Own The Original Apple Computer For A Cool Quarter Million

We all gotta start somewhere. For Steve Jobs, that meant his parents’ garage, where in 1976 he sold his first batch of 200 Apple-1 computers for the vaguely demonic price of $US666.66. Now one’s going for $US240,000 at auction.

That first machine – hand-carved, packing a whopping 8K memory – is the first of its kind to be sold by a major auction house. Why the steep price? Aside from being a major milestone in technological history, this particular Apple-1 comes in its original packaging, complete with instruction manual and a letter signed by Jobs himself.

It was the first fully pre-assembled computer produced, complete with a 1.0MHz MOS 6502 processor and an extra cassette interface for read/write capability. It was, essentially, a glorified calculator. And today it’s a stunning reminder of how far we’ve come in just 34 years. [Daily Mail via 9 to 5 Mac]