On the last weekend of May, the German auction house Breker (www.breker.com) held a bid, and sold one of the first Apple computers ever made in the world. According to AP news agency, one of the last functioning machines of the Apple-1 series was purchased by an Asian bidder, who wished to remain unnamed.

The auction house says that the winner of the bid purchased the vintage machine for 516 000 euros or 668 000 US dollars, which is roughly the equivalent of 149.7 million Hungarian forints.

Designed by Wozniak, the Apple-1 series computers were built in a garage in 1975 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, the founders of Apple Computer. The machines were released in the market in 1976. Auctioneers at Breker claim that there are only six functioning Apple-1 computers left today.

Actually, what Jobs and Wozniak offered was less than a fully assembled personal computer (PC) today. The Apple-1 consisted of a motherboard and components (processor, memory, etc.); they did not trouble with a monitor at all, the computer system could be connected to a television set. Using a television set as a screen was a major innovation since most machines at the time did not have a display peripheral at all. Text would scroll at a snail?s pace, 60 characters per second, however, Apple-1 still worked much faster than its rivals. The two of them also came up with the idea of using cassette tape and a cassette recorder to store, load and save programmes. They paid much attention even then to user-friendly aspects and ergonomic principles ? features to become hallmarks for Apple. Take for instance automatic programme loading that enabled their computer to start up more easily by finding and loading the operating system in the operative memory, once the machine had been switched on.

Apple-1 looked simple, yet it proved to be a masterpiece of design. Jobs and Wozniak far outran their peers by assembling a personal computer that had fewer components, but functioned just as well, and worked even faster than rival machines. Two hundred units were produced before the model was released in July 1976. All that delighted Apple owners had to buy as extra external hardware was a television set (in case they did not possess one) and a keyboard.

Apple-1 computers were initially sold for 666.66 US dollars (now equivalent of 2572 dollars), which means that the functioning model just auctioned is worth one thousand times more today than 37 years ago.