The first computer ever built by Apple is back on sale this
month. An example of the Apple-1, first sold in 1976, is about
to go under the hammer in London. The hand-built Apple-1 goes up
for auction at Christie's on 23 November. Expected to fetch
around £150,000, it's the only computer that makes the MacBook
Air look affordable. The Apple-1 was designed to 'just work'
straight out of the box, just like Apple's modern products. It's
a far cry from modern computers though, consisting of printed
circuit boards for which you had to provide your own monitor or
keyboard. An original letter from Steve Jobs is included in the
auction, filled with advice on which hardware to go for,
straight from the horse's mouth. The model going on sale this
month still has the original manuals, which is pretty impressive
-- we've usually lost bumf, chargers and cables in the time it
takes to open a new gadget and pass it round the Crave team. The
Apple-1 is encased in wood, and packs a 1MHz MOS 6502 CPU. It
has a paltry 8K memory