Christie's auctions rare computing treasures

Christie's is auctioning some of computing history's rarest treasures, including one of only 200 original Apple-1 computers ever built.

The Lot 65 package includes a motherboard, a letter from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs thanking the purchaser, an extra cassette interface card, all the manuals, including the original Apple logo featuring Newton, and a cassette tape containing the Basic programming language.

The lot also has the original box with a return address of the garage where Jobs and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak built the first units. The estimated price is £100,000 to £150,000.

For those with up to £500,000 to spend, a collection of Alan Turing's papers are up for sale, including offprints of his first published paper as well as his seminal works on building computational devices and artificial intelligence.

Christie's said that no comparable collection had come under the hammer in the past 25 years.

The auction house is also offering an early three-rotor Enigma machine used by the German military for encoding radio traffic, expected to fetch £50,000, the first operating manual for the Harvard Mark 1 co-written by Grace Hopper, and the patent specification for the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer.

The auction will be held on 23 November in London.