As it gets more and more difficult to stay technologically up to date, Christie's may have hit upon a new way for Apple product junkies to show just how savvy they are. One new trend for the technocracy seems to be investing in the archaic. How old is your computer? Not as old Marcho Boglione's. At least not after the Italian businessman purchased a 1976 Apple-1 computer for $212,267 — a record for a personal computer sold at auction — at Christie's November 23 "Books and Manuscripts" sale in London.

This ancient ancestor of the iPad originally cost $666.66 (because Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak liked repeating numbers, we hear — not because he was in cahoots with satanic powers). Last week, however, the 4KB-memory computer sold well within its $160-240,000 presale estimate in the 91-lot auction that brought in a total of $3,675,380.The lot that Boglione took home contained the Apple-1 (one of fewer than 200 such models), as well as an Apple cassette interface card, a letter signed by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs — with the return address listed as his parents' home — and other ephemera, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Other lots of note that were whisked off the block include Vladimir Nabokov's autographed unfinished manuscript of "The Original of Laura," scrawled out by the venerable Russian author on index cards, which sold for $124,334, quite a bit below the low presale estimate of $160,000. The World War II German "Enigma" cipher machine, meanwhile, went for $107,129, exceeding its estimate of $46,000-75,000. "Los Caprichos," a collection of 80 second-edition plates engraved by Goya — including a self-portrait wearing a jaunty hat — sold for $59,339, solidly within the $46,000-60,000 estimate.

While tracts by Euclid, Thomas Moore, and Adam Smith (to name a few) sold briskly, one historically significant lot failed to find a buyer: a trove of cryptologist Alan Turing's papers, which did not meet its reserve price — despite Google having given $100,000 to British spy haven Bletchley Park towards a bid. The lot, believed to contain the largest collection of Turing documents in the world, did not meet the $468,080-780,100 reserve, as the final bid amounted to only $374,448.

Now the director of Bletchley Park, where British specialists labored during World War II to crack Nazi codes, has launched a campaign to recruit a consortium of donors to purchase Turing's papers for his museum. The late scientist and code-cracker committed suicide in 1952 after extraordinary persecution for his homosexuality in his native Britain. According to the Wall Street Journal, one myth, long contested, is that a partially eaten apple found by Turing's dead body — he poisoned himself with cyanide — inspired Jobs and Wozniak's future computer company's logo.