memory chips is where the personal computer “revolution” started.

The board was produced by two college dropouts — the late Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. It first sold for $666.66.

The Apple 1 will be offered online from June 24 to July 9.

Another Apple 1 was sold last month for a record $671,400 by a German auction house.

“This is a piece of history that made a difference in the world, it’s where the computer revolution started,” said Perry.

The 11x14 green piece of plastic covered with a copper-coloured labyrinth of memory chips was one of the first 25 such computer elements.

About 200 were made but most have disappeared or been discarded. Various estimates put the number known to still exist from about 30 to 50. They came with eight kilobytes of memory — a million times less than the average computer today.

Vintage Apple products have become an especially hot item since Jobs’s death in October 2011, surrounding the mystique attached to this entrepreneur who joined forces with Wozniak to build computer prototypes in a California garage.

“This is the seed from which the entire orchard grew, and without this, there would be no Apple,” said Stephen A Edwards, professor of computer science at Columbia University. “I’ve been shocked auction prices got into the six digits. The market has just gone crazy.”

Perry, 70, acquired his Apple 1 in either 1979 or 1980, as a second-hand item he saw advertised.

He paid nothing for it; it was a swap with the owner.

At the time, he was working as a psychologist in a school in Carmichael, a town near Sacramento. While observing special needs children, he noticed that a teletype machine “made a huge difference” in how a deaf boy using it responded and learned.