Sotheby's auction house is listing an original operational Apple I motherboard, along with an Apple I cassette tape interface and a packet of manuals with Apple's original Newton-under-tree logo.

It is estimated to sell for $120,000 to $180,000, as part of an auction that starts at Sotheby's in New York on Friday morning.

There may be some artistic or historic value in the Apple I manuals as well.

The specs are tasty, at least by 1976 standards: An 8-bit microprocessor from MOS Technology (the same one that later went into the Atari 2600), along with 8 kilobytes of RAM and both a video terminal and keyboard interface. And man, is there any better way to run Apple BASIC than through a cassette deck?

What seems to be missing is any kind of a case, but even in its most active form, it always looked a bit half-built.

msnbc.com