A newly surfaced Steve Jobs-signed check is up for auction, linking the nation’s milestone anniversary with the earliest days of the personal computer revolution.
RR Auction is currently running a Fine Autographs and Artifacts auction, full of signatures from American presidents, political figures, authors, kings, queens, scientists, engineers, innovators, and everyone in between. Among the famous names is Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder and former CEO.
It’s hardly the first time Jobs-signed item has made it to the auction block, but this one comes with remarkable timing. The $10 payment to the People’s Computer Company (PCC) is dated July 4, 1976, America’s Bicentennial, just months after Apple was founded.
That date also means that the check was filled out just three months after Jobs and Steve Wozniak founded Apple in Jobs’s family garage. At the time, Jobs and Wozniak would have been building their first product, the Apple-1.
The check bears the letters DDJ, which suggests that it was payment for a one-year subscription to Dr. Dobb’s Journal, a programming magazine spun off from PCC’s newsletter.
At the time of publication, the check has 14 bids and is currently priced at $21,962. RR Auction expects the check to sell for $25,000.
The auction will run until July 15. Interested buyers must place an initial bid by July 15 at 6:00 pm, with final bidding to take place shortly after.
This year, America celebrates its 250th birthday. Apple celebrated a milestone birthday of its own, its 50th, on April 1.
In January, Apple’s 1976 formation papers landed on the auction block. While it was suggested that the papers could fetch up to $4 million, they eventually sold for $2.51 million.
