Possibly rarest Apple 1 ever for auction

[Fred Cisin]

On Fri, 22 Jul 2016, Corey Cohen wrote:
> There were no blank boards.  That's the key.  The sockets were wave 
> soldered by the PCB manufacturer according to Woz. There were 2 runs of 
> 100 boards each.

Then, there were blank boards before the shop making the boards populated 
them.  A bord could have been pulled aside at that time.
Obvious possibilities include:
1) It failed some form of quality control, even if just cosmetic or 
repairable?
2) Sample pulled aside before population for more testing.
3) An Apple technician who was fed up with trying to troubleshoot with 
crappy sockets requested/demanded/bribed the shop to populate xx of them 
with half decent sockets.  Surely Woz,himself, was fed up with the time 
that he had wasted due to the bad sockets!
4) the VERY first board got pulled aside for testing, populated 
with real sockets, wave-soldered, and then, when it passed testing, word 
was given to put crap sockets on the rest.

> This is also an early layout board (Non NTI) but with different wave 
> soldered sockets than the two known production runs which both used TI 
> sockets even though they were from a different PCB house.  This board is 
> from the 1st PCB house that made the "byte shop" boards but has the more 
> expensive and reliable RN sockets.  Which implies it predates the Byte 
> Shop boards because of all the evidence.

None of THAT explicitly implies PREdates.
Consider,  after completion, it was noticed that there was one more board. 
Maybe they had run out of, or dumpstered, all of the crap sockets.
Or Apple employee or board shop employee simply wanted something better.


Although, in #3 above, if it were ME, I would have populated a testing 
board with Augat.


With any of these scenarios, LATER ON, when no longer needed in testing, 
or Apple lab work, the board could have been given away or sold, such as 
at Computer Swap America.  With, or without, official authorization.


There was no attempt to affix a serial number to all of the boards?
"At some point, every company realizes the need to tighten inventory."