Original Apple Computer to Hit Auction Block

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Published November 03, 2015

The original Apple I computer, on display at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. (Ed Uthman / Wikipedia)

A rare byte of history is going under the hammer -- one of the original Apple computers that Steve Jobs shipped from his parents' garage, which could fetch nearly $240,000.

The Apple-1, which made its debut in 1976 for $666.66 -- and was one of an estimated 200 produced -- will be auctioned at Christie's in London on Nov. 23.

The Apple-1, the great granddaddy of the iPod, iPhone and iPad, came with a mere 8 kilobytes of RAM, dwarfed by the gigs of memory that are standard on today's computers.

It "was the first home personal computer to feature a fully pre-assembled motherboard," said Christie's Julian Wilson. "True, the Apple-1 was sold without a keyboard, monitor or power supply, and it didn't even have a casing, but in principle, it worked straight out of the box."

The items up for auction include the original packaging, instruction manuals and a signed letter by Jobs, Apple's co-founder.

"The manuals have the company's original logo of [Sir Isaac] Newton sitting underneath the apple tree," Wilson said. "The iconic Apple logo had yet to be adopted."