It appears that the much followed “Celebration” Apple I computer has finally been sold for a cool $815,000 US dollars. I guess it didn’t hit their stated value of $1M, but it’s still a heck of a lot of dough. I actually watched the bids hit $1.2M, but apparently there was a bid pulled at the last minute.
I’d now like to take a moment to reflect on exactly how much money just changed hands over a 40-year-old computer:
- With it’s 8k configuration, the buyer paid almost $100 per byte of RAM. (And you thought RAM cost a lot in the ’70s…)
- The 1MHz 6502 averaged about 250k instructions per second, or $3.26 per IPS.
- $20,375 per column of text
- $17.68 per TV pixel (NTSC)
- Corrected for inflation, this sale was 250 times the system’s original selling price.
- The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society of Arizona just made at least $8,150 (minimum 10% charity donation).
As far as I can tell, the record is $905,000 paid when the Henry Ford museum purchased one in 2014.