Original Apple I computer for sale - if you can spare $150K

1 day

Wilson Rothman

Actually, you may be able to get it for as little as $120,000. Sotheby's is listing an original operational?Apple I motherboard, along with an Apple I cassette tape interface and a packet of manuals with Apple's original Newton-under-tree?logo. It is estimated to sell for?$120,000 to $180,000, as part of an auction that starts at 10 a.m. Eastern?Friday.

The specs are tasty, at least by 1976 standards: An 8-bit microprocessor from MOS Technology (the same one that later went into the Atari 2600), along with?8 kilobytes of RAM and both a video terminal and keyboard interface. And man, is there any better way to run Apple BASIC than through a cassette deck?

What seems to be missing is any kind of a case for the sucker, but even in its most active form, it always looked a bit half-built, as you can see in this classic 1976?shot of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs from the Computer History Museum.

So the real question is, who's going to buy this thing, and why? Would you??Have a look at CNBC's video before figuring out your bid:

Wilson Rothman is the Technology & Science section?editor at msnbc.com. Catch up with him on Twitter at?@wjrothman, and?join our conversation on Facebook.

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