The Apple-1 was originally conceived by Steve Jobs and Steve ‘Woz’ Wozniak as a bare circuit board to be sold as a kit and completed by electronics hobbyists, their initial market being Palo Alto’s Homebrew Computer Club. Wozniak first demonstrated the Apple-1 at a club meeting in July 1976, and upon seeing interest among the membership, he and Jobs pooled their resources to have the boards produced. They originally hoped to sell 50 of them at $40 per board to recover their initial $1000 outlay. However, seeking a larger audience, Jobs approached Paul Terrell, owner of The Byte Shop in Mountain View, California, one of the first personal computer stores in the world. Terrell offered to buy 50 of the computers—at a wholesale price of $500 a piece, to retail at $666.66—but only if they came fully assembled. With this request, Terrell aimed to elevate the computer from the domain of the hobbyist/enthusiast to the realm of the mainstream consumer.
In the beginning, they hoped to sell 50 at $40 per board Jobs agreed to Terrell’s deal, and managed to secure favorable terms for financing the parts necessary to build 50 Apple-1 computers. He and Wozniak then spent ten days putting together, soldering, and testing the Apple-1 units before delivering them to The Byte Shop. Thus, the Apple-1 was one of the first completely assembled ‘personal’ computers which did not require soldering by the end user, and simply worked out of the box with a few accessories that could be purchased from a local electronics store (a power supply, case, keyboard, and monitor were not included). All together, over a span of about ten months, Jobs and Wozniak produced about 200 Apple-1 computers and sold 175 of them. The consignor of this Apple-1, a self-described ‘mainframe guy,’ attended one early Homebrew Computer Club meeting to see what it was all about. He purchased this Apple-1 secondhand from a co-worker for $300, and began learning BASIC and writing small programs. Even after outgrowing the system, he held onto it, realizing it could one day be a valuable piece of computing history. In 1982, he attempted to sell this Apple-1 to Steve Wozniak for $10,000—an offer that, fortunately, went unanswered.