A quite rare and working Apple 1 computer, or rather a motherboard, has been sold at Sotheby's auction and has exceeded the expected US $180k price by quite a number, selling for US $374,500.

With only six of those known to be in working condition it is no wonder that Steve Jobs' and Steve Wozniak's Apple 1 reached such a price. The auctioned piece, originally made as a set of 50 pre-assembled kits, was only sold by one distributor, the Byte Shop owned by Paul Terrell. In case you are wondering, the Apple 1 featured MOS Technology 6502 CPU running at 1MHz and 4kB or 8kB of memory.

The auction piece included an Apple 1 motherboard, cassette interface and its BASIC programming manual. The last of the auctioned Apple 1 computers was previously sold for US $210,700 but this one shattered all the records.