How do they know it's real?
It is perfectly possible to build a replica that will fool a so-called "expert" using off the shelf components. No, you can't tell from serial numbers ... thanks to bad record keeping, and a general lack of giving a shit about that kind of documentation back then, nobody knows for certain what the numbers were. Couple that with the original design, which The Woz gave out at a Homebrew Computing meeting in '76 (making it open source(!!) ... I still have my copy, I can't be alone in this). Next, throw in a little unscrupulous silk screening of copyright notice, and Bob's yer Auntie.
Not that I would recommend doing such a thing, of course. But you've got to wonder every time one of these things turns up ... especially one in working condition.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
