Additional information on auction details. Reprinted from San Jose Mercury News.
Cassidy: Apple 1 sells at Christie's auction for $212,267
By Mike Cassidy
Mercury News Columnist
Come on. $212,000?
I mean the Apple-1 is a fine machine and all. It's portable. No monitor to get all smudged the way that iPad screen does. (No keyboard either, which is sort of like the iPad.) But the thing is 34 years old and it's been god-knows where. It's a glorified piece of plastic, for goodness sake. It looks like something you'd find in a Dumpster behind some high-tech startup, rather than one of the world's first personal computers.
No matter. Italian magnate Marco Boglione stepped up at an auction Tuesday and paid nearly a quarter of a million at Christie's of London for one of the PCs that Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs built in Jobs' garage. (It must kill Jobs that he doesn't get a cut.) Yes, it's the Apple-1, which arguably launched the personal computer revolution and certainly launched Apple, a technology company that is slowly seeping into every aspect of our lives.
"It's a very nice representative example," says Sellam Ismail, of Livermore, who founded the Vintage Computer Festival. "It's probably one of the most complete, and in good condition, that I've ever come across."
And that's what I'd go with if I were Marco Boglione and it came time to share the glorious news with my significant other. I certainly wouldn't go with Ismail's first reaction: "I guess they found the one stupid guy with a lot of money," although Ismail later backed off that harsh assessment.
But $212,000?
"No," says Ismail, who's brokered the sales of a half-dozen Apple-1s, none for more than $30,000.
But beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
No matter that for the price of Boglione's Apple-1, you could buy 425 über-cool iPads. No matter that you could run down to the Apple Store and score the sleek new MacBook Air for 1/212th the cost. No matter that Boglione's Apple-1 comes with 8 kilobytes of memory and a cassette interface for storage, instead of, say, 500 gigabytes in today's low-end iMac.
It is a piece of history. Wozniak himself attended the auction.
The Apple-1, after all, was Apple's first PC. It came with a pre-assembled motherboard, a major convenience in the day of hobbyist computer kits. Wozniak and Jobs started shipping the 200 or so Apple-1s in 1976, charging $666.66 for the machine. (No, they weren't closet devil worshipers. The Steves wanted a 33 percent markup from their $500 wholesale price and Woz liked repeating numbers. So, $666.66.) About 50 survive today.
I couldn't reach Boglione, 54, on Tuesday. An e-mail sent to his sportswear conglomerate in Turin, Italy, after hours there went unanswered. But here's what we know about him: He's got a lot of money.
He also studied engineering at Turin Polytechnic, went into the advertising business and in 1983 founded BasicNet, according to the company website.
Had I reached Boglione, he might have explained that he got more than just an old computer for his $212,000. The sale included a personal letter from Jobs typed on lined paper and the original shipping box, addressed to Frank Anderson at Electric City Radio Supply in Great Falls, Mont.
And lest you doubt the historical significance of the great machine, you should know that it's still recalled in Great Falls today.
"I remember seeing it when he first got it," says Scott Stafford, 52, who shopped in Anderson's store when he was in high school. "He was the first person that I ever knew to have a personal computer."
Stafford always admired Anderson, who passed away years ago.
He named his audio-video installation business Electric City Sight & Sound in part as a tribute.
So what does he think about his old mentor's computer going for more than $200,000 at auction?
On the other end of the phone, Stafford starts laughing loud and long. To be honest, I'm not sure he has stopped yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment