Raise your hand how many fans of “Quién da más” or “Empeños a lo beast” are in the room. These programs give the strange feeling that at any moment we might stumble upon a relic of ancient computers.
And we might get away from that if we didn’t pay attention to a piece of hardware that would be worth millions today. Although its place is more of a museum display case. This is what happened a few years ago Apple I, one of those teams that will never lose its historical value.
The day someone had an apple that I threw away
And that’s it this story It’s really crazy: A woman from Milpitas, a small town in Santa Clara County (California), decides to clean out her garage and asks a recycling company to keep all the garbage she accumulated there after her husband’s death. Three boxes full of “garbage”, including a real rarity.
The store, Clean Bay Area, stumbled upon an Apple I, one of just 200 models built by Apple’s Entente of three: Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ron Wayne. The computer was also in stunning, pristine condition.
Not even the authors of this computer treasure knew what they would pay for one of them: The first models hit the shelves for $666.66 — Wozniak liked the joke of seeing so many repeating digits — less than $3,000 today and a price 35-40% lower than other PCs of the same era.
Historically, in 2009, an individual paid nearly $20,000 for a unit. Just a year later, the number went down by one zero. In 2012, a working model was auctioned in New York for $374,500. The number doubled just 12 months later, when another Apple I fetched $671,400 at a private auction.
And another Apple-1 ‘Byte Shop’, numbered “01-00002‘ by Steve Jobs himself – although the model was #78 according to the company’s internal records – it was auctioned on December 15, 2022. In the end The winning bidder paid $442,118 for this little programming relic.
The people in charge of the store didn’t know exactly what they were doing either. So one of the workers called Víctor Gichun, the company’s vice president and owner of the site, to find out how to appraise it. And of course Gichun couldn’t believe it. A priori he considered the equipment to be a fake, a “repro”, something very common in the past few years, a problem that has resulted in each auctioned model having a certificate of authenticity issued by Apple itself. However, after checking again That same week, they contacted a private collector and closed the deal: nearly $250,000.
Unfortunately, the Santa Clara woman never gave any more information, neither phone numbers nor references. This lady came in a van with the three boxes, unloaded them, suggested throwing them away and left with them. So Unable to distribute profits, Clean Bay Area employees pocketed small fortunes. “If I meet her car and recognize her, I’ll give her a check for $100,000.” I would say the person in charge of the store. The value of things is known to be given by the person.
Source : www.applesfera.com