PCB designed by Woz that helped Apple secure its first major order up for auction
PCB designed by Woz that helped Apple secure its first major order up for auction
This week, a sizeable piece of laptop records surfaced in a web public sale. A prototype Apple Computer A, allegedly constructed through none apart from Steve Wozniak and as soon as held through Steve Jobs, is up for public sale as Lot #5006 on RR Auctions.
If it doesn’t have a outstanding pedigree to hobby bidders, there may be photographic evidence that that is the manufacturing prototype for the Apple 1 and that it helped Apple land its first “major” order, the sale of fifty pre-assembled Apple 1s to The Byte Shop in Mountain View, California. Currently, at $278,005, the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) this is up for public sale is possibly to fetch extra than $500,000 on the cease of the public sale . Notably, the public sale ends on August 19.
Steve Jobs didn’t take properly care of the PCB whilst he had it in his possession. It is thought to were disregarded on the Apple Garage for numerous years after receiving the anciental order earlier than Jobs gave it to the existing proprietor approximately 30 years ago.
The breaks and cracks withinside the PCB and the reality that a few chips and capacitors are lacking—possibly due to the fact they had been given to different initiatives withinside the storage or PCs in manufacturing—display that it become mistreated. In addition, pix of the running prototype monitor that the pinnacle proper nook of the association is lacking some of large orange Sprague Atom capacitors. The CPU is likewise lacking.
Since that is the Apple 1 prototype, it ought to have had a MOS 6502 CPU walking at 1 MHz, a forty x 24 individual output, and four KB of RAM that would be multiplied to eight KB or forty eight KB the use of enlargement cards, and 456 KB of storage (tape). But as a prototype, this Apple Computer A become a touch extra adaptable due to the fact, in keeping with the public sale information, it is able to have operated with a socketed Motorola 6800 processor in place of a MOS 6502.
Between this prototype and the primary 50 Apple 1 computer systems that had been sold, there are some of different differences. According to RR Auctions, Woz completely soldered this unique version the use of his distinctive “three-handed” method.
According to the public sale advertisement, the primary batch of Apple 1 computer systems simplest cost $forty or much less to make; nevertheless, way to the assembly, software, and different value-brought services, in addition to profit, The Byte Shop become capable of promote every one for $666.66. Notably, The Byte Shop become one of the world’s first laptop stores and the primary one at the globe to promote an Apple laptop.
Would solving it and getting it returned in running order be wrong? It isn’t always a totally appealing PCB, and its situation is appalling. Nevertheless, it’s miles believed that a collector or enterprise goes to permit it’s in its present day kingdom of decay and at the back of glass for safekeeping. I mean, you need to hold a half-a-million greenback piece of cutting-edge records safe, irrespective of what days it has visible earlier.
