After a Bay Area woman dropped off boxes of old electronics to a recycling company last month, workers found a rarity mixed in with the keyboards and cables.
Clean Bay Area said the unknown woman dropped off several boxes of e-waste at their recycling center in Milpitas, California. She left without leaving her name, but she told workers she decided to clean the boxes of old equipment from her garage after her husband died.
Weeks later, a manager opened the boxes and found an Apple 1 computer inside.
"We really couldn't believe our eyes. We thought it was fake," Clean Bay Area Vice President Victor Gichun told NBC Bay Area.
The company sold the vintage computer to a collector for about $200,000, and now, they're looking for the woman to give her half of the proceeds.
The Apple 1 was Apple's first product, and it was designed and hand-built by Steve Wozniak. Unlike other home computers available in 1976, the Apple 1 came fully assembled — except for the keyboard and monitor users had to provide.
Wozniak told Byte magazine that only 200 of the computers were produced, and almost all sold. By one estimate, about 63 Apple 1s are known to still exist.