Recycler wants to give $100,000 to her.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: A Silicon Valley recycling company is searching high and low for a woman who dropped off a vintage Apple I computer worth $200,000 so it can give her half of the proceeds garnered from selling it.
Clean Bay Area told KNTV the anonymous woman dropped off a couple of boxes with e-waste materials a month ago at its facility in Milpitas, Calif. A recent widower, the elderly woman had decided to clear out some of her husband’s old things from their garage.
She left a pile of boxes with the recycling firm without leaving her name, and a few weeks later the Apple I was discovered, one of only 200 first-generation computers built in 1976 by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, according to the Los Angeles Times. At the time of its inception, the Apple I sold for $666.66.
Last year, an Apple I computer fetched $905,000 at an auction at Bonhams in New York — the highest price such a device has sold for, reported NBC News.
“We couldn’t believe our eyes, we thought it was fake. It was real,” Victor Gichun, CleanBayArea’s vice president, told NBC.
Gichun’s own mother died at age 54, and he remembers how his father suffered in the wake of the loss. Maybe, he remarked to the San Jose Mercury News, having some extra cash might help the woman in her grief.
To receive her $100,000 check, the mystery woman just needs to show up at the company’s warehouse at 1310 Piper Drive in Milpitas.
“To prove who she is,” Gichun told The Mercury News, “I just need to look at her.”