Rare Apple 1 computer sold for £240k

 The computer, consisting only of a naked motherboard, with primitive microchips and circuitry exposed, is thought to be one of only around half a dozen working examples of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak's first hardware.

Some 200 Apple 1s were built in 1976 and sold at retail for $666.66 without a case, keboard, monitor or power supply. The computer had 4 kilobytes of memory as standard and a processor running at 1 MHz.

By comparison, the latest iPhone has 512 megabytes of memory, and a dual-core processor running at 800 MHz.

The Apple 1 sold for $374,500 (£240,929) at an auction in New York. The price was considerably more than Sotheby's estimate of $180,000 and sets a new record for a sale of one of the machines.

"When Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs presented the Apple 1 Computer to the Homebrew Computer Club in 1976, it was dismissed by everyone but Paul Terrell, the owner of a chain of stores called Byte Shop," said Sotheby's in its catalogue for the auction, which is scheduled to take place in New York today.