New York, March 9 (US): Items from the birth of Apple and home computing and video games are set to be sold at an auction that will conclude on March 17.
The bulk of the “The Steve Jobs Revolution: Engelbart, Atari, and Apple” auction is a July 1976 check for $3,430 for Apple 1 computer parts, signed by Apple co-founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
“This was before they had any investors,” explained Bobby Livingston, executive vice president at RR Auctioneers, which is conducting the sale. “The reason why it was signed by both of them in their charter. Any expenses over $1,000, they both had to agree and that’s the proof.”
The auction includes several job-related items, including high school photos and an application he filled out for a job at Atari, which will also come as a non-replaceable NFT token, Reuters reported.
“Steve didn’t sign a lot of things. He didn’t like signing things. So autographs are very rare. It’s actually one of the rarest autographs that collectors care about. So anytime something comes up with Steve autographing it,” Steven Levy said, General Editor of Wired magazine, which focuses on emerging technologies, “It goes for a lot of money.”
The auction house said the items, including a quarter taken from one of the first Atari Pong video game machines and a Douglas Engelbart mouse from the 1960s, help tell the story of computer history.
“What makes these computers and video games so special is that they are prototypes and they are very early models that are hard to find. These items were brought to us by people from Silicon Valley who were there when the whole computer revolution began,” Livingston said.
HF