Jimmy Wales wants to sell off the computer that built the Wikipedia

He is attempting to sell off his old Apple iMac and an NFT (non-fungible token) of his first Wikipedia edit. When Wales first started working on Wikipedia, he used his Strawberry iMac to make the first version of the site. It was launched on January 15, 2001. It was called Nupedia when it first started, but the name was changed to Wikipedia at some point. 

A lot has changed since it was started more than twenty years ago. Today, it is the web’s best source for almost everything. You can read about anything in more than 300 languages on this site; nearly 6.5 million of them are in English alone.

If you look at the tech specs of the strawberry iMac that Wales used to make Wikipedia, they’re very different from the modern iMacs that are very powerful and fast. Was part of Apple’s iMac G3 line, which came out in 1998 and stayed on the market until 2001. It had new hardware and a new look. 

Unlike the original, Apple introduced a lot of different colours in 1999. There were blueberry and grape and strawberry. As cutting-edge as it was in the old days, it is totally outdated for even the most simple tasks in 2021. 

When it comes to speed, the processor in the Macbook Air runs at up to 400MHz. It has just 64KB of L1 cache, and it has 512KB of backside level 2 cache, but it’s not very fast. It used an AGP 2X GPU called the ATI Rage 128 VR 2D/3D (AGP 2X). It had up to 8MB of VRAM.

Wales is also selling an NFT based on his first Wikipedia edit, which he is selling along with the Strawberry iMac. “Hello World,” a short welcome, was added to Wikipedia’s main page when the site launched in January 2001. 

Although the NFT is being written to the Ethereum blockchain, it is conceptually identical to previous NFT sales by internet pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Dorsey sold an NFT of his first tweet for $2.9 million, while Berners-Lee sold off an NFT of the source code for the web browser for $5.4 million and gave the money to a good cause,

The slot-loading 4X DVD-ROM drive, an improvement over the tray-loading computers of the previous generation, and up to 10GB of ATA hard drive round out the list of important technical characteristics. There has a 1024 x 768-pixel resolution on the display, which is a 15-inch cathode ray tube (CRT). Although it only supported 10/100 BASE-T Ethernet connectivity, it did include a sound system designed by Harmon-Kardon. Note that these are the specs for the top-end G3/400 DV model, so lower-end models, like the G3/350, had lower specs for cheaper prices.

Christie’s is auctioning both the NFT and the iMac, both of which are being sold. The auction for “The Birth of Wikipedia” began on December 3 and will close on December 15. How much money does it cost to acquire this piece of internet history? If the auctions by Berners-Lee and Dorsey are any indication, the Wikipedia edit will certainly cost millions of dollars. The strawberry iMac has received a total of 40 bids, with the highest being $8,500.