Of the two dozen collectable categories on offer at Auction Team Breker’s autumn extravaganza in Cologne, Germany, computing and calculation came out on top. The highest price of the day was a Apple’s Lisa-1 personal computer, which went for $50,300.
Released on Jan. 19, 1983, the Lisa wasn’t a commercial success. However, it can still claim a place in PC history for introducing the overlapping windows, pull-down menus and the recycle bin that we still rely on today.
The Lisa was one of the first personal computers to offer a graphical user interface (GUI) in a machine aimed at individual business users. Development of the Lisa began in 1978, and it underwent many changes during the development period before shipping at the very high price of $9,995 (and that was 34 years ago) with a 5MB hard drive. The high price, relatively low performance and unreliable “Twiggy” floppy disks led to poor sales, with only 100,000 units sold.
