Few people have heard of it, yet many consider John Blankenbaker's KENBAK-1 to be the first commercial personal computer.
Original Apple 1 Computer For Sale
By James Grahame
Here's your chance to own an Apple 1. All you need is $50,000 to score the opening bid.
The Apple 1 was Wozniak and Jobs' first crack at creating a true mainstream personal computer. Woz's revolutionary approach involved placing everything onto a single circuit board, rather than in a huge box full of backplanes, connectors, and tangles of wire. Only a few were made, but everything they learned from their first machine went into making the Apple II an earth-shattering success.
Woz & Jobs chose not to use an Intel 8080 processor because, at $175 a piece, they couldn't afford it. Instead they went with the lowly 6502, available for a mere $25. Wozniak was also hung up on the daft idea of including a keyboard instead of a good, solid panel of switches and blinky lights. Computers have never been the same since. Loaded with 4K of memory, it hit the market on April 1, 1976 priced at $666.66 (I swear I'm not making this stuff up). Amusingly, most of them didn't work properly.
The package also includes an undated letter from Steve Jobs, who answers a few questions and promises to send a dealer application in early 1977.
Original Apple 1 computer for sale [eBay via @menadeau1]
