Steve Jobs Memorabilia Sold At Auction

The Apple 1 Computer sold as a motherboard.

There were only around 200 Apple 1's ever made and were priced at $666.66 (£426) and were sold as hand built fully assembled circuit boards made by Apples co-founder Steve Wozniak, who later said that he chose that price "because it was just an easier way to type".

There are very few Apple 1's believed to still be in existence and the one that was sold at auction was one of the very few left that still worked and was sold for a whopping $374,500(£240,929) which was more then double the estimated sale price.

Sotheby's said there was a battle between two parties for the item which also included the original manuals. A set of bids was executed by the auctioneer on behalf of an absentee collector, but a telephone bidder proved more persistent and eventually clinched the sale.

A memo written by Steve Jobs when he was working at Atari sold for $27,500 at the same event in New York which was almost double the estimated $15,000 sale price.

The Atari memo was written in 1974 and consists of 4 hand written pages of a the late Steve Jobs' thoughts on how to improve the company's arcade football game World Cup. Steve Jobs was 19 at the time and in the memo gave drawings and diagrams of how the game could have been improved to make it more fun to play.

The notes are stamped with Mr Jobs' Los Altos home address and a Buddhist mantra - "gate gate paragate parasangate bodhi svahdl".

It translates as: "Going, going, going on beyond, always going on beyond, always

becoming Buddha."

Sotheby's said there had been "at least three bidders" for the item.

The high sums are the latest confirmation of demand for memorabilia connected to Steve Jobs, who died last October.

Apple's founding papers, featuring Mr Jobs' signature, sold at auction in December for close to $1.6m.