Posted on 08/26/2016 6:24:32 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Earlier this summer, we reported on a “Celebration Edition” Apple I that would be going up for auction. Initial estimates pegged a value of over $1 million for the computer, but the auction today came to a close with a final selling price of $815,000. 10 percent of the proceeds from the Charitybuzz auction will benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.
Near the end of the auction, the Apple I reached a peak of $1.2 million, but the final bid was apparently cancelled at the very last second, giving the device a final sale price of $815,000 with 39 bids.
The “Celebration” Apple I model was unique in that it featured a blank “green” PCB board, suggesting that it was not part of the two known production runs of the Apple I. This means that it was potentially built before the production runs, perhaps part of a pre-production test. Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak confirmed himself that Apple never sold an Apple I with a blank PCB board, while historian Corey Cohen called this Apple I one of the “most unique” units he’d ever seen. This particular Apple I is believed to have been manufactured sometime during the summer of 1976.
Apple-related auctions have long garnered huge amounts on Charitybuzz. Earlier this year, an auction for lunch with Tim Cook raised $515,000. Previously, Cook auctions have pulled in $200,000 in 2015, $330,001 in 2014, and $610,000 in 2013. Other Apple executives have also offered up lunch meetings, including Eddy Cue, Apple Music exec Bozoma Saint John, and Beats Music’s Ian Rogers. Apple also offered up a campus tour last year.
10 percent of the auction price from the Apple I listing will benefit The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society to help support LLS research, patient services, advocacy, public and professional education, and community services. More information about the Apple I that brought in $815,000 can be seen in the video below:
I think they were going for more than that. I know, I tried to buy one but passed on it for $1000 in the mid-80s.
Not according to the Microsoft Share value calculator that keeps track of all the splits. That says you'd have $518,092 for a 79,484% growth. The stock has split 9 times. 7 - two for one splits, and 2 - two for three splits.
You start with 31 shares at $21 a share for $651:
09/21/1987 — 2 for 1 = 62
04/16/1990 — 2 for 1 = 124
06/27/1991 — 3 for 2 = 186
06/15/1992 — 3 for 2 = 279
05/23/1994 — 2 for 1 = 558
12/09/1996 — 2 for 1 = 1,156
02/23/1998 — 2 for 1 = 2,232
03/29/1999 — 2 for 1 = 4,464
02/18/2003 — 2 for 1 = 8,928
That results in the investor owning 8,928 shares. At today's close of $58.03, that's $518,092, and change, not counting re-invested dividends.
“Apple Services hit $20 billion in revenue in 2015. “
That is impressive in itself. I worked last year with Apple consulting services, and they are motivated. I am not sure they have the overall offerings businesses need, but they are working with a variety of new business ventures so I expect they will come around.
MS used to do significant service revenues, but, since about 2001, they folded much of it. Microsoft Consulting Services (MCS) was the powerhouse of the 1990’s for increasing overall sales at MS, but politics has all but killed off that division for that purpose. To be a Managed Partner was a significant position to be in as a independent consulting company. There were 22 MPs nationally, and I was one of them. That model is all but gone now.
There are gaps in the software and services market that are excellent opportunities. Most of what we have today is still nothing but 1990’s tech at best, such as email services. There is still so much room for innovation. MS won’t be doing it. They are without leadership.
Manufactured in: F => Fremont, California, USA
Year of production: 1984
Week of production: 24
Production number: KNC => 22724
Modell ID: M0001 => original Macintosh 1984 (128k)
Most of the floppy disks I saved no longer work. I wish someone would make a SCSI/dongle for them, with an assortment of software. Would be neat to see it fired up again.
Got it - I missed one of the splits!
No, his friend got the money ($20,000) as part of the Internment Camp Reparations legislation that was passed in 1988.
The US government did not issue the apology checks for the internees, especially for those who were born in the camps, until the 1980s. It took some time between for the government to agree that those born in the internment camps were even entitled to compensation equal to those who were rounded up and taken to the internment camps. My friend was born two weeks before they closed the camp. I recall when she called my now ex-wife to tell her the courts had ruled that it did not matter that she and the other children born in the camps had not actually suffered the indignity of being forced to relocate to internment camps, but they did have to live where they were not free, nor where their parents would have chosen for them to have been born, and they had been, in many instances denied their birthright.
Her parents had a small strawberry farm in Santa Barbara County taken from them because they were forced to go to a "concentration camp" near Cincinnati, Ohio, on just five days notice. The $50,000 they got did not come any where close to the millions it would have been worth today. Her parents got their checks several years before my friend got hers. They used it to pay off the mortgage on a small truck farm they had bought near Stockton, California, after being released from the camp.
Microsoft only went public on March 13, 1986, so no-one except Paul Allen and Bill Gates and a few insiders who were granted stock by the principals could own any shares of the company. My friend was friends with one of those insider's and was allowed to invest in the IPO, which is usually a restricted affair open to invited investors. She got invited to invest early on the opening day. Before that, she had the $25,000 in her savings account.
I've seen original Macintosh disk sets for sale on eBay. You might see if you can pickup a set there. Did yours get exposed to a magnetic field? I had a friend who, not thinking, put his box of disks on a large sub-woofer. Later when he tried to boot some of them, not a single one worked.
Another favorite story I like to tell is about the Best Products store in Stockton, CA, who back in the 1980s could not figure out why they had such a large percentage of software returns due to bad disks. They had the worst rate of software returns in the entire Best Products chain with about 30% being returned!
I figured it out one day when I was in their store and observed their continuous floor cleaning they did. They had this huge linoleum floor buffer which was essentially a five horsepower electric motor on top of a circular buffing pad which an employee would walk up and down the aisles, swinging back and forth. HUGE magnetic field around that thing. I asked the manager if I could look at the returned sofohelves! The damn buffer was erasing the disks as the employee was passing the buffer next and under the gondolas where they were on display for sale! Nobody at the store understood the way magnetic media worked.
IBM is going all in with Apple. They are converting in house to all Apple hardware at the rate of 2200 Apple computers per week. They are also holding seminars for other companies on the benefits of converting to Apple. IBM found they are saving 41% on their IT costs after converting to Macs and the Mac using employees have a far lower incidence of calls to IT for technical support.
Some got money early due to court cases. . . I could have sworn she said it was $25,000 she got. It may be the legislation set a lower amount to avoid the higher amount the courts were ordering.
Easy to do. Looking at your figures, it had to be one of the two for three split.
I distinctly recall that when our friend got her check my older daughter was still in elementary school, because I did a presentation for her GATE class on the internment based on the violation of the Constitution. Had that legislation been the source of her windfall for her investment in MS, my older daughter would have been in middle school, and I would no longer be involved in her classes. I know she got her reparations money earlier than 1988 and it was for her time in the camp in Cincinnati where she was born. She came with me to talk about what happened to her parents. My recollection was that it was around 1984-1985, when my daughter was in fourth or fifth grade.
I just checked with my friend who is a member of my conservative email list, so I just queried her about what happened. She said she and her parents were part of a separate law suit initiated in the late 70s. There had been several other successful suits from internees. The children born of the plaintiffs had to appeal to get included. Her parents and other plaintiffs one their suit in 1980 and the children's appeal was successful 1983, the settlement included in the budget for 1984. She did buy a two year old used car with part of the settlement, but put $25,000 into MS at the IPO with the rest of the payment.
I think it's one of those almost no brainer conclusions. In 1986, the IBM clone market was just taking off, and everybody and his uncle, second cousin, the in-laws, and the guy down the road was starting to build clones, all buying their OS from Microsoft, who had a monopoly position on the PC operating system that would run the majority of the software that was being written for office applications.
People with real money to invest were clamoring to be allowed to be part of the IPO purchase, but those being allowed in were very select. With that level of excitement, you could buy in the morning at the IPO price, and sell before close of market in the afternoon and double or triple your money. Brokerages reserve IPO offerings only for the very best clients. My friend was lucky to know someone who could put her on the list. Her piddly $25k was not generally enough to even consider for an IPO participant. I gather she might have been dating someone at Microsoft at the time.
Nothing is more profitable than success! Services are critical to beachheading like Apple is doing.
That Third Party Software near monopoly, JMHO, was the real cause of MS dominance.
I quite literally had no choice at all as a Mechanical Engineer (and most every other field) during the 80's if I wanted to run a Computer Aided Design package but run MS, and that dominance continues to at least within the last five years. (I'd pretty well dropped out of Engineering about the time The 0 got into office, so that figure might be lower.)
Back in the 80's, it wasn't really that big a deal. What people have to pay and do to get those CAD programs to play nice with crap like Win10 makes me wish I hadn't given all of my drafting equipment to that damn museum.
Oh, well. I can still do a pretty good freehand sketch. Now all I've gotta do is find a machinist to make some magic.
Yep, that was it.
I started college in 1986. If I took the first four years of tuition I paid and put it in Microsoft, I’d have around $12 million dollars right now...
I’ve benefited immensely from my degree (electrical engineering), but not QUITE $12 million worth!
I really doubt that. As the buzz about "the cloud" has grown in the business world, Microsoft is shifting to software as a service for applications, as well as migrating an awful lot of data centers into "the cloud," including web apps and MS SQL, and using AD and Azure. It still has a way to go, but I see an awful lot of drive to that direction in s lot of businesses.
Mark
“Microsoft is shifting to software as a service for applications”
Companies like Amazon dominate that market with Microsoft having weak and poor quality offerings.
Office 365 has been a disaster for those trying to implement it. Hosted email is nothing short of frustrating. The migration from server-based Exchange is often a disaster with such failures as no cloud based public folders or the ability to convert them to a new form.
Microsoft support is Indian based and they have zero clues what to do past the scripts they read. Multiple contacts to Microsoft results in the reading of the same scripts that can be found on a google search. “Have you tried...” “Yeah, I found the same thing on google, too, pal.”
So, no, Microsoft, is not offering innovative or working solutions.
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