Original Apple computer to fetch over $500K at auction

A fully operational Apple computer that company co-founder Steve Jobs sold out of his parents’ garage in 1976 for $600 will hit the auction block in December, where it is expected to fetch more than half a million dollars, The New York Post reports, citing Christie’s.

The so-called Ricketts Apple-1 Personal Computer, named after its original owner, Charles Ricketts, and being sold Dec. 11, is the only known surviving Apple-1 documented as having been sold directly by Jobs, then just 21, to an individual from the Los Altos, California, family home, Christie’s said.

“It all started with the Apple-1 and with this particular machine,” said Andrew McVinish, Christie’s director of decorative arts.

“When you see a child playing with an iPad or iPhone, not too many people know that it all started with the Apple-1,” he added. “So to be able to own a machine that started the digital revolution is a very powerful attraction.”

The computer is being sold by Robert Luther, a Virginia collector who bought it in 2004 at a police auction of storage locker goods without knowing all the details of its history.

“I knew it had been sold from the garage of Steve Jobs in July of 1976, because I had the buyer’s canceled check,” Luther wrote on a Kickstarter page soliciting funding for a book on the machine’s history.

Read more at Nypost.com.