Here’s a holiday gift for the Apple fan who’s got almost everything: an Apple-1, the world’s first personal computer. Shipped in 1976 from Steve Jobs’ garage (actually, his parents’ garage) in Palo Alto, CA, to its original owner in Montana, this little item is expected to fetch a quarter of a million bucks by the time its auctioned off at London’s Christie’s on Nov. 23.A part of Lot 62, sale item 7882 is described by the auctioneers at Christie’s as:

“APPLE-1 — Personal Computer. An Apple-1 motherboard, number 82, printed label to reverse, with a few slightly later additions including a 6502 microprocessor, labeled R6502P R6502-11 8145, printed circuit board with 4 rows A-D and columns 1-18, three capacitors, heatsink, cassette board connector, 8K bytes of RAM, keyboard interface, firmware in PROMS, low-profile sockets on all integrated circuits, video terminal, breadboard area with slightly later connector, with later soldering, wires and electrical tape to reverse, printed to obverse Apple Computer 1 Palo Alto. Ca. Copyright 1976.”

A whole 8k of RAM? What were they thinking?

Bonus items include an invoice signed by the salesman (Steven Jobs), the original shipping box and labels along with the business card of Apple’s co-founder, Steve Wozniak.

What the sale doesn’t include is a lot.

There’s no monitor, keyboard or casing for all these electronics, because Apple didn’t make or sell them in 1976. They only made the guts.

It wasn’t until the following year that the Apple II was launched, featuring such revolutionary items as integrated keyboards, sound,  plastic cases and internal expansion slots.

The original Apple-1 sold for $666.66 (Jobs apparently had a demonic vision when he thought about price points).  About 200 of this model were made and experts guess about a quarter of those are still around.

But as one blogger put it: Does it support Flash?

Tags: Apple, Apple-1, auction, Christies, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak