How much would the early printing press schedules be worth today? What would you pay to own the original designs for the phone? For some people, Steve Wozniak’s simple sketches for the Apple II have similar historical significance to those hypothetical artifacts from technical history. And we now know that someone was willing to pay $ 630,272 to be the exclusive owner of Woz’s doodles from the dawn of the digital age.
Wozniak first put pen to paper for these designs in 1975, and he issued a letter of authenticity to RR Auction just selling a sale. a few dozen Apple-related lots. “These documents, circa 1975, are my original Apple II prototype schematics and programming instructions,” Wozniak wrote. “They are precious.”
Of all its products over the decades, the Apple II has played perhaps the biggest role in establishing Apple as one of the main competitors in the home computer market. At the time of its release in 1977, technical experts said it “may be the first product to qualify as the ‘device computer’.” Its simplicity in its own right, its unique approach to memory, and the ability to display color images made it a hit. in the corporate world for years.
The package with notes and diagrams consisted of 23 pages in total and was sold to a private bidder, RR Auction said. The notes include diagrams for the “Bus Sources”, “System Timing”, “Display”, “Sync Timing & Address Gen” and “Timing”, as well as 12 pages of handwritten programming instructions.
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In his authenticity letter, Wozniak wrote:
In these work-in-progress diagrams, you can even see my breadboarding technique, where I would pass the connections drawn in red while soldering the wires into them. At the time, I preferred to use a purple felt-tip pen for writing, so it’s interesting to see these notes decades later. The prototype was hand-wired when I was still an engineer in Hewlett-Packard’s Advanced Product Division, where I was involved in the design of portable calculators.
His personal notes aren’t the only thing Woz verified. He wrote that in 1979 he had funky Apple-shaped rainbow glasses made by an optometrist who was “a project just for fun.” The glasses appears to be In shockingly good condition for their age and sold $ 18,972.50.
There were other interesting tidbits at the auction, including one of the first computer mice ever built that went before $ 34,478.75 and a short job offer letter from Steve Jobs to Del Yocam with the line for signature “I accept this amazing offer !!!” selled for $ 32,893.75. But the biggest item was a complete Apple 1 in pristine condition, including everything from the vintage power supply to the Apple cassette interface. That lot has been sold for $ 736,862.50.
You can view more pieces of Apple history recently auctioned in the gallery below.